ABSTRACT
The American missing-in-action (MIA) families and organizations, that is, the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, insisted that Vietnam provide an account of each case. Most of those MIAs disappeared in combat and were unlikely to have survived. About a million and a half Vietnamese were killed in the Vietnam War—185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 924,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong—and 425,000 civilians. About 58,000 Americans died. The Hanoi regime counts 300,000 MIAs of its own. One expert on the MIA search predicted that it would take five to twenty more years for air crash site investigations, retrieval of remains and analysis of archives to meet the objective of "fullest possible accounting" for the 2,211 Americans listed as unaccounted for from the war. Some people have called the United States' stubborn insistence on the full accounting of the American MIAs a tactic to punish Vietnam for effectively frustrating the American war efforts in Indochina.
