Smash hit

Much of the search for MIA has been concentrated in Vietnam, initially fuelled by the double injustice felt by returning veterans that their service in an unpopular war was derided by many Americans and that their fallen comrades were being abandoned.

Hollywood latched on to stories of surviving US servicemen, feeding the popular imagination with a series of films including three Missing in Action films starring Chuck Norris, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, starring Sylvester Stallone, all about the rescue of MIA.

For those picking their way through the Laos jungle in the hope of giving a tiny fragment of a former life the dignity of a formal remembrance, this is far from a forgotten battlefield. Mr Danielson, a quietly spoken but driven man, is fired by a personal sense of mission. “When I was a Marine we were able to take our dead with us after combat,” he said, “but in Vietnam that wasn’t always the case. Doing this work is a chance to come back for my fallen comrades from that war, and that makes it the best job I have ever had. It is the noblest job and the most rewarding.”()

Another Vietnam veteran toiling in the tropical heat is Chief Medic Robert Wickboldt, 62, from Texas, who also served in Iraq this year. He said: “This work means closure for the families who lost people out here. It means so much to them.”

Both men are looked up to by the young servicemen and women digging the iron-hard ground, nearly all of whom are veterans of the war in Iraq.

With comrades dying on Iraqi and Afghan battlefields, the presence of so many serving soldiers recently returned from there is hardly surprising. The fate of the MIA from a previous generation is a pressing matter of troop morale. Those on active duty expect their fallen comrades to receive a proper burial Marine Sergeant Winston Fulloch, 28, from New York, has completed two tours in Iraq and expects to be sent to Afghanistan soon. “My mother just says she’s glad I’m here in Laos for now,” he said.

Other teams are searching near by for the remains of 14 Americans who died when a giant Hercules Spectre gunship was hit by a missile in 1972, and for the graves of two pilots of a downed spotter aircraft from 1968.

Witness evidence from villagers has suggested that their bodies were buried near their aircraft by Vietnamese troops.

The search for the 1,800 missing is becoming a race against time as memories fade, witnesses die and remote crash sites are increasingly pillaged for scrap sold in the booming economy of Vietnam over the border. But it still throws up astonishing findings.

In September the remains of Air Force Major Burke H. Morgan, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, were flown back to the United States and buried with full military honours beside his wife, Mary, at the US Air Force Academy. Major Morgan had taken off on an armed reconnaissance mission over Laos on August 22, 1967. After leaving Nakhon Phanom air base, in Thailand, he and a fellow officer made radio contact for the last time, shortly after midnight. Subsequent searches of their last-reported location, in Xiang-khoang province, failed to locate the crash site.

However, in 1993 a joint team from the US and Laos travelled to the province. They interviewed three men who remembered the crash in 1967 and the burial of the crew members. The men also stated that one of the bodies had been disinterred in 1986. The remains were finally traced to a Lao official who had been holding them, awaiting directions from the authorities.

Scientists were able to positively identify bone fragments and dental remains for burial in America.

Some in Laos and Vietnam grumble about the large sums of money spent on finding dead Americans when their countries are still littered with unexploded bombs that continue to kill farmers.

The military museum in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, still exhibits dramatic wartime photographs of the struggle against the “criminal imperialists” who flew the aircraft. Many of the guerrillas who shot them down were in the women’s firepower battalions, tiny figures in the photos crouched under huge Soviet machineguns.

But old hatreds have faded. Jason Heyman, a 28-year-old Marine staff sergeant, has been guided to the jungle graves of Americans by the former North Vietnamese soldiers who killed them.

He said: “Soldier to soldier, they were just doing their job. I’ve had to kill in Iraq and I know they were doing what they thought was right to defend their country.”

Casualties of a secret war

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