Expeditions: My Search for Colonel Scharf

The hill tribesman stopped abruptly on the mountainside trail and pointed down the steep slope to a thicket of bamboo and dense underbrush. In a flash he used a foot-long machete to clear a 20-yard path down which I staggered to a tiny clearing. There lay the remnants of what used to be one of America's most feared weapons in its war with Vietnam: a 15-ton F-4C Phantom fighter reduced by explosion, fire and subsequent scavenging to a few chunks of twisted metal. In 1990 a joint U.S.-Vietnamese investigating team confirmed from the serial numbers on the plane that this was the jet flown by U.S. Air Force Colonel Charles Scharf and Major Martin Massucci and shot down by North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire on Oct. 1, 1965.

But while the fate of the plane is known, that of its crew is in dispute. The pilot of another F-4 claimed that he saw one parachute deploy fully before the plane exploded in the air and smashed in a ball of fire into the jungle covering Suoi Pai Mountain, 85 miles west of Hanoi. People from a nearby village who rushed to the site hoping to capture an American pilot have described graphically the bodies of two dead men thrown clear of the wreckage. The villagers, however, had been unable to pinpoint the site where they say the two airmen were buried. Scharf and Massucci were initially classified as missing in action; that was changed in 1978 to killed in action.

My personal MIA odyssey began last September. While on a reporting trip to Hanoi, I approached the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry with a proposition: since neither the Vietnamese nor the American government has any credibility on the MIA issue, I wanted to see what was involved in investigating these cases. A hastily arranged meeting with Dang Nghiem Bai, Assistant Foreign Minister for North American Affairs, yielded a positive response. The Vietnamese government was willing to permit me -- or any other concerned American -- to investigate particular cases with no restrictions on travel. They would even open up their files.

This offer was not altruistic. With the formal signing last October of an agreement that ended the Cambodian civil war, unresolved MIA cases are the only remaining major obstacle to normalizing diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam. Seventeen years after the war's end, 2,273 Americans are still unaccounted for. Of these, the Pentagon classifies 1,101 as killed in action, though their bodies have never been recovered. The rest are classified as MIAs. In 1987 General John Vessey, the U.S. special envoy for MIA affairs, presented a list of 119 so-called discrepancy cases to Hanoi for priority resolution, chosen because the Pentagon has reason to believe that Vietnamese authorities have some knowledge of the fate of the servicemen.

Scharf's case, which seemed to encapsulate many of the elements of the MIA mystery, was among them. He was one of many missing Americans who were the subject of so-called live sightings -- white or black men, usually emaciated, locked in bamboo cages or being led under guard through the jungle.

Last Sept. 28 the TIME bureau in Hong Kong received a rare long-distance phone call from the Foreign Ministry in Hanoi. Bai had obtained the necessary permissions from his superiors and from the local authorities in Son La province for me to visit the alleged crash site.