Half a century after the last American combat troops left Vietnam, the U.S. has taken the first steps in a major but little-noticed policy shift to solidify relations with its former adversary by helping the Vietnamese account for and identify their war dead.
Under a July 2020 Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Vietnam, the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development was given the formidable task of providing technical assistance and archival research to Vietnam on as many as 300,000 Vietnamese missing.
“The United States appreciates all the support that Vietnam has provided over the last 35 years in accounting for missing U.S. service members,” then-U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink said at the Hanoi signing of the memorandum between USAID and the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP).
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That reasoning would have been unthinkable when Americans recoiled at the brutal treatment of U.S. prisoners of war by Vietnam and urban legends proliferated about the possibility that Hanoi was still holding living POWs long after the war.
Kritenbrink added that the U.S. is now “committed to supporting the people of Vietnam as they seek to identify and ultimately reunite remains of combatants with their loving families.”
By helping the Vietnamese, the U.S. also stands…
