About a quarter century after American combat troops pulled out of Vietnam, a new generation of U.S. servicemen is returning to the country. Their mission is to search for the remains of Americans still listed as missing in action.
The helicopters the U.S. teams are using are Soviet-made and the pilots are Vietnamese army veterans.
Vietnamese officials have gone out of their way to help in the search for missing Americans, despite Vietnam's own estimated 300,000 who remain missing from the conflict.
The U.S. military mounts four or five search expeditions to Vietnam each year, at a cost of about $1 million each. Sometimes all that the expeditions yield beyond a bone fragment is a piece of a helmet or part of a shoe.
