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- NATION, Page 23American NotesMIASFour Down, One to Go
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- For most Americans, the Vietnam War is a painful memory; for
- families of the 2,273 servicemen listed as missing in action, it
- is a wound that will not heal. Hope flickered for many of those
- families last month, when five grainy photos purporting to show
- surviving U.S. soldiers in Southeast Asia surfaced. Last week
- the Pentagon disputed the authenticity of four of them, which
- turned out to have been clipped from Soviet magazine articles
- published over the past two years. A bearded man in a white
- shirt shown in one photo was actually a Soviet baker working at
- a South Pole scientific station. The men shown in the other
- photos were also Soviet citizens.
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- The discovery casts more doubt on the fifth and most
- publicized photo, which depicts three men holding a sign with
- cryptic writing and dated May 25, 1990. Although the Pentagon
- has not formally discounted it, officials have linked it to an
- "admitted fabricator" belonging to a "ring of well-known
- Cambodian opportunists." U.S. investigators currently in Vietnam
- on a one-month mission to resolve MIA cases have interviewed
- dozens of officials and private citizens and examined numerous
- crash sites, and say they have found no evidence of surviving
- American soldiers.
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