Pentagon budget cuts slash Vietnam War MIA recovery missions

Budget cuts have sharply reduced the Defense Department's work to find and identify troops still missing from past wars, with Vietnam War families hit especially hard, NPR reported.

Raymond Echevarria Jr. of Roxboro, North Carolina, was 4 years old in 1966 when his father, a Fort Bragg Green Beret on a reconnaissance team in Laos, was reported missing. He still hopes remains can be recovered. He told NPR that veterans who were there are dying, soil chemistry worsens with time, and answers for many Southeast Asia families seem no closer.

More than 3,800 U.S. troops have been recovered overall from past conflicts, about 1,000 of them from the Vietnam War. Federal budget cuts this year would slash by more than two-thirds the number of recovery missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, as reported by NPR.

More than 1,500 Americans remain missing from the Vietnam War. Some cases are considered unrecoverable. Others, including Echevarria's father, involve known landing zones and wartime witness accounts that make excavation more promising.

DPAA said the cuts are part of broader Pentagon reductions and were worsened by last year's government shutdown and by fuel shortages in Southeast Asia tied to the war in Iran. This summer the agency was placed under Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He told Vietnam MIA family members he would lobby Congress and Pentagon leaders to restore funding, linking budget levels directly to field teams, research, and remains processing.

Ann Mills-Griffiths, longtime leader of the National League of POW/MIA Families whose brother vanished when his plane went down off the Vietnamese coast in 1966, said the current pace is not satisfactory given decades of work to secure resources for the mission.

Even before the latest cuts, Vietnam War identifications were a small share of DPAA's total. Most recoveries have come from World War II and the Korean War, where missing numbers are higher and some remains rest in known cemeteries. Echevarria argued Vietnam cases should get priority because relatives who knew the missing are still alive.

NPR reported that over the past 10 months, of nearly 200 service members DPAA identified, only one was from the Vietnam War.