Email this page to friends About the Author Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist. One of America's preeminent war correspondents, with more than four decades as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded an assignment as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. His overseas postings include tours in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the former Soviet Union. During the course of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations. In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend." Special Feature: "Discharged and Dishonored" This special report looks at the plight of our nation's veterans, and their battle to claim their benefits. Full Joe Galloway Bio Joe Galloway Archives Special Report: Read Joe Galloway's new column for Knight Ridder Newspapers on Echo Company. Sound Off! -- Have an opinion about this article? Visit the Joe Galloway discussion forum. Military Opinions Index Your Two Cents Submit your stories, news items, or a benefits update -- and help Military.com bring the best, most important stories to your fellow servicemembers, veterans, and family members. Contribute here

HANOI, Vietnam - It's been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War; 40 years since the first American combat troops, one battalion of Marines, landed at Danang in the northern part of South Vietnam.

It's as good a time as any to take a look at where we stand on the search for the 1,399 Americans who are still listed as missing in action in Vietnam, and no better place to do that than here at the offices of Detachment Two of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

The small detachment permanently stationed in the capital of Vietnam is commanded by Army Lt. Col. Lentfort Mitchell of the Special Forces, who worked in Latin America before he was assigned here eight months ago.

Detachment Two maintains contact with the Vietnamese government and helps plan and conduct the searches that take place after the monsoon rains fade each year. The primary work is done between February and mid-December. Equipment for this summer's operations, which will focus on the central-eastern region of what formerly was South Vietnam, already has begun pouring in.

Col. Mitchell's detachment has a file on every one of those still missing. The files are divided into two groups: 667, including 468 individuals lost over the ocean, on whom there are no leads and little or no information; and 732 considered possibles. This includes 500 individuals for whom there are leads or information, however ephemeral.

To date, 52 sites involving 70 individuals have been inspected on the ground and identified for excavation by the joint American and Vietnamese teams. Because so many years have passed, the excavations are conducted with the precision and the slow, methodical effort of an archaeological dig.

Progress is often hampered by the daunting conditions in remote mountainous regions where helicopter landing zones and trails must be carved out of the jungle before any digging can begin.

The search itself is not without peril. There's a simple monument in the front courtyard of Detachment Two. On it are engraved the names of seven Americans from this detachment and nine of their Vietnamese counterparts who were killed in the crash of a Russian-made helicopter four years ago while on an MIA mission.

Once human remains are recovered - often only a few fragments of bone and a tooth or two -- there's still much work to be done by the scientists at JPAC's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to confirm them first as human, then as Western, not Asian, and then to pursue absolute identification through a match of mitochondrial DNA from a specific family.

Because there's a cap on the number of U.S. government employees based permanently in Vietnam, JPAC, which is headquartered in Honolulu, sends 95 military and civilian employees in to conduct investigations and carry out excavations during the four major field activities each year. They're joined by 20 Vietnamese officials and as many as 600 local Vietnamese workers.

Some will pursue leads that can be as soft as the memory of a Vietnamese woodcutter who recalls seeing the wreckage of a downed plane or helicopter on a remote mountain slope 15 years ago, or as hard as the information provided recently by a metal scavenger who was involved with gathering metal from 17 crash sites in the central part of former South Vietnam.

JPAC this year will conduct a second underwater survey of a potential crash site, Col. Mitchell said, because no one wants to give up on the 468 Americans lost at sea. Whether they involve plane crashes, as most do, or men lost overboard in accidents, there's little reliable information on where the plane went down or the sailor disappeared.

The search for America's missing has remained a priority for successive U.S. administrations since the war ended. Even in times of tight budgets, this effort has remained immune to cuts in funding although it's not inexpensive: The cost of finding, identifying and returning a single American who disappeared in Vietnam is more than $1 million.

But the extraordinary effort is worth it to the families who've waited and hoped for so long that word would finally come that their son, husband, father or brother has been found and is coming home at last.

It's worth it to those who wear the uniform of their country and believe in a simple creed that we are Americans and we will leave no one behind on the battlefield.

That implicit contract is best expressed in the words of a letter that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his friend Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War:

"I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if in trouble you would come for me, if alive."

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