Nine JPAC teams in Vietnam, Laos to search for MIAs

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Stars and Stripes

Published: March 18, 2013

Nine Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command teams are in Vietnam and Laos searching for 10 U.S. servicemembers missing from the Vietnam War.

Over 50 JPAC representatives, split into two joint U.S.-Vietnamese teams and three JPAC recovery teams, are searching for five missing servicemembers in Vietnam’s Dak Nong, Tra Vinh, Bac Lieu, Kon Tum and Lang An provinces, a JPAC statement said Friday.

Another 50 JPAC team members, making up one specialized investigative team and three recovery teams, are working in the Laotian provinces of Houaphan and Xiangkhouang to find another five missing servicemembers.

Both missions are expected to last about 30 days, the statement said.

JPAC falls under the U.S. Pacific Command and is tasked with searching for the more than 83,000 Americans still missing from past conflicts. It employs more than 500 military and civilian personnel.

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JPAC conducts mission to recover Vietnam War remains in Laos

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By Bryce S. Dubee

Stars and Stripes

Published: August 13, 2007

U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Korey Wright, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Communications specialist, sets up his satellite system on a river bed in the Xekong Province, Laos. Derrick C. Goode / Courtesy of U.S. Air Force

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii — For the past 22 years, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command has been scouring the rugged terrain of Laos, searching for signs of U.S. servicemembers who have been missing since the Vietnam War.

Recently, JPAC conducted its 100th recovery mission in Laos, venturing into the mountainous Kalum District of Xekong Province in the southern part of the country, according to a recent JPAC release.

Part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs through southern Laos, along which the U.S. military fought a major campaign in an attempt to stop the flow of enemy supplies into Southern Vietnam. According to JPAC, 357 American servicemembers are still missing in Laos due to U.S. military operations in the country.

During this recent recovery mission, two JPAC teams operating out of Taoy Base Camp spent more than a month braving Laos’ rainy season in hopes of finding the remains of fallen U.S. troops.

“The weather forced us to abandon our first site on a mountain ridge and conduct operations at an alternate site at a lower elevation,” said U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Luke Fortin, team leader of JPAC Recovery Team 3, in the release.

He explained that the team had prepared for this type of situation and was able to move its more than 700 pounds of equipment from a staging area on the mountain to an alternate location in less than 24 hours.

Paul Emanovsky, forensic anthropologist for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, surveys the site his team escavated in Xekong Province, Laos. Derrick C. Goode / Courtesy of U.S. Air Force

At the new location, JPAC forensic anthropologist Paul Emanovsky was able to brief the team about its new case and the new site.

“The main challenge is that the sites are completely different and I have to alter my team’s operational plans from recovering a servicemember lost during ground fighting, to recovering servicemembers lost in an aircraft crash,” Emanovsky was quoted in the release.

Despite the harsh conditions during the mission, the release stated that one JPAC team was able to recover possible human remains, while another team recovered life support equipment and personal effects.

“Everyone has really pulled together and made the best out of this situation,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brandt Deck, the commander of JPAC Det. 3 in the release. “I have been really impressed by how the teams have remained motivated and how hard they’re working in these extreme conditions.”

A Cold War Road Not Taken: Laos, not Vietnam, was almost the battleground for Southeast Asia

A Cold War Road Not Taken

Laos, not Vietnam, was almost the battleground for Southeast Asia, says
Seth Jacobs – and the reason it wasn’t makes for a valuable history lesson

10/04/12

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source: http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/publications/chronicle/FeaturesNewsTopstories/2012/features/jacobs100412.html

By Sean Smith | Chronicle Editor

Seth Jacobs (Photo by Lee Pellegrini)

Published: Oct. 4, 2012

It sounds likes an intriguing “what-if” question of 20th century American foreign policy: What if the US had chosen Laos, instead of Vietnam, as the battleground to oppose what experts saw as the spread of communism in Southeast Asia?

In fact, as Associate Professor of History Seth Jacobs explains, this scenario almost happened.

“During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Laos received at least as much attention as — or even more than — Vietnam,” says Jacobs, author of the recently published The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos. The US paid 100 percent of Laos’ military budget, he notes, equipped Laotian tribespeople to fight against communist guerillas, and weighed using atomic weapons to counter communist attacks on the Laotian capital, Vientiane — which could have triggered nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

“Laos was not a sideshow in the 1950s and early ’60s. When Eisenhower briefed Kennedy prior to JFK’s inauguration, they hardly talked about flashpoints like Cuba, Berlin, the Congo, or Vietnam. They discussed Laos.”

Laos, however, became a largely forgotten aspect of the US-Vietnam conflict. Now, in The Universe Unraveling, Jacobs throws a spotlight on the events, circumstances, and in particular the perceptions and attitudes that shaped American decision-making in Laos.

While logistical considerations have been cited for the US decision to focus its Southeast Asian strategy on South Vietnam instead of Laos, Jacobs says there is another, darker explanation: Cultural differences prompted Americans to dismiss the Lao as morally, intellectually and spiritually inferior, lazy, weak, incapable of standing up to communist aggression — and thus unworthy of US support.

“The accepted explanation for why the US chose South Vietnam over Laos had to do with geography: that Laos was a landlocked, mountainous country, a terrible place to fight. Laos had important advantages, though, including a thousand-mile border with Thailand, which was willing to allow the US to use it as a base to launch operations against the communists.

“But when you read archival material and other accounts of the era, what you see is ethnocentrism, a poisonous contempt for an entire country.”

The Wall Street Journal, for example, claimed the “very passive” Laotian people “do not care one way or another about communism or other big questions,” while Newsweek said, “No one is less interested in the struggle for his country than the gentle Lao.” American diplomats referred to Laos as “Never-Never Land” and “The Land of Oz,” and one prominent US missionary called the Lao “retarded children.”

Jacobs says the purpose of The Universe Unraveling is not to speculate on how history might have changed with Laos as the arena for the Southeast Asian conflict, nor is it to simply bash Americans’ unsavory attitudes toward the Lao.

“The experience in Laos should be seen as a cautionary tale,” he explains. “People with impressive educational and professional credentials convinced themselves that their take on Laos and its people was solid — but they misread almost everything.”

Laos was in an unenviable position in the 1950s and ’60s (“the Poland of the Far East,” Jacobs says), bordered by historic enemies China and Vietnam, as well as Thailand — which wanted Laos as a buffer against North Vietnam. Exacerbating the situation was a civil war between the US-backed Royal Lao Government (RLG), the communist Pathet Lao, and a neutralist front.

“Neutrality was the only option for Lao patriots seeking to keep their nation intact, independent and at peace. Anticommunism would have led to balkanization and foreign control, a point the RLG tried to make over and over.”

American statesmen, diplomats and media members, looking through a Cold War lens and with little appreciation of Laos’ historical and political complexities, says Jacobs, were frustrated by what they perceived as the country’s inability or unwillingness to adhere to a strong, purposeful anti-communist policy. Cultural differences worsened this mind-set.

“In American eyes, the Lao didn’t demonstrate sufficiently ‘masculine’ behavior. The neutralist leader, Kong Le, wept in public and seemed earnest but clueless. Lao statesmen spoke softly, smiled while being hectored, rarely interrupted, and never invaded someone’s personal space. This gave the impression of a people who were apathetic, infantile and non-confrontational.

“What nobody seemed to see was that not all Lao were battle-shy — only the royalists were. Kong Le captured Vientiane with a single battalion and held it for four months. The Pathet Lao also fought with valor against better-armed opposition.”

Under Eisenhower and Kennedy, Jacobs says, Laos became a “testing ground” for strategies that came of age in Vietnam, and which produced similar problems — support of unpopular but pro-Western despots, clashes between US civilian and military bureaucracies, and ignorance of the native population’s needs.

Ultimately, Kennedy rejected the Eisenhower-initiated support for the Lao right wing and accepted a neutralist government. But this decision made a military solution in Vietnam harder to avoid, Jacobs says.

“Kennedy’s dovishness in Laos paradoxically dictated hawkishness in Vietnam. He felt he had to confront the communists in Southeast Asia, but Vietnam — whose people were judged to be of far sterner stuff than those of Laos — was going to be the place.”

“Here in Laos,” she said, “the past is always with us.”

Clinton, in historic visit to Laos, touches on toll of Vietnam War

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Click on picture

By Stephanie McCrummen, Published: July 11

VIENTIANE, Laos — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday became the first high-ranking U.S. official to visit Laos since the Vietnam War era, when the United States dropped some 260 million cluster bombs across the countryside in a nine-year campaign to crush North Vietnamese supply lines and bases. Clinton met with Laotian Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong and other officials for talks that centered mostly on addressing the lingering effects of that war — including a sense of mutual estrangement — and then toured a small museum devoted to its human toll.

In the sweltering afternoon, Clinton walked through an exhibit of dangling cluster bombs and crude wooden artificial legs made by villagers whose limbs had been blown off by unexploded ordnance, the legacy of a war that Clinton had protested as a college student in the 1960s.

Then she met Phongsavath Souliyalat, who had been blinded by and lost both hands to a cluster bomb. He told her he hoped governments would ban the weapon.

“We have to do more,” Clinton responded. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.”

The stop in Vientiane, Laos’s capital, was a brief but symbolically significant part of a longer trip that has also taken Clinton to Mongolia, Vietnam and, later Wednesday, to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, where she was expected to attend Thursday’s regional meeting of the ASEAN group of 10 Southeast Asian nations.

The trip is intended to underline the Obama administration’s much-promoted strategic pivot toward Asia, and more particularly to convince ASEAN nations that U.S. interests in the region are not just security-based, but economic as well. Clinton is unveiling a range of economic initiatives and private-sector business deals during the trip.

At the same time, the United States is trying to encourage ASEAN nations to assert themselves in a simmering territorial dispute with China over the South China Sea, which analysts view as a test case for how a rising China will deal with the world — through threats and coercion or according to international legal norms.

China claims most of the South China Sea, including portions also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, and the resolution of those disputes will determine not only fishing rights but the rights to potentially large reserves of oil and natural gas.

The United States has been pushing the ASEAN nations to unify around a legally binding code of conduct based on international maritime law as a means of managing the disputes and as a way of cultivating ASEAN as a partner in the larger mission of engaging China.

China essentially wants the United States to stay out of it, and it is unclear which way ASEAN nations will bend.Even if they do come up with a tough code of conduct, analysts say the Chinese are unlikely to sign on to it.

Finessing such complexities of the so-called Asia pivot has been Clinton’s job, and she has carried it out partly by showing up: She has attended every ASEAN regional conference, and with her trip to Laos on Wednesday, she has visited all of the 10 ASEAN nations except Brunei, many of them multiple times.

As her term as secretary of state winds down, analysts say, many Asian leaders wonder whether U.S. engagement will last.

“She’s carrying a lot of the water herself,” said Ernest Z. Bower, a senior adviser and director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But when Asia looks at the U.S., they wonder if she has the support of the White House, of the political system, and that is a big question mark.”

After Clinton met here with Thongsing, her motorcade sped along bumpy, palm-tree lined roads, past people on sidewalks who stopped to stare. Later, she addressed U.S. and Laotian employees of the U.S. Embassy.

“Here in Laos,” she said, “the past is always with us.”

Hillary Clinton pays historic visit to communist Laos

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_21051906

By Bradley Klapper

Associated Press

Posted:   07/11/2012 09:22:36 AM PDT

Updated:   07/11/2012 09:22:37 AM PDT

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton watches a map which displays locations of bombing sites during Vietnam War, on her tour at the Cooperative Orthotic Prosthetic Enterprise Center (COPE), in Vientiane, Laos, Wednesday, July 11, 2012. COPE provides free prosthetics to those who need them including the victims of blasts of unexploded Vietnam War era ordnance, (AP Photo/Brendon Smialowski, Pool) ( Brendan Smialowski )

VIENTIANE, Laos — Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos in more than five decades, gauging whether a place the United States pummeled with bombs during the Vietnam War could evolve into a new foothold of American influence in Asia.

Clinton met with the communist government’s prime minister and foreign minister in the capital of Vientiane on Wednesday, part of a weeklong diplomatic tour of Southeast Asia. The goal is to bolster America’s standing in some of the fastest growing markets of the world, and counter China’s expanding economic, diplomatic and military dominance of the region.

Thirty-seven years since the end of America’s long war in Indochina, Laos is the latest test case of the Obama administration’s efforts to “pivot” U.S. foreign policy away from the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It follows a long period of estrangement between Washington and a once hostile Cold War-era foe, and comes as U.S. relations warm with countries such as Myanmar and Vietnam.

In her meetings, Clinton discussed environmental concerns over a proposed dam on the Mekong River, investment opportunities and joint efforts to clean up the tens of millions of unexploded bombs the U.S. dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. Greater American support programs in these fields will be included in a multimillion-dollar initiative for Southeast Asia to be announced later this week.

After the meetings, she said they “traced the arc of our relationship from addressing the tragic legacies of the past to finding a way to being partners of the future.”

Clinton also visited a Buddhist temple and a U.S.-funded prosthetic center for victims of American munitions.

At the prosthetic center, she met a man named Phongsavath Souliyalat, who told her how he had lost both his hands and his eyesight from a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton place flowers at a statue after during a tour of the Ho Phra Keo Temple, in Vientiane, Laos, Wednesday, July 11, 2012. (AP Photo/Brendon Smialowski, Pool) ( Brendan Smialowski )

“We have to do more,” Clinton told him. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.”

The last U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos was John Foster Dulles in 1955. His plane landed after being forced to circle overhead while a water buffalo was cleared from the tarmac.

At that time, the mountainous, sparsely populated nation was at the center of U.S. foreign policy. On leaving office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his successor, John F. Kennedy, that if Laos fell to the communists, all Southeast Asia could be lost as well.

While Vietnam ended up the focal point of America’s “domino theory” foreign policy, Laos was drawn deeply into the conflict as the U.S. funded its anti-communist forces and bombed North Vietnamese supply lines and bases.

The U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the impoverished country during its “secret war” between 1964 and 1973 — about a ton of ordnance for each Laotian man, woman and child. That exceeded the amount dropped on Germany and Japan together in World War II, making Laos the most heavily bombed nation per person in history.

Four decades later, American weapons are still claiming lives. When the war ended, about a third of some 270 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos had failed to detonate, leaving the country awash in unexploded munitions. More than 20,000 people have been killed by ordnance in postwar Laos, according to its government, and contamination throughout the country is a major barrier to agricultural development.

Cleanup has been excruciatingly slow. The Washington-based Legacies of War says only 1 percent of contaminated lands have been cleared and has called on Washington to provide far greater assistance. The State Department has provided $47 million since 1997, though a larger effort could make Laos “bomb-free in our lifetimes,” California Rep. Mike Honda argued.

“Let us mend the wounds of the past together so that Laos can begin a new legacy of peace,” said Honda, who is Japanese-American.

The U.S. is spending $9 million this year on cleanup operations for unexploded ordnance in Laos, but is likely to offer more in the coming days.

It is part of a larger Obama administration effort to reorient the direction of U.S. diplomacy and commercial policy as the world’s most populous continent becomes the center of the global economy over the next century. It is also a reaction to China’s expanding influence.

Despite America’s difficult history in the region, nations in Beijing’s backyard are welcoming the greater engagement — and the promise of billions of dollars more in American investment. The change has been sudden, with some longtime U.S. foes now seeking a relationship that could serve at least as a counterweight to China’s regional hegemony.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has made significant strides toward reform and democracy after decades as an international pariah, when it was universally scorned for its atrocious labor rights record and its long repression of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy movement. The Obama administration is expected to ease investment restrictions in the country this week.

Vietnam, threatened by Beijing’s claims to the resource-rich South China Sea, has dramatically deepened diplomatic and commercial ties with the United States, with their two-country trade now exceeding $22 billion a year — from nothing two decades ago. Clinton on Tuesday made her third trip to the fast-growing country, meeting with senior communist officials to prod them into greater respect for free expression and labor rights.

Landlocked and impoverished Laos offers fewer resources than its far larger neighbors and has lagged in Asia’s economic boom. It remains one of the poorest countries in Asia, even as it hopes to kick-start its development with accession soon to the World Trade Organization.

In recent years, China has stepped up as Laos’ principal source of assistance, with loans and grants of up to $350 million over the last two decades. But like many others in its region, Laos’ government is wary of Beijing’s intentions. And it has kept an envious eye on neighboring Vietnam’s 40 percent surge in commercial trade with the United States over the last two years, as well as the sudden rapprochement between the U.S. and nearby Myanmar.

Persistent human rights issues stand in the way of closer relations with Washington. The U.S. remains concerned about the plight of the ethnic Hmong minority, most of whom fled the country after fighting for a U.S.-backed guerilla army during the Vietnam War. Nearly 250,000 resettled in the United States. The U.S. has pressed Laos to respect the rights of returnees from neighboring countries.

Washington also has been seeking greater cooperation from Laos on the search for U.S. soldiers missing in action since the Vietnam War. More than 300 Americans remain unaccounted for in Laos.

And it is pressing the government to hold off on a proposed $3.5 billion dam project across the Mekong River. The dam would be the first across the river’s mainstream and has sparked a barrage of opposition from neighboring countries and environmental groups, which warn that tens of millions of livelihoods could be at stake.

The project is currently on hold and Washington hopes to stall it further with the promise of funds for new environmental studies.

On Visit to Laos, Clinton Is Reminded of Vietnam War

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/world/middleeast/on-visit-to-laos-clinton-is-reminded-of-vietnam-war.html

July 11, 2012

By JANE PERLEZ

Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday visited with Phongsavath Souliyalat, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb.

VIENTIANE, Laos – Traveling in Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday made a brief stop in Laos, the first visit by an American secretary of state in 57 years and one that was marked by the enduring legacy of the Vietnam War.

At an artificial limb center, Mrs. Clinton met a 19-year-old who lost his forearms and eyesight when a bomb, dropped by the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War and unexploded for decades, finally blew up three year ago.

The young man, Phongsavath Sonilya, gesticulated with his arm stumps as he explained to Mrs. Clinton that more than 30 years after the end of the war, more still had to be done to stop the use of cluster bombs and to support victims of those still lying unexploded in the countryside. The United States has not signed the Convention on Cluster Bombs.

The four-hour visit by Mrs. Clinton to Laos provided other reminders of the Vietnam War.

The government is run by the Communist Party, and five of the nine members of the Politburo, including the Prime Minister, Thongsing Thammavong, who met with Mrs. Clinton, are veterans of the Pathet Lao guerrilla group that supported North Vietnam against the United States. Until 1975, Vientiane, the capital, had a strong American influence. After Saigon fell, more than 1,200 Americans were evacuated from Laos when the Pathet Lao backed by the Soviet Union took power.

Now Laos is closely aligned with China, its biggest benefactor by far with investments of more than $4 billion in mining, hydropower and agriculture. The Chinese built many of the main buildings in the relaxed tropical capital, and are now constructing a new convention center with 50 villas for a European-Asian summit in November, a meeting that excludes the United States.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit, in keeping with the understated nature of the people, was quite subtle. When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles came here in 1955, he tried to persuade the Lao royal family to drop their neutrality in the Cold War and join the American camp. Mrs. Clinton did not attempt anything as brazen as mentioning China, though the import of her visit – to seek warmer relations between the United States and Laos – was quite clear.

There was no news conference with the Prime Minister, but a carefully worded statement negotiated by both sides that noted the upcoming entry of Laos into the World Trade Organization, and co-operation between the United States and Laos on environmental protection.

After the meeting with the prime minister, the State Department said that Laos had decided to suspend the construction of the Xayaburi dam, a project being built by Thailand to send electricity to Thailand.

Neighboring countries have complained that the dam would upset the flow of the Mekong River, the main waterway of Southeast Asia.

At the center that provides artificial limbs, known as the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise, Mrs. Clinton viewed a map embedded with red dots that showed where bombs were dropped along the Ho Chi Minh trail and on the Plain of Jars. There were more than 580,000 bombing missions by the United States Air Force, making Laos the most heavily bombed country on a per capita basis, the text said.

More than 30 percent of the bombs remained unexploded, leaving Laos with a deadly problem in rural areas that persists until today.

Each bomb contained about 600 bomblets, and in recent years 100 people have been killed by unexploded ordinance, 40 percent of them children.

Rural people often scavenge for the bombs, believing the metal has value. Young children think they are toys, said Soksai Sengvongkham, the operations manager of the visitors center. As she toured the center, Mrs. Clinton asked several times why more sophisticated technology could not be used to find the bombs, which are currently located by workers with metal detectors.

There was evidence, too, of the low cost nature of some of the home-made limbs that farmers put together using bamboo, metal tubes from bombs, and wood, while they awaited more professional limbs.

After the visit to the center, Mrs. Clinton said it was “a painful reminder of the Vietnam War era.”

“The international community will join us in our efforts to bring this legacy of the Vietnam War to a safe end,” she said.

From Laos, Mrs. Clinton flew to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, for the annual meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of South East Asian Nations.

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