Sen. Tom Carper once asked Vietnamese leaders to help the U.S. find its missing service members. Now he says it's the U.S.'s turn to help them
By Nicole Gaudiano
Former wartime Navy pilot Tom Carper returned to Vietnam as a member of Congress in 1991, hoping to persuade the country’s leaders to help the U.S. search for missing service members.
They did, to an extent that Carper said surprised him. And now Carper, the Senate’s last Vietnam veteran, says it’s important to do the same for the Vietnamese, using the skills and cutting-edge technology developed here to help them locate their relatives nearly 50 years after the war’s end.
As President Joe Biden travels there on Sunday and the U.S. strengthens diplomatic ties with its former adversary, Carper said such humanitarian aid helps endear the US to the Vietnamese people.
“To the extent that we can, as a good neighbor, return the favor that they extended to us all those years ago, I think it would go a long ways with, not just the leadership of Vietnam, but actually the people there who have lost a lot of relatives,” said Carper, a Delaware Democrat. “I’m sure they’d like to find out what happened to their relatives too.”
The U.S. and Vietnam have worked together for decades to identify and repatriate remains of more than 1,000 American service members killed during the war. More recently, the U.S. government became formally involved in helping identify remains of Vietnamese.
The Hanoi government believes 300,000 are still missing, while 1,244 Americans are still unaccounted for in Vietnam.
“As they search for their missing, they may help us find some of our missing as well,” said Tim McMahon, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s director of DNA operations at Dover Air Force Base, Del. McMahon is among those in recent years who have helped modernize Vietnamese laboratories and provide training on DNA testing as the technology has become cheaper, faster and more sensitive. “So it's this partnership of honoring our war heroes and I think we're really moving forward with them.”
The work is reciprocal. Carper, a former P-3 pilot who flew wartime surveillance missions off the coast of Vietnam, said the Vietnamese were “surprisingly forthcoming” in their willingness to help the U.S. find missing service members, providing access to crash sites for digging and opening up their war museums and other sources of information.
“We should find out what worked in terms of identifying our MIAs … and basically use those same skills, the same tools to now help identify their MIAs,” he said.
In 2021, the U.S. launched the Vietnamese Wartime Accounting Initiative to help identify Vietnamese war dead. As part of the initiative, DOD supports Vietnam’s remains identification through archival research. USAID assists with DNA analysis, following work the agency did to connect Vietnamese labs with US experts between 2015 and 2017.
A USAID spokesperson said the agency expects to combine the latest advances in technology and apply them to Vietnamese bone sample analysis by next year.
“By 2025, USAID’s goal is to equip a lab in Vietnam with the needed equipment and expertise to operationalize this technology,” the spokesperson said. “USAID’s ultimate objective is to build local government systems to implement a comprehensive identification program, as opposed to a case-by-case identification approach.”
'We chose to travel together'
Vietnam Veterans of America, meanwhile, has been helping identify possible missing Vietnamese for 30 years by turning over reports and personal effects, a goodwill effort they say helps veterans heal and leads to more information on missing Americans.
McMahon, however, said there are time constraints as witnesses with first-hand knowledge of the war grow older. Also, Vietnam’s acidic soil degrades bones and DNA and monsoons cause water damage, he said.
“For reconciliation between Vietnamese and Americans, time is our friend,” Vietnam’s ambassador to the U.S., Nguyen Quoc Dzung, told participants at a United States Institute of Peace event last year. “But for finding the missing, time is not our friend.”
Even so, McMahon said his laboratory has made advances that give scientists access to more DNA for testing and allow them to examine highly damaged DNA, as well. “The newest and greatest methods will start to help them with their identification process, too,” he said.
Carper said he was convinced after his 1991 visit to Vietnam, and his meeting then with then-General Secretary Do Muoi, that the US could have a productive relationship with Vietnam.
“We wanted to find out the truth of our people, and if we got that, we could move toward normalized relations,” Carper told this reporter in 2016.
He returned again in 2016 with former President Obama as part of a push for closer ties with the country. While there touring the Hanoi Hilton, he met a young Vietnamese man who said he knew Do Muoi.
Carper wrote a message with an old saying that he asked the man to give to the former leader: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, travel together.”
“And I said, ‘We chose to travel together and it’s been good for your country and mine.’”
James LaPorta contributed to this story.