Foes No More: American Veterans Help Vietnamese Find Remains
Capt. Edward Lundquist, U.S. Navy retired
Thursday, November 21, 2024
For three Vietnam veterans, the war in Southeast Asia has come full circle. They returned to battlefields where they once fought to meet with soldiers and officials from Vietnam who are no longer enemies. They share a common purpose: to find the grave sites of North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong fighters who died at those sites so their remains can be identified and returned to their families.
The effort complements but is separate from the joint recovery operations conducted by the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which works with the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Persons, looking for American missing servicemen.
Three veterans—Bob Connor, Richard Magner and Kinbourne Lo—in June completed a two-week visit to locations between Ho Chi Minh City and Danang as part of a delegation sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent, nonpartisan public institute founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential for U.S. and global security. The institute’s Vietnam program is part of the Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative, a DoD-led effort that, since 2021, has assisted Vietnam in finding its own missing from the war.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/foes-no-more-american-veterans-help-vietnamese-find-remains
