Bone Dealers in Vietnam

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The beautiful country of Vietnam, even with its ubiquitous poverty, dirty and crowded city streets, and few creature comforts, seems like a recently discovered paradise to many visitors these days. The Vietnamese themselves are a warm, caring, graceful and gregarious people, but their lives are often difficult. With little money and scarce medical attention available, an otherwise minor illness in a remote village may well end in death even today. For example, one small Vietnamese village visited in 1995 consisted of 43 families (about 250 people) and reportedly loses 40 children and elderly people to illness or disease each year.

It is no wonder that so many of the Vietnamese people we have met during our work with the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI), whether they lived in the city or country, wanted to di My–’go to America. They perceived America as a free and rich land of opportunity. But most Vietnamese have very little money by American standards and cannot afford to travel to the United States. In recent years, impoverished Vietnamese citizens have come to see the human remains of American soldiers as their ticket to America, and some Vietnamese have become involved with unscrupulous people selling human remains that are purported to be American MIAs.

Whenever we are in Vietnam, we are asked by the U.S. MIA Office in Hanoi to examine suspected American remains. There are two types of people who bring in remains–honest citizens who find remains while working on rice fields or who accidentally stumble upon a crash site in some remote area, and bone dealers. Although most Vietnamese citizens find it abhorrent to deal in human bones and teeth, some consider it a ticket out of Vietnam and the promise of a new start in America.

Many people mistakenly believe that U.S. authorities will pay for a Vietnamese family’s passage to America if remains are discovered that are determined to be those of a missing U.S. service member. But they are wrong. American authorities do not and, to our knowledge, never have paid private citizens for remains. Should such a policy be in existence, it would clearly result in the exhumation of thousands of Vietnamese graves by Vietnamese citizens and hundreds of examinations by CILHI anthropologists.

Very rarely, some people who bring in remains for examination are compensated for their time and personal expenses. But they have to take time off from work and pay for their own transportation to meet with American representatives and Vietnamese officials of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP) and, when possible, a CILHI anthropologist.

The vast majority of remains turned in by Vietnamese citizens are either from Vietnamese people or animals, including cows, pigs, dogs or deer. Most American soldiers who died during the war were young, tall in comparison with the Vietnamese, and had many dental fillings. Although the majority of the remains we have examined since 1992 are of 18- to 25-year-old Vietnamese men, some were from old men, women, and even children. But innocent citizens as well as unscrupulous dealers who hand over remains cannot t tell the difference between the skeleton of a 15-year-old girl and that of a 70-year-old man. To most Vietnamese, they’re just bones.

The Vietnamese government, to the best of our knowledge and experience, neither condones nor promotes the illegal and unscrupulous practice of bone dealing. People do illegally obtain human remains and pass them off as American MIAs, but when the VNOSMP and police have enough evidence, they prosecute those who remove remains from cemeteries for sale or barter. Dealing in human remains is considered a major crime punishable by imprisonment and hard labor. But many dealers avoid punishment by simply lying about how and where they obtained the remains. Usually, all that the VNOSMP can do is to warn suspected dealers of the serious consequences of such activities, thank them for bringing the remains in for examination, and then keep a watchful eye on them.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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