History
Immediately after the Paris Peace Accords were signed on Jan. 27, 1973, Operation Homecoming returned 591 prisoners of war who had been captured in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (two Vietnam POWs and a Cold War POW were released from China).
Some families and government officials expected a greater number of returnees, which gave rise to the urgency of the accounting mission. Although Article Eight of the Accord called for mutual assistance among the parties in accounting for the missing Americans, immediate postwar hostilities limited access to many sites. In 1973, the U.S. listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for from the war, with roughly equal numbers of those missing in action, or killed in action/body not recovered.
From February 1973 to March 1975, teams from the U.S. and the Republic of Vietnam conducted joint, but restricted searches for Americans missing in South Vietnam. These searches met with limited success, recovering and identifying 63 personnel, 23 of whom had died in captivity in North Vietnam, and five of whom had been killed in Laos. On Dec. 15, 1973, U.S. Army Capt. Richard M. Rees was killed by guerrilla fighters while conducting search efforts, which caused restrictions of the ongoing recovery work. On April 30, 1975, searches ended completely when the Communists took over Vietnam.
In the 1980s, the U.S. resumed its recovery efforts with high-level policy and technical meetings. Then in August 1987, President Ronald Reagan dispatched Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr. as a Special Presidential Emissary on POW/MIA issues to find ways to account for those still missing from the war. As a result of the Vessey meetings, the Vietnamese permitted American teams to search throughout the country starting in September 1988. Parallel arrangements were reached in Laos and Cambodia around the same time and occasional targeted investigations were done in China. Continuous joint searches began in April 1988 in Laos, and in October 1991 in Cambodia.
In February 1992, the U.S. organized its accounting efforts into the large-scale field operations which continue today. Teams work during several periods each year in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, alongside their foreign counterparts. They have interviewed thousands of witnesses and conducted archival research in all three countries regarding the fate of missing Americans, resulting in the discovery of crash and burial sites across the region. Archeologists and anthropologists use meticulous site exploitation to find remains and material evidence, followed by a forensic process that often leads to the identification of our missing personnel.