After years of juggling with POW/MIA issue, the Vietnamese Communist government recently asserted that they also have 300,000 MIA's of their own. This is echoed repeatedly by Hanoi's agencies, its supporters, and others who quickly accepted the figures without a further thinking. In fact, the figures is minimized much below truth.
During the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese military headquarters and the US MACV claimed that the Communist side suffered more than 900,000 KIA's. Many people in the media doubted the figure and took it as an exaggerated report.
Apparently, both North and South Vietnam blew up their enemy losses. A statistics office of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff totaled all of the Communist losses reported on Saigon newspapers from 1959 to 1973, came up with around 1,5 million Communist soldiers killed. Meanwhile, the losses of their opposite side claimed by North Vietnamese official newspapers - Nhan Dan, of the Communist Party, and Quan Doi Nhan Dan of the NVN military - in the same period were about 2 million South Vietnamese along with some 100,000 Americans killed. These NVN newspapers had never said a single word about losses of their side while the South Vietnamese and the Americans did not understate theirs.
In 1969, General Vo Nguyen Giap admitted in an interview with Oriana Fallaci, an Italian reporter, that his Vietnamese Communist forces had lost half million men (*). But recently, Hanoi unexpectedly admitted that it had lost 1,100,000 soldiers. Almost none of those who once disbelieved the MACV figure of 900,000 Communist KIA's admits that the SVN military and its American ally had been too conservative.
Anyone who once fought the Vietnam War knew that almost all of those Communist dead were left on battlefields in hostile territories. Some buried by their enemies - American and South Vietnamese soldiers. Most of the others lay rotten in jungle areas, never recovered or registered by their side. On their bodies, there were almost nothing to show their name, unit, age or birth place. Only a few graves of those killed in the Communist controlled areas were marked with names.
Technically, they all were MIA's. If Hanoi's officials confirmed that they had lost 1,1 million soldiers, they should have admitted that at least 1 million of them were "missing." The story might be rather confusing to some who seldom give attention to what are happening in Vietnam.
During the first few years of the war, North Vietnamese soldiers were sent to the South in regular units organized to the division level. They were not allowed to bear any identification that might have proved their North Vietnamese origin.
Since about 1968, because of critical military situation, North Vietnamese draftees were hastily sent to South Vietnam with little basic training - sometimes less than a week.- and in replacement groups instead of organized units. They would be assigned to combat units with no personal records kept at any level but their district conscription offices. And so were the communist guerrillas from South Vietnam.
South Vietnamese and American soldiers sometimes found letters, diaries, ID cards and photographs in the bodies of the Communist soldiers, but more often since 1968, probably because of less inspection before the NVA replacements crossed the Demilitarized Zone.
Back at their homes, death certificates were granted to their families years later. Most were not based on written reports of their units. A number of deaths were confirmed by platoon or squad leaders who survived fierce battles, but many certificates were issued on their families' petitions after years without seeing them back. In North Vietnam, many POW's came back after March 1973 POW exchange - and so did many "chieu hoi" after being released from prisons - to learn that their families had received their death certificates a long time before. ("Chieu hoi" were Vietnamese Communist soldiers who rallied to the South Vietnamese government side. After April 30, 1975, most were sentenced from a few years in prison to death).
After April 1975, Hanoi did very little to take care of a small number of its soldiers' graves in South Vietnam. Only since 1985 when its veterans in South Vietnam became a very troublesome matter did Hanoi launch a campaign to give help to its dead soldiers' dependents, and renovate their graves. The communist authorities could rebury with names on headstones only those who died in South Vietnamese Army's POW camps where Saigon's MP kept POWs' records well, and a few local Viet Cong guerrillas whose relatives were informed of when and where they got killed. In places near populated areas where communist soldiers were buried in war, Hanoi just built monuments for its "unknown soldiers." Meanwhile, mass graves in remote jungle places were just ignored.
Therefore, locating and identifying the remains of the great majority of Vietnamese Communist MIA's was completely impossible.
There is a shallow, wide river close to the 17th Parallel where North Vietnamese soldiers had to wade across a battalion at a time when no American warplane was in the region. Soldiers who got too sick - mostly from malaria - to cross the stream might be allowed by their commanders to stay at the northern bank. If they become strong enough when the next unit arrived, they would join it to continue their way southward. A great number of the sick died and were buried in a clearing beside the route by other North Vietnamese units on the way infiltrating South Vietnam. Until now, the many thousand North Vietnamese soldiers still rest in unmarked graves below a memorial built after 1975.
Actually, only the Chieu Hoi who may be still living somewhere in South Vietnam with different names without having contact with their relatives, could really be Hanoi's living MIA's.
In the last few years, there were American veterans of the Vietnam War pointed out some mass grave sites where hundreds of Communist dead soldiers had been buried. In fact, the Vietnamese Communist authorities have known too well about all locations where their comrades were buried, but they do not have anything to do with the unknown remains. Mass graves of Communist soldiers after battles are not secrets, particularly in populated areas where any resident could pinpoint the sites, let alone Communist officials.
Obviously, the new assertion of 300,000 Communist MIA's was for propaganda purpose. Hanoi is skillful in playing with numbers. The figure 300,000 is large enough to tell the Americans that they also have the problem 10 times greater, but not so large as it really is, that could bring about adverse reactions from the families of the war dead.
In fact, Hanoi has never cared about its million as Washington has about its twenty-two hundred MIA's. What is taking place around the 300,000 MIA's issue is no more than a carefully staged drama for something else without humanitarian purpose.
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(*) Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974; translated by John Shepley, Liveright Publishing Corp., 1976) p. 79.
VIETQUOC Sept 15, 1996.
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