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VIETNAMESE TROPHY SKULLS HAVE YET TO BE
RETURNED -- The skulls had been confiscated
from
U.S. soldiers who were trying to bring them
home
as macabre souvenirs from Vietnam in the 1970s.
Story here...
http://www.centredaily.com/
news/nation/story/144048.html
Story below:
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Skulls taken as souvenirs have yet to be
returned
By Michelle Boorstein - The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Certain things are immediately apparent about the six
human skulls lined up on the metal cabinet in a back room of Walter Reed
Army Medical Center.
First, there is the graffiti scrawled across them, abrasive as wartime
expressions can be: "Today's pigs are tomorrow's bacon" on one, "Stay
high stay alive" on another, trippy thick stripes of bright blue, red
and yellow on a third. Two eye sockets are filled with red candle wax,
as though the skull had been used to light up a soldier's lonely night
decades ago.
Second is their story. Unlike the thousands of other human specimens
kept at the Defense Department's National Museum of Health and Medicine,
staff anthropologists said, the skulls had been confiscated from U.S.
soldiers who were trying to bring them home as macabre souvenirs from
Vietnam in the 1970s.
"These are an anomaly at the museum," said Paul Stone, of the Armed
Forces Institute of Pathology, of which the museum is a part. Both are
on the Walter Reed campus.
But the skulls are interesting for another reason, too, veterans' groups
say: The U.S. government has never made any effort to return them to
Vietnam.
In the 35 years since the institute took custody of the specimens, a
massive infrastructure has been created to track down any evidence of
missing Americans in Vietnam. Some 600 government employees staff that
effort, and a parallel -- though far smaller -- campaign began in the
1990s to find some of the 300,000 Vietnamese missing from the war.
Veterans' advocates, including the National League of Families and
Vietnam Veterans of America, have put out the call to U.S. vets to
return photos, diaries, maps or anything that could help locate
Vietnamese war dead. According to the VVA, some 900 Vietnamese have been
identified this way, primarily by leading investigators to mass grave
sites.
"It's a no-brainer. Can you imagine some guy in Japan saying, 'I have
six American skulls here in the closet; do you want them back?' And the
government saying no?" said Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Fund.
According to museum officials, five of the skulls were confiscated in
Vietnam when soldiers attempted to send them home. The sixth was found
during a search of a footlocker at Fort Campbell, Ky.
The skulls and their mysteries typify how complex the issue of
repatriation can be.
Although museum scientists presume from the age of the dead -- five
young men and possibly one young woman -- and the context that they were
Vietnamese combatants, they can't say for certain. The skulls could have
come from a cemetery and could belong to fighters from Laos or Cambodia
who were drawn into the conflict. The institute has never tried to track
down the soldiers who took the skulls.
A potential obstacle, say Americans who work on repatriation issues, is
the Vietnamese government.
Although the Vietnamese public has lobbied in the past decade for help
in finding its war dead, officials have sometimes turned away remains
that can't be confirmed as Vietnamese who fought on the side of the
triumphant North, U.S. advocates say.
"If the Vietnamese aren't guaranteed who they are, they don't want
them," said Bill Duker, a veteran who works as a VVA representative on
repatriation.
The Vietnamese have made no request for the return of the skulls. Cuong
Nguyen, a spokesman for the Vietnamese Embassy, said officials had heard
about the skulls for the first time in the past few days in the
Vietnamese media and are "looking into it." "We appreciate any
cooperation from the (U.S.) government, but so far we don't have any
official information," Nguyen said.
Whether the skulls belonged to fighters or whether the Vietnamese
government has the DNA records and resources to identify the people
shouldn't matter, some U.S. veterans groups say.
"These are Vietnamese citizens who were brought out by Americans. Those
remains belong back in Vietnam, no matter whose they are," said Ann
Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families,
which is made up of families of those missing in Southeast Asia.
The group has worked with the Vietnamese government to return
unidentified remains, she said, including remains of fighters who might
have been on the U.S. side during the war. "Heroes' cemeteries" with
anonymous remains have been created, she said. "It was politically
sensitive and took a long time, but it has helped a lot of families."
Stone said he did not know why the U.S. soldiers who took the skulls
were not questioned at the time about where the items came from. Once
they were in the institute's custody, however, "it's our responsibility
to preserve them for scholarly use," he said. The museum has never
exhibited the skulls publicly.
The institute has the U.S. soldiers' names, but Stone would not release
them. Launching a probe to find the soldiers, he said, isn't the role of
the institute or the museum.
"That's counter to what a museum does," said Franklin Damann, an
anatomical curator at the museum who has worked with Asian governments
on the repatriation of Americans' remains.
Government officials and private groups who work on the issue say it
would be time-consuming and costly to research the skulls' history, and
absent an official Vietnamese request and hard evidence of whom the
skulls belonged to, it's not something the government would do
automatically.
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Larry Scott --
