by Vu Kim Chung
18-4-2001
Officials on April 8, 2001 recovered the bodies of 16 people -- including seven Americans -- who died in a helicopter crash while searching for Americans missing in action from the Vietnam War. The bodies were carried on stretchers down the hillside where the Russian-made MI-17 helicopter crashed the day before near Thanh Tranh village in Quang Binh province's Bo Tranh district, about 280 miles south of Hanoi.
Vietnamese officials initially reported 20 people were on board the helicopter, but changed the figure. A Pentagon spokesman in Washington, Lt. Cmdr. Terry Sutherland, said seven Americans and nine Vietnamese were killed in the crash. There were no survivors. U.S. officials said the American victims were military service people. The sky was hazy at the time.
The pilot of the helicopter was apparently blinded by fog before the aircraft slammed into a hill, a Vietnamese investigator said on April 10.
"The helicopter flew inland from the sea across Highway 1," a Vietnamese aviation official in Thanh Trach told Reuters. "When it got close to the hill, there was very thick mist. The pilot couldn't see the hill. When he did see it he started to climb but the tail hit the top of the hill. So bad weather could have caused the crash".
The U.S. military's Pacific Command said that the team was "preparing for a recovery operation involving unaccounted for Americans lost during the Vietnam war." A spokesman for the command in Honolulu, Lt. Sean Kelly, said the service members killed were all on a mission for Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, a group based in Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii. The task force has searched for remains from the Indochina War in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and southern China since 1992, and in recent years has expanded operations to include World War II and Korean War MIA recovery cases.
President Bush expressed his condolences and urged Americans to "remember their sacrifice."
"The families of the service personnel lost in today's tragic accident know better than most the contribution their loved ones made in bringing closure to scores of families across America," the president said in a statement issued at the White House.
"Today's loss is a terrible one for our nation," Bush said.
There are currently no large-scale MIA excavations under way in Vietnam, but some Americans remain in the country year-round doing advance work for future digs. Since 1973, the remains of 591 American servicemen formerly listed as unaccounted for have been identified and returned to their families. There are 1,992 Americans still unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia, including 1,498 in Vietnam. The United States spends $5 million to $6 million annually on MIA recovery operations in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Quang Binh province, where the accident occurred, was the southernmost province of North Vietnam during the war, just north of the former demilitarized zone. It contains many military crash sites because it was heavily bombed during the war. The Joint Task Force-Full Accounting program was set up by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. Its teams conduct preliminary investigations of crash sites to determine whether they should be excavated. Based on their findings, sites are prepared for excavation under a schedule agreed upon by the U.S. and Vietnamese governments.
Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, a spokesman for the program, said those killed were the advance team for a 95-member team that was scheduled to leave Hawaii in late April for six separate recovery sites in Vietnam. The program makes about 10 such deployments per year, each lasting about a month. The terrain is rugged and often littered with debris from the war.
"Every mission is a dangerous mission," Childress said. "It's a very difficult area to operate in."
No decision has been made yet if that mission will go on as scheduled, Childress said. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a statement that the overall mission to account for the MIAs and recover their remains will continue.
"We've been flying in this type of helicopter for a number of years, and this is the first accident," he said.
The only eyewitness to the accident, 62-year-old Nguyen Van Vi, as saying one of the Vietnamese on the helicopter was still alive when he reached the site.
"His left leg was cut off," Vi said, adding that he had carried him from a bush to clear ground. Vi said his last words were: "Vinh, MIA mission, mother...." The man, a technician on the helicopter, subsequently died.