American Notes Mias

For most Americans, the Vietnam War is a painful memory; for families of the 2,273 servicemen listed as missing in action, it is a wound that will not heal. Hope flickered for many of those families last month, when five grainy photos purporting to show surviving U.S. soldiers in Southeast Asia surfaced. Last week the Pentagon disputed the authenticity of four of them, which turned out to have been clipped from Soviet magazine articles published over the past two years. A bearded man in a white shirt shown in one photo was actually a Soviet baker working at a South Pole scientific station. The men shown in the other photos were also Soviet citizens.

The discovery casts more doubt on the fifth and most publicized photo, which depicts three men holding a sign with cryptic writing and dated May 25, 1990. Although the Pentagon has not formally discounted it, officials have linked it to an "admitted fabricator" belonging to a "ring of well-known Cambodian opportunists." U.S. investigators currently in Vietnam on a one-month mission to resolve MIA cases have interviewed dozens of officials and private citizens and examined numerous crash sites, and say they have found no evidence of surviving American soldiers.