Expeditions: My Search for Colonel Scharf

By RICHARD HORNIK SUOI PAI

The hill tribesman stopped abruptly on the mountainside trail and pointed down the steep slope to a thicket of bamboo and dense underbrush. In a flash he used a foot-long machete to clear a 20-yard path down which I staggered to a tiny clearing. There lay the remnants of what used to be one of America's most feared weapons in its war with Vietnam: a 15-ton F-4C Phantom fighter reduced by explosion, fire and subsequent scavenging to a few chunks of twisted metal. In 1990 a joint U.S.-Vietnamese investigating team confirmed from the serial numbers on the plane that this was the jet flown by U.S. Air Force Colonel Charles Scharf and Major Martin Massucci and shot down by North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire on Oct. 1, 1965.

But while the fate of the plane is known, that of its crew is in dispute. The pilot of another F-4 claimed that he saw one parachute deploy fully before the plane exploded in the air and smashed in a ball of fire into the jungle covering Suoi Pai Mountain, 85 miles west of Hanoi. People from a nearby village who rushed to the site hoping to capture an American pilot have described graphically the bodies of two dead men thrown clear of the wreckage. The villagers, however, had been unable to pinpoint the site where they say the two airmen were buried. Scharf and Massucci were initially classified as missing in action; that was changed in 1978 to killed in action.

My personal MIA odyssey began last September. While on a reporting trip to Hanoi, I approached the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry with a proposition: since neither the Vietnamese nor the American government has any credibility on the MIA issue, I wanted to see what was involved in investigating these cases. A hastily arranged meeting with Dang Nghiem Bai, Assistant Foreign Minister for North American Affairs, yielded a positive response. The Vietnamese government was willing to permit me -- or any other concerned American -- to investigate particular cases with no restrictions on travel. They would even open up their files.

This offer was not altruistic. With the formal signing last October of an agreement that ended the Cambodian civil war, unresolved MIA cases are the only remaining major obstacle to normalizing diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam. Seventeen years after the war's end, 2,273 Americans are still unaccounted for. Of these, the Pentagon classifies 1,101 as killed in action, though their bodies have never been recovered. The rest are classified as MIAs. In 1987 General John Vessey, the U.S. special envoy for MIA affairs, presented a list of 119 so-called discrepancy cases to Hanoi for priority resolution, chosen because the Pentagon has reason to believe that Vietnamese authorities have some knowledge of the fate of the servicemen.

Scharf's case, which seemed to encapsulate many of the elements of the MIA mystery, was among them. He was one of many missing Americans who were the subject of so-called live sightings -- white or black men, usually emaciated, locked in bamboo cages or being led under guard through the jungle.

Last Sept. 28 the TIME bureau in Hong Kong received a rare long-distance phone call from the Foreign Ministry in Hanoi. Bai had obtained the necessary permissions from his superiors and from the local authorities in Son La province for me to visit the alleged crash site.

On Oct. 3 TIME photographer Greg Davis and I were in Hanoi for our first meeting with Ho Xuan Dich, director of the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Personnel. Dich's deputy, Ngo Hoang, had participated in the February 1990 joint U.S.-Vietnamese visit -- known in MIA jargon as an iteration -- to the crash site, a six-day trip topped off by an eight-hour slog up the side of a mountain. He reviewed the Vietnamese file on the case, the one the Pentagon lists as 0158. The joint team had interviewed witnesses who had seen a jet explode in midair, others who found two dead bodies at the crash site and others who claimed that they had buried the two pilots. The Vietnamese investigators concluded that Scharf and Massucci both died when their plane crashed into Suoi Pai Mountain.

A visit to the American Office for POW-MIA Affairs, set up last summer in Hanoi's Boss Hotel, cast some doubt on that conclusion. Bell, head of the office, said the pilot of an F-4C flying in formation with Scharf's had reported that he saw a parachute fully deployed. That meant one of the crew could have survived and may have been taken prisoner. Because Scharf's body was never located, said Bell, "our conclusion was that further efforts are warranted." But one of the office's investigators later insisted, "Both of them are dead."

In fact, almost all the evidence indicated that both men perished, though the passage of time, the dense jungle and the cold, rainy weather made it + impossible for the investigation team that went to the site in 1990 to locate the graves. As for the parachute, it could have been the drag chute used to slow F-4s after landing. It also could have been an effort by a comrade-in- arms to do a favor for the families of the downed crew. As long as a serviceman is listed as MIA, his family continues to receive his pay and even benefits from periodic promotions. Those explanations were persuasive. But while the evidence remained inconclusive, Case 0158 would be an open wound.

Dich warned that it would be a long and difficult journey. A U.S. investigator who had made the trek agreed. But a new witness -- Luong Van Phe, who was chief of police in Truong Tien village at the time of the crash -- had surfaced. He claimed that he knew precisely where the graves were and had even found some personal effects.

Early on Oct. 6, photographer Davis and I, accompanied by a translator from the Foreign Ministry press center, set off from Hanoi on a seven-hour, 150- mile drive through the scenic karst valleys of Son La province to Phu Yen district. Before the last two-hour leg of the journey, the driver warned that we would not be able to stop until we reached the hamlet of Phu Yen because even a brief halt in daylight might leave us prey to the bandits who operate in the area.

Phu Yen town is little more than a crossroads with a few shops and an open market. The local People's Committee compound, a series of one-story concrete buildings, would be our base of operations. Four witnesses who had either seen the crash or its aftermath made the trek from outlying villages to be interviewed. Two would serve as guides up nearby Suoi Pai Mountain to the crash site itself. Over cups of bitter green tea, I interrogated the witnesses as carefully as possible.

Each interview took more than an hour of slow, sentence-by-sentence translation. The witnesses went into vivid detail about what they had seen when they arrived on the scene: the plane's wreckage and the mangled bodies of the two airmen. Agreement on these details could have been orchestrated by the Vietnamese government, but small differences between the witnesses' stories seemed more likely to stem from the various times at which they arrived on the scene. Their accounts meshed in a way that would have been hard to coordinate.

The villagers remembered that soldiers from a North Vietnamese army engineering battalion had arrived at the site the day after the crash. The soldiers photographed the dead Americans and retrieved some of their personal effects. But the battalion left in 1966 and was demobilized after 1975. Neither its records nor any members with knowledge of this case have been found. Another dead end.

Just after dawn on Oct. 7, we set off on the bone-shaking 15-mile drive to the base of the mountain. From there we headed out on foot across a small dam and then walked along an irrigation canal past rice paddies. Our leisurely stroll ended abruptly when the path veered off through 12-ft.-high, aptly named saw grass. But the discomfort of being hacked at by razor-sharp weeds became fond memories when the trail suddenly zoomed up the mountain at a 70 degrees incline. For almost a mile straight up, there was less a path than a series of tenuous toeholds dug into sticky red clay. Several other equally steep but shorter climbs that followed made the six-mile journey a five-hour ordeal.

Still, we were lucky. The weather was overcast and dry -- perfect climbing conditions. When the official investigators made the journey in 1990, it had been cold and rainy, turning the ascent into a treacherous hands-and-knees affair.

Midway up the trail we met Trieu Van Hin, the party chief of Suoi Pai hamlet, close to the crash site. He had led a squad of villagers to hack some of the foliage away from the trail, clearing our path. Almost exactly 26 years earlier, Hin had been one of the first people to arrive at the scene of the crash, less than half a mile from the present location of Suoi Pai hamlet.

One of our two guides, Mui Van Pin, was the leader of a nearby guerrilla detachment in 1965. During questioning at Phu Yen the day before, he had clearly remembered burying the two airmen three days after the crash -- a delay caused by a dispute between two neighboring villages over which should get the credit for two dead enemies. But the newly discovered witness, Phe, distinctly recalled burying both men the day after the crash, in separate graves, even though the regular soldiers were ready to put them in a common grave. "I am a member of the Thai minority," he explained, "and for us it is not proper to bury two people in the same grave." He even recalled a large rock near one of the graves: "I sat on it to rest because it was very hard to dig."

Phe and Pin continued to argue at the crash site, squatting on what appeared to be the cowling of one of the F-4's engines. Hin, the hamlet party chief, tended to agree with Phe but said he had left before the burial to attend a meeting in Phu Yen. When he returned to the crash site several days later, the men had been buried. Pin said the graves lay deep in the jungle up the mountainside -- though he could not remember exactly where. According to Phe, however, the site was only 15 ft. away. He quickly located one of the spots, and our expectations soared -- only to plummet when it became obvious that someone had already dug up the grave.

Trading in the alleged skeletons of American servicemen has become a big business in Vietnam over the past decade, in part because many Vietnamese refugees believe their chances of being permitted to resettle in the U.S. would improve if they brought with them a set of American bones. In the past year Vietnamese authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have raided the homes of seven families and recovered 1,178 boxes and bags that contained more than 3,100 sets of human remains. But a joint investigation determined that all but 22 of the grisly artifacts were those of Vietnamese.

The U.S. refuses to pay for remains out of fear that to do so would encourage the trade in bones even more. Says Garnett Bell: "Some remains could be in the hands of private citizens, but the figure is unknown." Last year a Vietnamese team was sent the length of the country to ask local officials and individuals to turn over any evidence on MIAs. The search yielded a scant 46 boxes, only three of which contained materials relating to MIA cases. A joint U.S.-Vietnamese forensic team is examining the materials.

U.S. officials have long felt that while it is virtually impossible that any live Americans are still being held in Vietnam, there is reason to believe that the Vietnamese government has been warehousing the remains of dead Americans, perhaps to be used as a bargaining chip at some future date. Forensic examination of some recently returned bodies indicates that the bones that have been returned were stored aboveground. The charge that they have been holding back the bodies of MIAs incenses the Vietnamese. Says Dich: "We have not been detaining any live Americans and we do not have a storehouse full of remains. That is why we are willing to let Americans look all over Vietnam."

But the evidence remains strong that bones are being warehoused in Vietnam. Moreover, the central government's efforts to collect remains held by its citizens have been halfhearted at best. A week after our trip to Suoi Pai, we traveled to Ho Chi Minh City and put out the word that we were interested in MIA bones. Leads flooded in. A Vietnamese military officer passed along photocopies of the personal effects of three servicemen that supposedly came from graves dug up by impoverished soldiers in Kontum province.

The Vietnamese military expects troops in outlying regions to support themselves, and these men had heard that Americans paid a reward for the remains of their soldiers. The people in the village near their post told them of some American graves, and they dug. Now the soldiers wanted to sell the bones they had found, but could locate no buyers. They were too afraid to turn over the remains to their government. If they do in fact have the remains of American MIAs, those remains may well disappear.

Early in 1991 Phe and three of his sons had done some digging at the Scharf crash site. They trekked to Suoi Pai from their village on the other side of the mountain and made a few small excavations on either side of the plot that someone else had already uncovered. Sifting through the dirt from the earlier dig, Phe says, he found a zipper "still working" and some eyelets from a boot. A tantalizing lead, but, as is so often the case in these investigations, another dead end. On the way back down the mountain, says Phe, his sons threw the evidence away because "they didn't want some dead man's things." Using a pick, we too sifted through the dirt that had come from the alleged grave, but found nothing.

Exhausted and disappointed, we returned to the hamlet. For dinner we ate crackers and sardines. Most of the villagers dined on sticky rice and manioc. The distended bellies of half a dozen naked toddlers bore testimony to the fact that some had no evening meal at all.

For the Vietnamese investigators, the contrast between the money and effort being spent to resolve the cases of American MIAs and the grinding poverty in most of the search zones is emotionally wrenching. Moreover, many Vietnamese families share the plight of the families of American MIAs. In an exclusive interview, Vietnam's new Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, described his own suffering: "There are tens of thousands of Vietnamese families whose relatives are also missing and unaccounted for. I myself am a victim. My immediate family has three members -- my wife and two sons -- missing in action. American helicopters killed 300 people in one action along the Saigon River, and my family disappeared."

Later in Hanoi, Bell commiserated with us about the frustrating journey: "That's pretty typical. We get right down to the wire and then can't find the remains." He said the American MIA office in Hanoi would like to excavate the Scharf crash site, because even if most of the bones have been removed, it is possible that a few teeth or other fragments might remain. But it would be next to impossible to lug the necessary gear up the mountain, and Vietnam's Soviet-built helicopters are too large and unreliable to risk setting down in that treacherous terrain. Another joint team visited the area last month to see if they could pinpoint the gravesites. The U.S. side took its findings back to Hawaii and Texas for further investigation.

That mission might come up with enough evidence to persuade U.S. officials to close the case of Colonel Charles Scharf. But it is unlikely that his family will accept a few teeth or bone shards as conclusive proof of his demise. For them, Scharf will always be missing in action, no matter how much the evidence indicates that he died in combat nearly three decades ago.