Hanoi Opens 3 MIA Search Areas, Releases Letters
In a poignant historical postscript, the United States and Vietnam on Monday exchanged artifacts of war, including a U.S. soldier’s written account of life under fire before his death and a Vietnam trooper’s diary held for over 40 years by an American GI.
At a ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnamese defense minister Phung Quang Thanh delivered the letters to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who in turn gave Thanh the small maroon diary taken from the body of the Vietnamese man by a U.S. service member who brought it home with him.
Defense officials said the Vietnamese had used the letters by Army Sgt. Steve Flaherty as propaganda.
“I felt bullets going past me,” Flaherty, from Columbia, S.C., wrote to someone named Betty. “I have never been so scared in my life.”
And to his mother he wrote, “”If Dad calls, tell him I got too close to being dead but I’m O.K. I was real lucky. I’ll write again soon.”
To a Mrs. Wyatt, he nevertheless suggested he believed in the mission.
“This is a dirty and cruel war but I’m sure people will understand the purpose of this war even though many of us might not agree,” he wrote in excerpts released by U.S. defense officials.
Officials said this is the first time such a joint exchange of war artifacts has occurred. The two defense leaders agreed to return the papers to the families of the deceased soldiers.
Flaherty, who was with the 101st Airborne, was killed in the northern section of South Vietnam in March 1969. According to defense officials, Vietnamese forces took his letters and used them in broadcasts during the war.
Vietnamese Col. Nguyen Phu Dat kept the letters, but it was not until last August, when he mentioned them in an online publication, that they started to come to light.
Early this year, Robert Destatte, a retired Defense Department employee who had worked for the POW/MIA office, noticed the online publication, and the Pentagon began to work to get the letters back to Flaherty’s family.
At a news conference, the Vietnamese government also announced its agreement to open three new sites in the country for excavation by the United States to search for troop remains from the war.