Tonight, come back with us to Vietnam on a military mission the likes of which American
troops have never been on before.
Vietnam veterans carrying detailed maps and memories from 25 years ago, searching for
soldiers still missing in action.
Not American soldiers, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers.
If we help our former enemies find their missing, maybe they'll help us find ours.
Because somewhere there are veterans on the other side that know what happened to our
people, just like there are veterans on our side that can account for a lot of Vietnamese.
It looked like, you know, these airplanes that you made when you were kids and threw
them, and it looked like one of those darts.
Kids airplane Ben Rich designed is called the F-117 Stealth Fighter.
It may be funny looking, but it has an amazing attribute.
It's invisible to enemy radar.
When someone's sitting at radar looking for what's coming in, and you've got an F-117
coming in, what do they see on the radar?
Nothing.
They would see nothing.
I'm wondering if you think it's fair that you, when you retire from Congress, are going
to be getting a $55,000 pension right off the bat.
Well, Leslie, you're once again trying to destroy and run down Congress, and you shouldn't
do that.
You're a grown woman.
You ought to have something better to do.
Well, what about you personally?
No, me personally.
I have my own resources, and I'm not worried.
I didn't run for this office for the retirement.
Those members don't.
All you want to do is hurt Congress, hurt the people of this country.
Why don't you get off our backs?
I'm Mike Wallace.
I'm Morley Safer.
I'm Ed Bradley.
I'm Steve Proft.
I'm Leslie Stahl.
Those stories and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes.
Well, Marcus Belfry finally signed with Gramercy Press to publish his next novel, The Last
Man on the Rock.
So we had a little celebration.
Peter told us that it meant Gramercy Press would be able to remain independent and that
I'd still have my job.
Meanwhile, up in the Adirondacks, Marcus Belfry is furiously putting the finishing touches
on his new novel, Apocalypse of the Heart, with the help of Ellen DeRossette.
Anyway, there's going to be this big party to launch the book, and you'll never guess
who's going to be there.
I'm going to Hawaii.
Why did I buy a bikini?
I wonder what I'd look like sitting.
When you're trying for a certain look, you're going to be sitting in a bikini.
I'm going to Hawaii.
Why did I buy a bikini?
I wonder what I'd look like sitting.
And what's the best way to get a certain look?
Putting on suntan lotion?
Walking.
Help get that look by including Kellogg's Special K. Great toasted taste, 110 calories
and fat free.
Bikini.
Yeah, I'd say that rhymes with the low такие.
Kellogg's Special K, great taste never looked so good.
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Rich, velvety, long-lasting.
Had enough? Have a nips.
Mighty Dog presents Sam.
Now that she's over seven, there's new Mighty Dog Senior.
Specially formulated with 25% less fat and extra nutrients to meet her needs.
What makes your dog a Mighty Dog?
It's been 20 years since the last American soldiers came home from Vietnam.
And those who did are still not convinced that either side is doing enough to account for those who didn't.
Finding out once and for all what happened to our missing in action, our MIAs,
has been the principal stumbling block in normalizing relations between our two countries.
Last year when the largest Vietnam veterans group, the Vietnam Veterans of America, decided to bypass official government channels
and deal directly with the very soldiers that they fought 20 years ago on the battlefield, we went with them.
And as we said when we first broadcast this story last fall, the appeal was simple enough.
Maybe the Vietnamese veterans could help locate our 1,600 missing in action
if American veterans could help the Vietnamese locate more than 300,000 of their soldiers still missing.
So the Vietnam Veterans of America asked their former members to go into their garages and attics
and search out war trophies that they'd transported across an ocean 20 years ago
and stored away in foot lockers and duffel bags unopened like Pandora's box.
Back here I have a helmet taken from a North Vietnamese soldier.
It's got his name on it. It has something else in it.
Pat Burke was the first lieutenant with the U.S. Army in Quang Ngai Province in 1970.
Today he's a bank officer in Lafayette, Louisiana.
I thought about it for a long time, but I think that if there's some mother in North Vietnam
who doesn't know what happened to her son, that this would be important for her to get.
The items came into the Vietnam Veterans of America headquarters in Washington by the box load.
Grave markers for enemy soldiers that the North Vietnamese had made from a downed U.S. helicopter.
A photo album with snapshots taken from the body of this highly decorated North Vietnamese officer.
In all, according to Jim Brazee, the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America,
enough information to help identify 1,800 former enemy soldiers.
Because somewhere there are veterans on the other side that know what happened to our people,
just like there are veterans on our side that can account for a lot of Vietnamese.
There were detailed maps of enemy grave sites drawn from memory 25 years later.
But Bill Crandall says by far the most common items sent in were pictures, gruesome souvenirs,
but invaluable documentary evidence for identifying the dead.
I think it does something to you to keep pictures of 30 dead men for 20 years.
You're talking about letting go of something that represents a day in which you lived or died,
in which friends died, in which you were involved in killing.
So early this summer, a delegation of 14 American veterans packed up the items and flew off to Vietnam.
For many of them, it was their first trip back since being medevaced out on a stretcher,
once young shining faces now wrinkled with middle age.
We call this a veteran-to-veteran exchange.
When they handed over the helmet, grave markers, and those gruesome pictures,
they had no idea what kind of reception or reaction they'd receive from the Vietnamese.
I think this is very significant, very significant.
They were met by Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Mai,
whose own brother is one of the 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers still unaccounted for.
Welcome you very much.
The American people have been told over the years that the Vietnamese don't feel the same way
about their war dead and their missing in action that the Americans do,
that it wasn't important to your government, or that it wasn't important to your people.
I think it is a pity that you see there's a lack of understanding.
Of course, the culture of the U.S. and Vietnam is different, but we all are human beings.
The importance the Vietnamese attached to their own missing stunned the American veterans.
Vernon Valenzuela from Bakersfield, California, and Tom Manning, a deputy sheriff from Fort Lauderdale,
didn't realize it until they visited a Vietnamese family.
Part of the dehumanization that went on in our training was that they didn't grieve like we do,
they didn't care about their loved ones like we do.
And we walked in there and nothing could be further from the truth.
What they walked into was the home of a Vietnamese woman who lost her husband in 1973 near Da Nang.
Mrs. Le Binh was five months pregnant when her husband left to fight the Americans in the South.
She received three letters in ten years.
He died without ever having seen his young son.
The family was never told where or even if he'd been buried.
The last thing she expected was a visit from former GIs.
I was so emotional I couldn't hardly talk when she was first talking her story.
She sat there weeping, talking about losing her husband and how good a man he was and stuff, and that's real sad.
There can be no greater sadness for the father not to have known his son and not to be able to come back to his wife.
In the corner of the living room there's a shrine with his picture.
It exists in hundreds of thousands of homes.
It's a society that worships its ancestors and believes if a relative doesn't receive a proper burial, the spirit is never at peace.
And yet there was no anger towards the Americans, no animosity, only sadness.
When I see your pain in remembering your husband, it makes me want to commit stronger to help find out answers for other families.
That's the railroad track.
And that's just what Valenzuela did.
Two days later we were on Highway 1 searching for a grave in which five Viet Cong soldiers were buried.
Valenzuela had been given a detailed map and photographs of the dead by a former Marine named Bob Fallow, who said they were buried near a command post called Hotel 8.
Here's the grave that the bunker would be right over on this side.
I don't see anything that looks that mountain that close here going up.
Unless it's that one right over there.
But 26 years later everything had changed but the mountains.
And that could be.
But look, there's the trees.
I think we might be right there, real close.
No sooner had we gotten out of the van than we were approached by a Vietnamese farmer.
You was with Marine Corps?
Yeah, 1967.
You was here?
Yeah.
Did you know Hotel 8?
He not only worked for the Americans, he remembered Bob Fallow, the Marine who had turned over the map and pictures.
They buried right here, five VCNVA, they buried five.
Where?
Right here.
Show me.
Come show me.
You know?
He remembered exactly where the five dead Viet Cong were buried.
Valenzuela showed in the pictures.
This is the grave.
This is the grave.
This is the grave.
Is that him?
Is that you?
Yeah, that's you.
The old man had also worked for the Marines and had helped bury the bodies 26 years earlier.
Okay, I'll tell Bob.
He'll be very happy to know that you're still here.
Ask him what happened after the war.
Sergeant James, you turn this around.
He was sent to the re-education camp for four years.
For four years.
About five months.
I took on the ankle of a deer.
No, he didn't have to.
This area right here.
They explained that after the war the bodies had been dug up and reburied at a different location,
but the soldiers had never been identified.
Now with the pictures of the bodies, it may be possible for the Vietnamese government to do that.
For the Americans, the trip back also offered something else,
the promise of finding some meaning from events a long time ago
and a chance to close a chapter of personal history.
Let's walk down there.
In Da Nang, John Catterson, a lawyer from New York,
founded on what is now one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in the world, China Beach.
If you told me in 1966 that there'd be people coming back here to surf and build hotels,
I'd have told you crazy.
He was last here 28 years ago with the U.S. Marines.
It's like I'm casting out a demon to walk on this sand.
Why?
This was like hell back then.
It was just everyday was survival.
Everyday was just staying alive and they'd get me out of this place.
The Vietnamese used to mine the beach every night with unexploded mortar rounds they'd found the day before.
It was here at age 19 that John Catterson, for the first time, saw a friend die.
The second platoon moved through me and this kid, Brown, moved right past me
and moved right into my position at point.
And he stepped through the gate right at this bunker up here.
It had wire around it.
And I remember standing back about 100 yards and I had a Mexican sergeant named Aguilar
who said to this kid, Brown, he said, maybe you want a probe.
And the kid bent down to step through the gate and hit a mine and blew himself up.
And it was the first American casualty I saw.
I think so.
Talk about it like it was yesterday.
It was yesterday.
Almost 30 years ago.
Yeah, it was 28 years ago.
It's like it was yesterday.
My God.
Is this it?
Yeah.
And this kid just stepped through the gate.
I don't think I could go in there.
Not on a bad day, not on a good day.
It's a good day, yeah.
I can go with you.
It's just one step at a time.
It's just a beach.
There's nobody trying to hurt you here.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
I think the war may have ended for most of the country in 1973,
but it didn't end for an awful lot of people, including a lot of people on this delegation.
Most of us were here a year or less.
And it was the defining experience of our lives.
We carry this around with us every single day and we think about it.
We've never quite dealt with it.
I've got to go outside.
I've got to go to the mayor.
This is just too real.
You never thought you'd see this again, did you?
Not today, man.
But there were a lot of people that died up here.
Didn't have to be.
Before John Katerson and the rest of the delegation returned home,
they wanted to tackle one final mission.
Using maps and notes from two former American soldiers who didn't make the trip,
and with the help of the U.S. MIA Task Force in Hanoi,
they began a search for the largest North Vietnamese gravesite they knew about,
just outside Tainan,
a long-since forgotten outpost called Landing Zone Grant.
Twenty-five years ago, it was a fire support base just 20 miles from the Cambodian border
in the shadow of the Black Virgin Mountain.
In March of 1969, the North Vietnamese attacked with two battalions
before the American 1st Cavalry Division even finished building the base camp.
Seventeen Americans died here, including the battalion commander,
and more than 200 North Vietnamese.
For a few days, it was big news.
Then, Elsie Grant was gone and forgotten,
except in the minds of the men who were there.
So armed with maps and directions supplied by former GIs,
the American veterans took their former enemies on a joint patrol
through a cassava field in pursuit of their dead.
This Rakhsan Doi is a river with a busted up bridge right here.
If we can find this river and find this bridge, then we've got a...
One of the American veterans who volunteered the information wrote,
I'm 45 years old and present in body, but my mind never left War Zone C.
The day after the attack on Elsie Grant, bulldozers were flown in on sky cranes,
and the medics used ponchos to clean up the enemy dead.
Sandbag! Sandbag's back here.
Look at this depression. We got us a base camp here.
The letter continues.
In a crater from an earlier B-52 striker,
maybe just a massive pit behind the Elsie off to the northwest,
a few hundred yards from the river and a French bridge piling
is where the humanity was bulldozed under.
I believe there were a hundred or so, or so it seemed.
Look, from the edge of that little roadway you see right there,
right down to here. That's 40.
He closed. If this information helps the initiative
and helps even one of our brothers come home, so be it.
The letter was unsigned.
If you look, this is a pretty low spot, if you look all around you,
and running in the right direction from east to west.
There's a little high ground behind me, there's a little high ground on each side of me.
Finally, exactly where the Americans said it would be,
they found a slight depression, consistent with the mass grave.
Fifteen feet wide and about eight to ten deep.
It would be right in here. I think so.
With their Vietnamese counterparts beside them,
the delegation paid tribute to the dead of both sides
in a traditional Vietnamese funeral ceremony with incense and firecrackers.
I'm thinking about that man back in Hanoi whose home I visited,
and he pointed to this picture of his son on the wall,
and if his son is out here somewhere, he should know that.
I mean, that's what this initiative is about.
And that his son was part of the division that was operating out here,
then we've helped solve that man's loss,
and he will have some peace because now we've been able to find his son's grave.
And there were 99 other families in this country for whom we've done that today,
and that's an extraordinary experience.
A postscript. Four months after the veterans helped locate the mass grave outside Tay Ninh,
the Vietnamese excavated the site and recovered 95 bodies.
But to date, the veterans' initiative has produced no new information
on Americans missing in action.
So you can't keep up with your old ma, huh?
Not with this headache.
Where's your atonement?
It's Advil now.
You switched?
I like the way Advil works.
I'm tough paying too. Advil worked better than Tylenol.
Welcome to the 90s, Mom.
Thanks.
Advanced medicine for pain.
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You're smarter.
And you're smarter.
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Lean on me.
You're smart and capable.
People lean on you to get things done.
But when you're selling your home, who do you lean on?
Call a Century 21 professional.
You just might have a problem.
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But we all need somebody to lean on.
We all need somebody to lean on.