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First Trip to Vietnam by a U.S. Secretary of Defense Since End of War Yields Big Results

In June, as part of a nine-day regional tour of Asia aimed at boosting military ties in the region, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay, where a civilian-crewed U.S. naval cargo ship, Richard E. Byrd, is anchored and being serviced by Vietnamese contractors. The visit came days after Panetta’s announcement at the Shangri La Security Dialogue conference in Singapore that by 2020, 60 percent of U.S. Navy warships will be positioned in the Pacific as part of a strategic focus on Asia, which echoes what Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced in a speech last March.

“We’ve come a long way, particularly with regards to our defense relationship,” Panetta said on the deck of the Byrd, adding that now he wanted“to take this relationship to the next level.” Two years ago, with rising concern over China’s claims to control all of the South China Sea, the United States and Vietnam signed a memorandum on defense cooperation. Byrd is the fifth vessel to be repaired in Vietnam after the country agreed to conduct minor repairs on noncombatant U.S. Navy ships.

Looking out on a bay that was once teeming with U.S. naval ships during the Vietnam War, Panetta spoke of the “arc of history” in which a bitter war had given way to a new era. “For me, personally, this is a very emotional moment,” he said. “A great deal of blood was spilled in this war on all sides.”Panetta was a young Army officer during the 1960s, but he did not serve in Vietnam.

After the war, the Vietnamese leased the Cam Ranh installation to the Soviet Union, but the Russians left in 2002.

Vietnam Opens New Search Sites for U. S. MIAs

During Defense Secretary Panetta’s visit to Hanoi in June, Vietnam agreed to open three previously restricted sites to the United States for excavations in search of American servicemen still listed as missing in action. Eight sites remain restricted, according to Ron Ward, casualty resolution specialist at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hanoi. The opening of the three sites, said Ward, will allow recovery specialists to examine areas where JPAC believes the remains of four U.S. servicemen are located, American Forces Press Service (AFPS) reported.

Panetta thanked Vietnamese Defense Minister Phuong Quang Thanh for the support Vietnam has provided over the years, reported AFPS. The U.S. military has six recovery teams and two investigative teams in Vietnam searching for troop remains. JPAC’s Vietnam detachment has conducted 107 field searches for American MIAs, and to date, according to AFPS, the command has repatriated and identified 687 remains. Some 1,284 U.S. service members are still unaccounted for in Vietnam, along with several hundred more in Laos and Cambodia. Officers briefing Panetta said that the remains of some 600 of those could be recoverable, the Associated Press reported.

“All of these efforts, hopefully, will result in us sending Americans home,” Ward told marinecorpstimes.com.

War Mementos of Slain Soldiers Exchanged in Peace

Along with an agreement to expand sites for searching for the remains of American soldiers who are still listed as MIA, Defense Secretary Panetta and Defense Minister Thanh took part in an unprecedented exchange of letters and a diary that had been taken off the dead bodies of troops from each country during the war.

Panetta returned a small diary that a U.S. soldier had found on a Vietnamese soldier (see story, p. 12), and Thanh handed Panetta three sets of letters from U.S. servicemen who were killed in action, including those written by Sgt. Steve Flaherty, 22, of Columbia, S.C. Flaherty was killed on March 25, 1969, while serving with the 101st Airborne Division near the A Shau Valley. Vietnamese forces took the letters written by Flaherty and used them for propaganda purposes during the war. They came to light again when Vietnamese Senior Col. Nguyen Phu Dat, who retained the letters, referred to them in an online publication about documents kept from the war years. Dat’s comments caught the attention of former Defense Department official Robert Destatte, who had worked at the POW/MIA office, and he notified the Defense and State departments. Flaherty’s family was informed in April about the existence of the letters.

According to Defense Department officials, Sgt. Flaherty’s letters, addressed to his mother, a friend Betty and a woman named Mrs. Wyatt, express emotional accounts of his fears in the face of fighting and combat.

To Betty, he wrote,“Thank you for your sweet card. It made my miserable day a much better one but I don’t think I will ever forget the bloody fight we are having.”

And to his mother, he wrote,“Our platoon started off with 35 men but winded up with 19 men when it was over. We lost platoon leader and whole squad.”

“I definitely will take R&R. I don’t care where so long as I get a rest, which I need so badly, soon. I’ll let you know exact date.”

Flaherty’s sister-in-law, Martha Gibbons, said he was a college student with pro baseball prospects but joined the Army willingly “because he felt it was his obligation,” according to a CNN report.“I was in tears [reading the letters] thinking of how he must have felt, how afraid he must have been yet determined to do his duty.”

President Launches Commemoration and Lauds Vietnam Vets at The Wall

This year’s Memorial Day observance at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highlighted by President Barack Obama’s appearance to officially declare the beginning of the national commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, which will run through Nov. 11, 2025. Participants in the ceremony included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, former Sen. Chuck Hagel, Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and actor Tom Selleck, who served as master of ceremonies.

Obama laid a wreath at The Wall with Rose Mary Sabo-Brown, the widow of Army Spc. Leslie Sabo, who received the Medal of Honor posthumously in May.

The commemoration will last 13 years, roughly the length of the war, though the war’s exact dates have been disputed. The United States first sent advisers to Vietnam in 1959, and combat troops were sent in 1964, following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The year 1962 was chosen for the purpose of the commemoration because that’s when the Pentagon first authorized a Vietnam Service Ribbon for troops sent to Southeast Asia, The Boston Globe reported. It was also the year that President John Kennedy increased military advisers from a few hundred to several thousand.

This was the second time a president has attended the Memorial Day service at The Wall. “It’s here we feel the depth of your sacrifice,” Obama said.“You did your job. You served with honor. You made us proud and you earned your place among the greatest generations. Welcome Home.”

For more on the commemoration, visit www.vietnamwar50th.com.

‘History Detectives’ IDs Wartime Diary

A diary belonging to a North Vietnamese Army soldier killed in the war was returned to Vietnam in June, as part of Leon Panetta’s landmark visit to the country, thanks in large part to the PBS TV show History Detectives. U.S. Marine Robert Frazure, of Walla Walla, Wash., saw the diary on the chest of a slain NVA soldier in 1966, according to Pentagon officials. Frazure brought it back to the U.S., and years later he asked Marge Scooter, the sister of a battalion mate killed in Vietnam, for help in researching its owner. In February Scooter took the diary to History Detectives, coproduced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and Lion Television.

According to Kristi Turnquist of The Oregonian, Wes Cowan, a History Detectives cohost who was working on the diary segment, said series researchers had been in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi. “We were trying to locate the family of the North Vietnamese soldier who was killed, and who belonged to the diary,” said Cowan. “That’s how the Defense Department found out we were working on this.”

In May someone contacted the History Detectives production office, wanting to have Panetta take the diary to Vietnam. Cowan said the segment was still in the research stage, however, with no filming done, so there was a scramble to film a brief segment with the diary before it made its way back to Vietnam. Panetta exchanged the Vietnamese diary for U.S. soldiers’ letters that have been in Vietnam’s possession since the end of the war. The episode featuring the diary is scheduled to air on September 25 on PBS.

 

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.