AFTER THE SHOOTING STOPPED

Hanoi, the heart of the enemy camp, lay before me. I had fought its troops in many capacities—as a U.S. infantry company commander, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha commander, province adviser and then Defense Department planner of actions against the North. Yet here I was, in December 1975, helping a congressional committee open talks with that very foe to account for Americans who were still missing.

Seven years earlier, in 1968, I had left Vietnam on a stretcher, cared for by my “lady in white,” a Vietnamese nurse at a hospital in Long Binh. Seven months earlier, as Hanoi’s forces smashed into the Presidential Palace in Saigon at the end of April 1975, I had trashed all my Vietnamese language books, thinking I was finished with the country. A little over seven days earlier, I had been in Paris, meeting with Jean Sainteny, who had led French efforts to prevent his country’s Indochina war in 1946 and set up the talks leading to the Paris Peace Accords that ended America’s war in 1973. Together, we had arranged the December 1975 talks, the first postwar visit to Vietnamese officials. “They are full of arrogance right now,” Sainteny told me. “Let them absorb their victory and the future will get better.”

There were reports that Vietnam had 400 remains “on the shelf” to deal out piecemeal for money or political objectives.

The scene in Hanoi confirmed his assessment. Numerous signs proclaimed the triumph, while newspapers and posters urged people to rebuild Vietnam with the same heroic effort that was used during the war and make the country a model for developing nations. Pictures of Ho Chi Minh were everywhere, often with the inscription: “Vietnam is one, from Lang Son [in the far northeast] to Ha Tien [in the far southwest].” The communists were still celebrating their victory, and soldiers who lived through it were still coming home.

I took a long walk in central Hanoi and