Sùng Chính wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luat Khoa Magazine on August 11, 2025.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the repatriation of the remains of missing veterans has remained a top priority for the United States. Each year, the U.S. Congress allocates hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars for search efforts. However, the search for American service members missing in action (MIA) in Việt Nam has always been fraught with complex “unknowns.”
The core issue, a perceived lack of transparency from the Vietnamese side, is a logistical obstacle that also fuels widespread suspicion among the American public and affects Việt Nam’s image on the international stage.
A recent report from the U.S. National League of POW/MIA Families has accused Việt Nam of turning the recovery missions for missing American service members into “a profit-making enterprise” rather than an act of humanitarian cooperation.
The report’s author, historian Jay Veith, alleges that Hà Nội has demanded the U.S. pay up to $10,000 for each document and $15,000 for each recovered artifact. He points to a nine-year period, from 2016 to 2024, during which the United States paid Việt Nam more than $86 million in return for only 25 MIA recoveries—a price he deems “extremely high.”
In an interview with BBC Vietnamese, Veith stated, “They charge for research interviews, they charge for research. So what the report shows is that the Vietnamese MIA agency is very willing to do those things—because that’s how they make money,”
Veith also noted that potential means of identifying MIA service members—such as dog tags, helmets, and other personal belongings—are publicly displayed in museums across Việt Nam. Nevertheless, the report claims the Vietnamese government has not provided complete information on these cases to the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).
The report also bluntly criticized the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) for repeatedly overstating Việt Nam’s cooperation and achievements in the search efforts, which it claims led to American complacency. This has fueled consistent pressure from veterans’ family groups, who urge the U.S. government to demand greater transparency from Hà Nội, suspecting that complete records on missing service members have not been provided. Key information—such as the locations of missing soldiers, records of mass graves, and prison camp data—remains undisclosed by Vietnamese agencies like the Ministry of National Defense.
This lack of transparency extends to the financial side of the cooperation. While the Vietnamese government has never publicly detailed its revenues and expenditures from the MIA program, the costs to the U.S. are substantial. According to a White House report, MIA search operations in Việt Nam account for nearly 70% of the DPAA’s current budget of almost $190 million.
This high price tag is not a new phenomenon. A 1993 article in The New Yorker by journalist Neil Sheehan detailed the early years of the search when the U.S. was already spending around $100 million annually in Việt Nam. This covered everything from office rent and local labor to specialist fees, with the average cost to exhume a single soldier’s remains to reach $1.7 million. Sheehan’s report painted a picture of a transactional relationship, where the Vietnamese side calculated the figures and set a price for each task it agreed to assist with, rather than treating it as a purely humanitarian effort.
How Does Việt Nam Respond?
On August 2, Việt Nam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the U.S. allegations regarding financial transparency in the MIA search. The ministry’s spokesperson, Phạm Thị Thu Hằng, asserted that the humanitarian cooperation between the two countries has been carried out “very effectively” for more than 50 years.
“This is a highly significant outcome, contributing to the strengthening of Việt Nam–U.S. relations in addressing the consequences of war,” she stated.
Beyond the diplomatic statements, the search for remains in Việt Nam is complicated by a harsh reality: it is the most heavily bomb- and mine-contaminated country in the world. During the war, the U.S. dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs across the country, and an estimated 800,000 tons of unexploded ordnance remain scattered over 6.1 million hectares—roughly 18% of Việt Nam’s total land area. In addition, severe contamination by Agent Orange (dioxin) in several areas makes it impossible to access certain search sites.
Addressing these war legacies is another facet of U.S.-Việt Nam cooperation. From 2007 to 2021, the U.S. Congress allocated approximately $390 million for this purpose, which included the successful dioxin cleanup at Đà Nẵng Airport in 2018. The United States is also obligated to fulfill an additional $300 million commitment for the ongoing remediation project at Biên Hòa Airport, with funds also supporting the development of affected Vietnamese communities.
50 Years and an Unanswered Question
The origins of the modern MIA issue date back to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which marked the formal withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the conflict. At the time, North Việt Nam—the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam—pledged to cooperate with the U.S. in the campaign to repatriate its missing service members.
In February of that year, Hà Nội unilaterally returned 591 American prisoners of war (POWs) in “Operation Homecoming.” However, U.S. diplomatic sources reported shortly after that more than 2,000 service members were still missing in Indochina, including over 1,200 in Việt Nam itself. This discrepancy created a massive information gap that has fueled decades of speculation and suspicion among the American public regarding the transparency of the Vietnamese side.
This information gap was exemplified by a classified document, believed to have been written by General Trần Văn Quang, a deputy chief of staff of the North Vietnamese army. The document reportedly referenced 1,205 U.S. prisoners of war held in 11 different prisons. If accurate, this would mean the number of POWs publicly announced by Hà Nội was less than half of the actual total.
“If General Quang’s report is correct, more than 600 prisoners of war may have died or been killed in Viet Nam between the fall of 1972 and April 1, 1975,” The Times commented.
In response, the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam flatly rejected the claims, dismissing the document as a “fabrication” by U.S. officials, but provided no further evidence to support its position. This lack of transparency had severe and long-lasting consequences, becoming a primary reason the United States maintained its economic embargo on Việt Nam for many years.
The search and repatriation of POW/MIA personnel remained a non-negotiable U.S. priority. As John Kerry, then head of the MIA office, bluntly stated the American position: “No MIA cooperation, no normalization of relations. If the Vietnamese side cannot demonstrate goodwill in this matter, I will not push the U.S. Congress to lift the embargo on Viet Nam.”
It took years for the diplomatic deadlock to break. Only in 1985 did Việt Nam begin allowing small groups of American specialists to participate in joint MIA search operations. This slow process of rebuilding trust continued with the establishment of a U.S. MIA office in Hà Nội in 1991 and the full normalization of bilateral relations in 1995.
To date, these joint efforts have led to the recovery and repatriation of approximately 752 sets of remains of missing U.S. service members. Yet, more than 50 years after the Paris Peace Accords, over 1,000 Americans remain unaccounted for across Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. The information gap that opened in 1973 has narrowed, but it has not closed, and the questions of transparency and the true cost of this cooperation continue to linger.