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Budget cuts have sharply reduced the Defense Department's efforts to find and recover troops missing in previous conflicts, and the impact is hitting one group of families especially hard. WUNC's Jay Price reports.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Raymond Echevarria Jr. of Roxboro, North Carolina, was 4 years old in 1966 when his father was reported missing. Raymond Sr., a Fort Bragg Green Beret, was part of a small reconnaissance team that had come under heavy fire in Laos. Echevarria holds out hope his father's remains can be recovered, but it gets harder as the Vietnam War slips further into history.
RAYMOND ECHEVARRIA JR: Some of the veterans that were there are dying off. You've got issues with bodies being there for 50, 60 years. You've got acidity issues in the soil. Time is passing, and they don't seem to be getting any closer to finding answers for a lot of southeast Asia families.
PRICE: The U.S. government's efforts to bring MIAs home sprang from a grassroots movement in the 1960s. More than 3,800 troops have been recovered, about a thousand of those from the Vietnam War. But federal budget cuts this year would slash by more than two-thirds the number of recovery missions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. That's according to the Pentagon office responsible for the work, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency - or DPAA. Many of the more than 1,500 still missing from the Vietnam War are considered unrecoverable for various reasons, but others, like Echevarria's father, vanished under circumstances that make finding them more likely.
ECHEVARRIA: They know where the helicopter landed. They have done interviews with various - I call them NVA soldiers. They identify certain areas where they saw American bodies. So they've got a pretty good idea where they can go and excavate and look for them.
PRICE: The DPAA says the budget cuts are part of Pentagon-wide reductions, and the effects were worsened by last year's government shutdown and fuel shortages in southeast Asia tied to the war in Iran. This summer, the agency was placed under the Defense Department's undersecretary for personnel and readiness, Anthony Tata. At a recent meeting, he told Vietnam MIA family members he'll lobby Congress and DOD leaders to get the funding restored.
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ANTHONY TATA: I'm fully committed to increasing the budget for DPAA because it's a direct correlation for how much we can get out, how many teams we can deploy into the field and how much research we can do and how many remains that we can process.
PRICE: Ann Mills-Griffiths - whose brother, James Mills, went missing in 1966 when his plane went down off the Vietnamese coast - was a longtime leader of the National League of POW/MIA Families. A skilled political operator who was close to President Ronald Reagan, she has fought for decades to get more funding for what became the DPAA, but she's long said the agency isn't prioritizing Vietnam cases as much as it should.
ANN MILLS-GRIFFITHS: It's not at all satisfactory, especially with how hard we've worked and depended and fought for their assets and resources and priorities.
PRICE: Even before the budget cuts, Vietnam War identifications were a fraction of those completed by the DPAA. The bulk of the agency's recoveries have come from World War II and the Korean War, where missing troops were more numerous and are often easier to find in places like POW cemeteries. But Raymond Echevarria Jr. says that Vietnam War recoveries should be prioritized because family members who knew missing troops like his father are more likely to be alive.
ECHEVARRIA: Our prayer is that we're able to bring him home while we're still here before it goes to the next generation.
PRICE: Over the past 10 months, out of nearly 200 service members the DPAA has identified, just one was from the Vietnam War.
For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
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