Officer sees future U.S. military role in Vietnam

Officer sees future U.S. military role in Vietnam

HANOI (Reuter): The top U.S. military officer in Asia said
yesterday he sees U.S. military cooperation with former enemy
Vietnam once relations are normalized.

But continued cooperation in U.S. efforts to account for the
more than 2,000 U.S. pilots and soldiers still listed as missing
in action (MIA) from the Vietnam War was critical to advancing
political and economic relations, Admiral Richard C. Macke said.

The Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific Command had said
earlier during his two-day visit to Vietnam that Hanoi's
cooperation on the MIA issue had been "wonderful", "tremendous"
and "impressive".

But it had to continue, he told a news conference at the end
of his visit.

"Cooperation in the MIA issue is absolutely critical to
further cooperation in the political and economic areas between
our two countries," he said.

"We are very pleased with the cooperation that we see now. We
need to continue and enhance that cooperation and let the
political masters make the decisions down the road from there."

The U.S. and Vietnamese governments are preparing to establish
their first diplomatic missions since the war ended nearly two
decades ago -- liaison offices, not embassies -- in Hanoi and
Washington.

A decision on when to establish diplomatic relations is up to
President Bill Clinton.

Macke said he did not rule out a future U.S. military presence
in Vietnam and indicated he was interested in the old U.S. naval
base at Cam Ranh Bay in southern Vietnam, now a Vietnamese base
where Russia has a small presence.

Cooperation

"I think that once the rest of the political and economic
cooperation starts to advance, that the military to military
cooperation could also advance," he said.

The United States and Hanoi were enemies in the war, which
ended in April 1972 when Vietnamese communist tanks rolled into
Saigon, defeating the former South Vietnam government which U.S.
forces had supported for more than 10 years.

U.S. troops withdrew and Vietnam released U.S. prisoners of
war after peace accords signed in Paris in 1973.

Macke said neither military cooperation nor Cam Ranh Bay were
raised in his talks with Vietnamese ministers on Tuesday. But he
added: "I am a naval officer and naval officers are always
looking for good ports."

He said unilateral Vietnamese efforts on the 2,214 U.S.
soldiers and pilots still listed as MIA were important.

U.S. officials said earlier that researchers wanted Vietnam to
turn over more wartime documents to help them pinpoint the fate
of missing individuals.

Macke said he was not concerned that cooperation would
decrease if diplomatic relations were established, and said it
had improved after Clinton scrapped the U.S. economic embargo
against Hanoi last February.

Military units searching for MIAs in Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos fall under Macke's command, and he flew by helicopter to see
two sites in northern Vietnam where U.S. warplanes were shot down
during bombing raids in 1972.

He saw wreckage, especially at a site in Quang Ninh province
where a Navy F-4 fighter was lost, and was told bones had been
recovered.

Macke spoke with U.S.-Vietnamese search teams working on the
sites and thanked gangs of Vietnamese -- the men wearing khaki
helmets and the women in conical hats -- for their hard work.