Failed Mission to Hanoi

Communist officials still insist they have no more M.I.A.s

The twin-engine executive jet that landed at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport last week looked distinctly out of place next to the Ilyushins and Antonovs parked on the tarmac. On its fuselage was lettered United States of America. A team of top U.S. officials had flown in to discuss with Communist officials an issue that still stirs deep emotions among Americans: the fate of 2,553 U.S. soldiers still unrecovered from the Indochina War.

The delegation, the ninth to visit Hanoi since the war ended almost seven years ago, was headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage. The group was greeted at the airport by a line of smiling Vietnamese officials, then loaded into several black Volga sedans. As they rode toward the capital, the Americans noticed that much of the countryside had the appearance of a nation on military alert; antiaircraft guns loomed over bomb craters, and camouflaged radar antennae poked their way out of thatch-roofed huts.

The capital, however, had the look of a nation at peace. The promenade around the city's downtown lake was filled with teenagers, many in blue jeans, who were trying to cope with the latest craze imported from Ho Chi Minn City (formerly Saigon): platform shoes. In contrast to 1980, when the markets held little except black-market cigarettes, the stores were packed with shoppers and a limited range of merchandise. Instead of exhortations from Ho Chi Minh, display windows at the Hanoi general department store contained wicker furniture.

After checking into the Cuban-built Thang Loi (Victory) Hotel, the Americans were driven to a French colonial vil la for talks with their Vietnamese hosts. "Let me introduce Lieut. Colonel John Per," Armitage said, turning to a member of his delegation. "He was a guest of yours before for six years, but he stayed in a different hotel from the Thang Loi." Per was shot down over Thai Nguyen, 40 miles north of Hanoi, in 1967.

Among the U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam who are still missing, all but eight are known to be dead. The Vietnamese, who have handed over the remains of only 74 Americans, insist that they have no more bodies to return. The U.S. admits that hundreds of dead servicemen are hard to trace because they were lost at sea or in the jungles of Laos, or were buried by peasants in unmarked graves. But the U.S. delegation, honoring a campaign commitment of President Reagan, called on the Vietnamese to give a better accounting of the missing servicemen.

At the close of the 24-hour visit, the Americans had little to say, but the Vietnamese, who are in desperate economic straits and are anxious to reduce their dependence on the Soviet Union, seized the occasion to renew their plea for rapprochement with the West. Declared Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach: "We seek normal diplomatic relations with the U.S., not financial aid. Nobody here ever thought that normalization would come to us via Santa Claus." Though the Vietnamese chided the Americans for attempting to "politicize" the problem of the missing servicemen, they did agree to send a team of experts to the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Hawaii, where bodies of American servicemen returned in the past were sent for identification. sb

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.