1 Joint teams of American and Vietnamese specialists plan Thursday to start investigating the fate of 85 U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.
2 A survivor of the bloody 1968 battle at Lang Vei Special Forces camps in central Quang Tri province will help dig for the remains of five of his missing comrades, said Air Force Major Randall Garrett, operations officer for the U.S. MIA office in Hanoi.
3 Frank C. Willoughby, a retired major in the Army's Special Forces -- known as the Green Berets, will return to Lang Vei, where North Vietnamese tanks and infantry overran a base of camps on Feb. 7, 1968, during the Tet Offensive.
4 His participation is unusual, but not unheard of. The search for remains of the 2,211 U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the war rarely requires help from survivors of a specific battle, Garrett said.
5 Willoughby is expected to help outline battlefield positions and trace the course of battle to find out where men might have fallen or been buried.
6 Eight teams will spread throughout Vietnam to interview witnesses and excavate at old battlefields, burial sites and areas where U.S. helicopters and airplanes crashed. The planned five-week operation will be the 34th in a series that started in September 1988, Garrett said.
7 The U.S. Defense Department lists 1,621 Americans as missing in Vietnam, but only 55 of them were last seen alive and in imminent danger of being captured. Most were killed in action or lost over the ocean, but their bodies were never recovered, defense officials say.
8 Another 505 U.S. servicemen are unaccounted for in Laos, 77 in Cambodia and eight in China.
9 President Clinton has said Vietnam must do more to help Americans learn what happened to their MIAs before the United States will agree to establish full diplomatic relations with its former foe. The two countries opened liaison offices in each other's capitals last month.
10 Vietnam counts more than 300,000 of its own soldiers as missing, but poverty and inadequate records have prevented the Vietnamese from doing much to investigate them.

A survivor of the bloody 1968 battle at Lang Vei Special Forces camps in central Quang Tri province will help dig for the remains of five of his missing comrades , said Air Force Major Randall Garrett , operations officer for the U . S . MIA office in Hanoi .
will help dig for the remains
Why is he helping?