Bone Dealers in Vietnam

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People had gathered outside her home and curiously watched as she retrieved the remains from a room in the back of her home. She had kept them in a plastic 5-gallon water container. The top of the container was covered with a piece of green plastic and tied in place with yellow plastic rope.

As is standard practice, the team members photographed the container before it was opened. Bob removed the green plastic and immediately decided that the remains were Vietnamese. Two thighbones were visible, and the hip sockets were tiny–probably too small to be American. The anthropologist removed the remains and laid them out on the front porch. The examination took only about 15 minutes. There was no duplication of bones, indicating that only one individual was represented by the remains. The skull was small and short front to back, the facial bones were flat, the nasal bones were very small, and the nasal opening wide and short–typical Asian traits. The hips were also small, the greater sciatic notch narrow and shallow, the auricular platform flat, and the pubic bones triangular–these were the bones of a small male. What stood out most about the remains was the edentulous mandible–the individual was old enough to have lost all his teeth, and the bony mandible had changed shape in response to the loss. When the anthropologist articulated the lower jaw (mandible) with the temporomandibular joints (jaw joints), the head had the typical appearance of an elderly man–the lower jaw jutted forward. The woman had the skeleton of a Vietnamese man who had died when he was more than 70 years old.

When the VNOSMP official explained to the woman what she had, she slid down in her chair, placed her hands together in front of her face as if to pray, and slowly rocked back and forth as she cried and apologized to everyone. She was obviously distraught that she had been duped by a bone dealer and embarrassed that she had held the remains of one of her fellow Vietnamese in a plastic container in the back room for five years. If she had suspected they were Vietnamese, she would have immediately buried them. Everyone in her village would soon know that she had been swindled, and her three taels of gold were forever gone.

The dealer who sold the unfortunate woman those remains probably swindled people on a regular basis. He had probably exhumed a grave in the middle of the night, bought a dog tag (they can be easily purchased in Vietnam’s bigger cities) and concocted a story about having found the remains in some remote area. After getting her $1,500, the dealer no doubt repeated his scam elsewhere.

Unscrupulous Dealers

The other side of the coin, the unscrupulous dealer, is usually what turns up at field forensic reviews. A week after the foregoing episode, for example, Bob examined remains that had been turned in by five sources. The team met in a large room at the Saigon office of the VNOSMP, and each group of remains was laid out on a long conference table. While Bob examined the remains, two members of the U.S. Research Investigation Team (RIT) interviewed the owners.

The first two cases, each accompanied by a dog tag, turned out to be adult Vietnamese females. The third case consisted of cow bones, a dog tag, and an altered currency control card. The card was encased in hard plastic and looked old and, to the untrained eye, authentic. But some of the words had been carefully touched up with pen and ink, and there were typographical mistakes. On one side of the card was: CERTIFICATE PULL: [soldier's name] PERMANENT GRADE: PILOT NAVIGAT CAPTAIN FUNCTION DUTY OFFICE CHARGE COMPANY COMMANDER SERVICE NUMBER. PEOPLE: AMERICAN - POS UNIT AIR FORCE SPECIAL UNIT. On the other side of the card was: U.S. MILITARY ASSISTANCE COMMAND, VIETNAM CURRENCY CONTROL PLATE

One case consisted of two plastic bags that held pieces of a termite mound–not even a single bone. The remains, which had been turned over to one of the joint US/SRV investigation teams, had reportedly been recovered from an aircraft crash site. Joint Task Force-Full Accounting policy is that anything suspected of being human remains and all bones and teeth must be examined by a qualified CILHI physical anthropologist before they can be discarded. In fact, there is a list distributed to all Joint Task Force offices in Southeast Asia of CILHI physical anthropologists who are authorized to examine and turn back remains while in the field. This hold and examine policy also applies to excavation teams where an archaeologist is on hand. Having a physical anthropologist examine the remains eliminates the possibility of discarding human remains that might be mistaken for those of a cow, dog or pig.

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

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