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Antipathy toward the regime in Hanoi is highest in the ranks of South Vietnamese rangers and paratroopers, many of whom have settled in California. In a speech in San Jose early this month, former President Nguyen Van Thieu, now living in London, suggested that if political changes are not forthcoming in Hanoi, the refugees should be prepared to head home, shoulder weapons and seize control again.
The passion in the Vietnamese exile community is a puzzle to many Americans. That is no surprise to Phuong Dai Nguyen, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, whose family fled Saigon in 1975: "The Americans don't know much about the Vietnamese." Yet the same has been true of the Vietnamese government's inability to fathom the importance to the U.S. of the POW/MIA issue. Fully 62% of those polled by TIME/CNN -- and 84% of Vietnam veterans -- believe there are still MIAs alive in Vietnam.
"There is no logic to this," says Douglas Pike, a retired State Department analyst who assiduously read accounts of every reported MIA sighting but was never able to come up with verification by a second source. A resident of northern Vietnam, released after 13 years in re-education camps, is equally incredulous. "Americans? There are no Americans here. I never heard of any." The Vietnamese people long ago gave up looking for their own missing. Bodies decompose quickly in the subtropical climate. Although no U.S. official will say so publicly, the widespread conviction is that there are no more live Americans.
Still, the National League of Families issues regular status reports of sightings on a hundred or so of the 2,303 men listed as missing in action or unaccounted for in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Since a Japanese lieutenant hid on a Philippine island for 30 years after World War II before surfacing, anything is possible. But it is more likely that any Americans still in Vietnam remain there for conjugal reasons and have led retiring lives. Either that or the people sighted were really East Europeans or the now grown Amerasian offspring of former G.I.s.
Because issues surrounding the war are so emotionally charged even now, some people counsel continued caution in dealing with the government of Vietnam. "Any improvement has to be gradual," says Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who spent 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison after his Navy attack bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. "Below the surface, there is a very strong anti-Vietnamese feeling. When you get down to the V.F.W. halls, the American Legion halls, these people still have the feeling that the U.S. was damaged and humiliated in that conflict." Nonetheless, says McCain, who in the past has favored legislation for reopening ties to Vietnam, "it is in our interest, over time, to have an improvement in relations."