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                                                                                NATION, Page 13

EXPEDITIONS

My Search for Colonel Scharf


A TIME correspondent treks through the jungle 17 years after the
Vietnam War in hopes of solving a mystery: What happened to a
missing U.S. pilot?

By RICHARD HORNIK/SUOI PAI


    The hill tribesman stopped abruptly on the mountainside
trail and pointed down the steep slope to a thicket of bamboo
and dense underbrush. In a flash he used a foot-long machete to
clear a 20-yard path down which I staggered to a tiny clearing.
There lay the remnants of what used to be one of America's most
feared weapons in its war with Vietnam: a 15-ton F-4C Phantom
fighter reduced by explosion, fire and subsequent scavenging to
a few chunks of twisted metal. In 1990 a joint U.S.-Vietnamese
investigating team confirmed from the serial numbers on the
plane that this was the jet flown by U.S. Air Force Colonel
Charles Scharf and Major Martin Massucci and shot down by North
Vietnamese antiaircraft fire on Oct. 1, 1965.

    But while the fate of the plane is known, that of its crew
is in dispute. The pilot of another F-4 claimed that he saw one
parachute deploy fully before the plane exploded in the air and
smashed in a ball of fire into the jungle covering Suoi Pai
Mountain, 85 miles west of Hanoi. People from a nearby village
who rushed to the site hoping to capture an American pilot have
described graphically the bodies of two dead men thrown clear of
the wreckage. The villagers, however, had been unable to
pinpoint the site where they say the two airmen were buried.
Scharf and Massucci were initially classified as missing in
action; that was changed in 1978 to killed in action.

    My personal MIA odyssey began last September. While on a
reporting trip to Hanoi, I approached the Vietnamese Foreign
Ministry with a proposition: since neither the Vietnamese nor
the American government has any credibility on the MIA issue,
I wanted to see what was involved in investigating these cases.
A hastily arranged meeting with Dang Nghiem Bai, Assistant
Foreign Minister for North American Affairs, yielded a positive
response. The Vietnamese government was willing to permit me --
or any other concerned American -- to investigate particular
cases with no restrictions on travel. They would even open up
their files.


    This offer was not altruistic. With the formal signing
last October of an agreement that ended the Cambodian civil
war, unresolved MIA cases are the only remaining major obstacle
to normalizing diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam.
Seventeen years after the war's end, 2,273 Americans are still
unaccounted for. Of these, the Pentagon classifies 1,101 as
killed in action, though their bodies have never been recovered.
The rest are classified as MIAs. In 1987 General John Vessey,
the U.S. special envoy for MIA affairs, presented a list of 119
so-called discrepancy cases to Hanoi for priority resolution,
chosen because the Pentagon has reason to believe that
Vietnamese authorities have some knowledge of the fate of the
servicemen.

    Scharf's case, which seemed to encapsulate many of the
elements of the MIA mystery, was among them. He was one of many
missing Americans who were the subject of so-called live
sightings -- white or black men, usually emaciated, locked in
bamboo cages or being led under guard through the jungle.

    Last Sept. 28 the TIME bureau in Hong Kong received a rare
long-distance phone call from the Foreign Ministry in Hanoi. Bai
had obtained the necessary permissions from his superiors and
from the local authorities in Son La province for me to visit
the alleged crash site.

    On Oct. 3 TIME photographer Greg Davis and I were in Hanoi
for our first meeting with Ho Xuan Dich, director of the
Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Personnel. Dich's deputy, Ngo
Hoang, had participated in the February 1990 joint
U.S.-Vietnamese visit -- known in MIA jargon as an iteration --
to the crash site, a six-day trip topped off by an eight-hour
slog up the side of a mountain. He reviewed the Vietnamese file
on the case, the one the Pentagon lists as 0158. The joint team
had interviewed witnesses who had seen a jet explode in midair,
others who found two dead bodies at the crash site and others
who claimed that they had buried the two pilots. The Vietnamese
investigators concluded that Scharf and Massucci both died when
their plane crashed into Suoi Pai Mountain.

    A visit to the American Office for POW-MIA Affairs, set up
last summer in Hanoi's Boss Hotel, cast some doubt on that
conclusion. Bell, head of the office, said the pilot of an F-4C
flying in formation with Scharf's had reported that he saw a
parachute fully deployed. That meant one of the crew could have
survived and may have been taken prisoner. Because Scharf's body
was never located, said Bell, "our conclusion was that further
efforts are warranted." But one of the office's investigators
later insisted, "Both of them are dead."

    In fact, almost all the evidence indicated that both men
perished, though the passage of time, the dense jungle and the
cold, rainy weather made it impossible for the investigation
team that went to the site in 1990 to locate the graves. As for
the parachute, it could have been the drag chute used to slow
F-4s after landing. It also could have been an effort by a
comrade-in-arms to do a favor for the families of the downed
crew. As long as a serviceman is listed as MIA, his family
continues to receive his pay and even benefits from periodic
promotions. Those explanations were persuasive. But while the
evidence remained inconclusive, Case 0158 would be an open
wound.

    Dich warned that it would be a long and difficult journey.
A U.S. investigator who had made the trek agreed. But a new
witness -- Luong Van Phe, who was chief of police in Truong Tien
village at the time of the crash -- had surfaced. He claimed
that he knew precisely where the graves were and had even found
some personal effects.

    Early on Oct. 6, photographer Davis and I, accompanied by
a translator from the Foreign Ministry press center, set off
from Hanoi on a seven-hour, 150-mile drive through the scenic
karst valleys of Son La province to Phu Yen district. Before the
last two-hour leg of the journey, the driver warned that we
would not be able to stop until we reached the hamlet of Phu Yen
because even a brief halt in daylight might leave us prey to the
bandits who operate in the area.

    Phu Yen town is little more than a crossroads with a few
shops and an open market. The local People's Committee compound,
a series of one-story concrete buildings, would be our base of
operations. Four witnesses who had either seen the crash or its
aftermath made the trek from outlying villages to be
interviewed. Two would serve as guides up nearby Suoi Pai
Mountain to the crash site itself. Over cups of bitter green
tea, I interrogated the witnesses as carefully as possible.

    Each interview took more than an hour of slow,
sentence-by-sentence translation. The witnesses went into vivid
detail about what they had seen when they arrived on the scene:
the plane's wreckage and the mangled bodies of the two airmen.
Agreement on these details could have been orchestrated by the
Vietnamese government, but small differences between the
witnesses' stories seemed more likely to stem from the various
times at which they arrived on the scene. Their accounts meshed
in a way that would have been hard to coordinate.

    The villagers remembered that soldiers from a North
Vietnamese army engineering battalion had arrived at the site
the day after the crash. The soldiers photographed the dead
Americans and retrieved some of their personal effects. But the
battalion left in 1966 and was demobilized after 1975. Neither
its records nor any members with knowledge of this case have
been found. Another dead end.

    Just after dawn on Oct. 7, we set off on the bone-shaking
15-mile drive to the base of the mountain. From there we headed
out on foot across a small dam and then walked along an
irrigation canal past rice paddies. Our leisurely stroll ended
abruptly when the path veered off through 12-ft.-high, aptly
named saw grass. But the discomfort of being hacked at by
razor-sharp weeds became fond memories when the trail suddenly
zoomed up the mountain at a 70 degrees incline. For almost a
mile straight up, there was less a path than a series of tenuous
toeholds dug into sticky red clay. Several other equally steep
but shorter climbs that followed made the six-mile journey a
five-hour ordeal.

    Still, we were lucky. The weather was overcast and dry --
perfect climbing conditions. When the official investigators
made the journey in 1990, it had been cold and rainy, turning
the ascent into a treacherous hands-and-knees affair.

    Midway up the trail we met Trieu Van Hin, the party chief
of Suoi Pai hamlet, close to the crash site. He had led a squad
of villagers to hack some of the foliage away from the trail,
clearing our path. Almost exactly 26 years earlier, Hin had been
one of the first people to arrive at the scene of the crash,
less than half a mile from the present location of Suoi Pai
hamlet.

    One of our two guides, Mui Van Pin, was the leader of a
nearby guerrilla detachment in 1965. During questioning at Phu
Yen the day before, he had clearly remembered burying the two
airmen three days after the crash -- a delay caused by a dispute
between two neighboring villages over which should get the
credit for two dead enemies. But the newly discovered witness,
Phe, distinctly recalled burying both men the day after the
crash, in separate graves, even though the regular soldiers were
ready to put them in a common grave. "I am a member of the Thai
minority," he explained, "and for us it is not proper to bury
two people in the same grave." He even recalled a large rock
near one of the graves: "I sat on it to rest because it was very
hard to dig."

    Phe and Pin continued to argue at the crash site,
squatting on what appeared to be the cowling of one of the F-4's
engines. Hin, the hamlet party chief, tended to agree with Phe
but said he had left before the burial to attend a meeting in
Phu Yen. When he returned to the crash site several days later,
the men had been buried. Pin said the graves lay deep in the
jungle up the mountainside -- though he could not remember
exactly where. According to Phe, however, the site was only 15
ft. away. He quickly located one of the spots, and our
expectations soared -- only to plummet when it became obvious
that someone had already dug up the grave.

    Trading in the alleged skeletons of American servicemen
has become a big business in Vietnam over the past decade, in
part because many Vietnamese refugees believe their chances of
being permitted to resettle in the U.S. would improve if they
brought with them a set of American bones. In the past year
Vietnamese authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have raided the homes
of seven families and recovered 1,178 boxes and bags that
contained more than 3,100 sets of human remains. But a joint
investigation determined that all but 22 of the grisly artifacts
were those of Vietnamese.

    The U.S. refuses to pay for remains out of fear that to do
so would encourage the trade in bones even more. Says Garnett
Bell: "Some remains could be in the hands of private citizens,
but the figure is unknown." Last year a Vietnamese team was
sent the length of the country to ask local officials and
individuals to turn over any evidence on MIAs. The search
yielded a scant 46 boxes, only three of which contained
materials relating to MIA cases. A joint U.S.-Vietnamese
forensic team is examining the materials.

    U.S. officials have long felt that while it is virtually
impossible that any live Americans are still being held in
Vietnam, there is reason to believe that the Vietnamese
government has been warehousing the remains of dead Americans,
perhaps to be used as a bargaining chip at some future date.
Forensic examination of some recently returned bodies indicates
that the bones that have been returned were stored aboveground.
The charge that they have been holding back the bodies of MIAs
incenses the Vietnamese. Says Dich: "We have not been detaining
any live Americans and we do not have a storehouse full of
remains. That is why we are willing to let Americans look all
over Vietnam."

    But the evidence remains strong that bones are being
warehoused in Vietnam. Moreover, the central government's
efforts to collect remains held by its citizens have been
halfhearted at best. A week after our trip to Suoi Pai, we
traveled to Ho Chi Minh City and put out the word that we were
interested in MIA bones. Leads flooded in. A Vietnamese military
officer passed along photocopies of the personal effects of
three servicemen that supposedly came from graves dug up by
impoverished soldiers in Kontum province.

    The Vietnamese military expects troops in outlying regions
to support themselves, and these men had heard that Americans
paid a reward for the remains of their soldiers. The people in
the village near their post told them of some American graves,
and they dug. Now the soldiers wanted to sell the bones they
had found, but could locate no buyers. They were too afraid to
turn over the remains to their government. If they do in fact
have the remains of American MIAs, those remains may well
disappear.

    Early in 1991 Phe and three of his sons had done some
digging at the Scharf crash site. They trekked to Suoi Pai from
their village on the other side of the mountain and made a few
small excavations on either side of the plot that someone else
had already uncovered. Sifting through the dirt from the
earlier dig, Phe says, he found a zipper "still working" and
some eyelets from a boot. A tantalizing lead, but, as is so
often the case in these investigations, another dead end. On the
way back down the mountain, says Phe, his sons threw the
evidence away because "they didn't want some dead man's things."
Using a pick, we too sifted through the dirt that had come from
the alleged grave, but found nothing.

    Exhausted and disappointed, we returned to the hamlet. For
dinner we ate crackers and sardines. Most of the villagers dined
on sticky rice and manioc. The distended bellies of half a
dozen naked toddlers bore testimony to the fact that some had
no evening meal at all.

    For the Vietnamese investigators, the contrast between the
money and effort being spent to resolve the cases of American
MIAs and the grinding poverty in most of the search zones is
emotionally wrenching. Moreover, many Vietnamese families share
the plight of the families of American MIAs. In an exclusive
interview, Vietnam's new Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, described
his own suffering: "There are tens of thousands of Vietnamese
families whose relatives are also missing and unaccounted for.
I myself am a victim. My immediate family has three members --
my wife and two sons -- missing in action. American helicopters
killed 300 people in one action along the Saigon River, and my
family disappeared."

    Later in Hanoi, Bell commiserated with us about the
frustrating journey: "That's pretty typical. We get right down
to the wire and then can't find the remains." He said the
American MIA office in Hanoi would like to excavate the Scharf
crash site, because even if most of the bones have been removed,
it is possible that a few teeth or other fragments might remain.
But it would be next to impossible to lug the necessary gear up
the mountain, and Vietnam's Soviet-built helicopters are too
large and unreliable to risk setting down in that treacherous
terrain. Another joint team visited the area last month to see
if they could pinpoint the gravesites. The U.S. side took its
findings back to Hawaii and Texas for further investigation.

    That mission might come up with enough evidence to
persuade U.S. officials to close the case of Colonel Charles
Scharf. But it is unlikely that his family will accept a few
teeth or bone shards as conclusive proof of his demise. For
them, Scharf will always be missing in action, no matter how
much the evidence indicates that he died in combat nearly three
decades ago.