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.