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The last missing woman from the Vietnam War

The Last Missing WomanA Houston doctor remains the only American woman unaccounted for from the Vietnam War

By , Special to the Chronicle

The day had barely begun in Southeast Texas on May 30, 1962, but already it was evening in South Vietnam. Chaos reigned at the Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium, where Houston physician Ardel Vietti served as a missionary. Shrieking a gospel of terror, ransacking buildings, and waving bayonets in the faces of missionaries and patients, about a dozen armed men dressed in black invaded the leprosarium at dusk.

Two hours passed like an eternity as darkness descended. The invaders delivered a stern and chilling lecture to the missionaries standing helpless in the dark. "You have betrayed the Vietnamese people! You deserve to die!" They destroyed Bibles and hymnals, and gathered up anything that might be of use.

Finally, they retreated. At gunpoint, they forced three missionaries -- two men and a woman -- to go with them. Ardel Vietti, who had traveled half a world away to fight a disease older than the Bible, was among the three. Her parents, sister, brother, friends and colleagues would never see or hear from her again.

The day the Viet Cong raided the leprosarium was a Wednesday. On Friday morning, June 1, Dr. Teresa J. Vietti, then an assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, heard from a friend that radio reports were saying her twin sister had been taken prisoner in Vietnam.

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A headline in the New York Times that day read, "3 U.S. Missionaries Kidnapped by Vietcong in Raid on Hospital." Photographs of Ardel Vietti and fellow missionaries Daniel Gerber and the Rev. Archie Mitchell accompanied the story.

After almost 40 years and the efforts of many people and organizations to find the missionaries, their fate remains the jungle's secret. To this day, Eleanor Ardel Vietti (she seldom used her first name) is the only American woman -- civilian or military -- still considered missing in Vietnam. The ratio of civilian to military women lost in Vietnam seems staggering; eight military women, compared with 58 civilian women.

ouston Christian High School teacher Ron Rexilius grew up in Vietnam as the child of missionaries. For his doctoral thesis at the University of Nebraska, Rexilius researched the cases of civilians lost in Vietnam. According to his research, "The oldest unresolved POW case in Vietnam is that of Archie Mitchell, Dan Gerber and Ardel Vietti."

Although it's been decades since the three disappeared, they have not been entirely forgotten. When the body of missing serviceman Rudy Ray Becerra was returned to his family in Rosenberg recently, hope was rekindled that one day information will surface about the Ban Me Thuot missionaries.

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And in recent years, voices that demanded to know the fate of the three now articulate their message via the Internet. Numerous Web sites dedicated to the three have sprung up.

Pam Young, a Vietnam-era veteran in Seattle, is the author of one of the Web sites. In 1993, Circle of Sisters/Circle of Friends, an organization that honors the 58 American civilian women lost in Vietnam, asked Young to contact the Vietti family. Young, who had worked on Operation Homecoming beginning in 1973 to repatriate returning prisoners of war, escorted the doctor's brother, Victor, and his wife, Marge, from their Houston home to Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial on Nov. 11, 1993.

Although families and friends of military personnel know the risks inherent in war, Young says, "We didn't comprehend that the same thing could happen to civilians who went there for humanitarian reasons. I think it took immense courage to go halfway around the world into hostile territory to help others."

Those left behind when Vietti disappeared into the jungle that night can't help but wonder about the Viet Cong's accusations of betrayal. Just who was betrayed? The people whose lives Ardel worked tirelessly to improve or the woman who went to Vietnam with the purest of motives?

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front-page photograph in the Houston Chronicle Nov. 5, 1957, shows Vietti packing for her missionary assignment in Vietnam as her parents, Victor and Grace Vietti, watch. The day was the 30th birthday of Ardel and sister Teresa, born Nov. 5, 1927, in Fort Worth.

When she was just a teen-ager, Ardel had burned with a calling her family couldn't comprehend: to serve God wherever she was needed. The smiles her parents wore in the newspaper photo masked what they really felt about their daughter going to Vietnam.

"None of us liked it very much," Teresa Vietti recalls today.

The twins' younger brother had just returned from a tour of duty in Korea. When he heard Ardel was being sent to Vietnam, he remembers, "I was dead set against it."

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But every move Vietti had made over the previous decade and a half had been in preparation for this moment. She would go to Vietnam. It was God's will.

Even before Ardel entered Houston's San Jacinto High School in the early 1940s, the Vietti children had experienced far more than most of their classmates. Their father, a scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, took the family with him when his job in the oil business sent him to Bogotá, Colombia. For Ardel, life in Bogotá was a fascinating introduction to Third World subsistence.

After three years in Bogotá, Ardel contracted a serious strep infection of the sinuses. She and her mother flew home to Houston, where doctors performed surgery. With America's involvement in World War II, the other Vietti children were sent to Houston to join their mother and sister. Eventually their father joined the family and settled into a job with Texaco.

Neither of Ardel's parents was particularly religious -- her mother considered herself a Methodist, and her father considered himself to be no longer a Catholic, according to Ardel's brother Victor. But somewhere between the streets of Bogotá and Houston's developing Medical Center, Ardel heard the call. She was to do more than worship God. She was to serve God.

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At San Jacinto High School, Ardel transformed her dreams into a plan of action. In the cafeteria one day, a group of girls had just begun to pray over their lunches when the somewhat awkward figure of 15-year-old Ardel Vietti cast a shadow over them.

She wanted to know what church they attended. With the words "Christian and Missionary Alliance Church," Ardel knew she had found her way.

Marian Carlson, daughter of church pastor George W. Carlson, remembers that first meeting. Ardel was tall, and she wore her thick, dark hair in braids, one on either side of her head. "Even in those days, that was a little much for high school kids."

Ardel was quick to investigate the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church at 808 Anita. Soon she was a permanent fixture, riding up on her bicycle to attend services and letting it be known God had a plan for her that involved the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

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"She was just a precious person," Carlson says. "She was very bright, very gifted and very intellectual. She didn't participate in sports. She was always just deep in thought and deep in contemplation."

Another teen-age friend, Marion Zapp, says Ardel was a born doctor. "I remember that a group of us went out to the airport, and the planes were going over. Ardel said something to me, and I didn't answer." From that, Ardel diagnosed that Zapp had a hearing problem, which turned out to be the case.

That kind of thing happened frequently. Church member Bud Zeigler recalls, "One night a group of us was over at my sister's house. Ardel had her stethoscope. She examined me and told me I had a heart murmur. I didn't know it at the time."

Zeigler's sister and brother-in-law, Jessie and Bob Sylvester, often provided lodging for visiting missionaries who came to speak at the Houston church. Ardel hung on their every word as they related their stories from the field. Bob Sylvester says it was no secret -- "she had in mind that she would become a doctor and go into the mission field."

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Because her illness had cost Ardel a year in school, Teresa was a year ahead at Rice Institute. That first year without her identical twin went smoothly for Teresa, but the second year, "professors were always getting us mixed up. I remember being told by one professor that I was taking too many classes. Of course, I wasn't." The professor was seeing double and didn't know it.

After Rice, the Vietti twins applied to medical school. "I went to Baylor, which was a very religious school at that time," Teresa says. "My sister was the religious one. I'm not sure why Ardel didn't go to Baylor. Perhaps they thought one of me was enough."

Instead, Ardel was accepted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She graduated in 1954, one of seven women in a class of 133.

After an internship at South Shore Hospital in Chicago and residency at Texas General Hospital in Wichita Falls, she was ready for the mission field.

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Victor Vietti recalls that his sister believed that the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with headquarters then in Nyack, N.Y., was her best route to the mission field. "She felt these were the only people who offered her an avenue she could pursue."

Church member Julia Wallace says although it looked doubtful there would be a place for Ardel in any of the Alliance missions worldwide, "I know she felt the Lord called her to be a doctor. The minute she got her degree, the door opened for a doctor in Vietnam."

The church, founded in 1887 by the Rev. Albert B. Simpson, a Presbyterian minister, started its outreach with five missionaries in the Congo and quickly expanded. By 1962 it had a substantial presence in Vietnam.

David Seckinger, the current pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Houston, now called Parkway Fellowship, notes, "The Christian and Missionary Alliance was at that point in time, for the most part, the only Protestant, evangelical denomination in Vietnam."

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n 1957 the French had finally ended their Indochine war. The 1954 Geneva Agreement had split the country into two states, and refugees were pouring by the thousands from the Communist-controlled north to the south.

The guerrillas who had fought with Ho Chi Minh against the French began terrorizing the south. Their treatment of the Montagnard, the mountain tribes of the central highlands, was especially brutal. It was into this environment that Ardel touched down late in 1957.

The leprosarium was eight miles from Ban Me Thuot, the capital of Darlac province between the Cambodian border to the west and the South China Sea to the east and midway between the tip of the Mekong Delta and the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam.

With a 35-bed hospital for people in advanced stages of leprosy and another facility for patients with other maladies, the leprosarium was situated on 150 acres in a green valley surrounded by dense jungle.

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Patients included refugees from North and South Vietnam and the Montagnard, who usually arrived clad in loincloths with limbs that had been grotesquely damaged as a result of leprosy. On occasion, even Viet Cong showed up for treatment. Vietti made no distinction.

She treated all patients with dignity and respect, regardless of birthright or political affiliation. The once-awkward teen-ager who wore braids and rode her bicycle to church was now a poised young woman and just the doctor the leprosarium needed.

The staff at the leprosarium included four nurses from the United States and local tribal nurses. The doctor had not been at the leprosarium long when she realized she was seeing patients whose degree of disfiguration could have been prevented by early treatment. Early detection meant making house calls to tribal villages.

From time to time, she and a nurse would pack a few supplies and set out by motorbike on rugged jungle trails or by launch on waterways punctuated by rapids. Ardel feared nothing the jungle harbored, neither tigers nor the Viet Cong.

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At each village she would strong-arm the tribal chief into lining up his subjects. She and the nurse went down the line, assessing each villager. Those found to be in the early stages of the disease were shot full of sulfa. Those with the most advanced cases were taken back to the leprosarium for treatment.

"Dr. Vietti was just a tremendous doctor," says a fellow missionary, the Rev. Charles Long, 66 and now retired. "She was very good at diagnosing problems, and she would be on it in a minute."

It was pioneer medicine. She did whatever was needed, regardless of the facilities or equipment at hand. Long remembers holding a light over a dining table while Ardel and another doctor performed cataract surgery.

After a Vietnamese pastor had contracted malaria, Ardel arrived on the scene to find him sweating under mounds of blankets.

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Long says, "She sent everyone out to get all the ice they could. Then she put the ice in a bathtub and filled it with water." Although the Vietnamese questioned the strategy of placing a man who was already shivering into a tub of cold water, "she saved that pastor's life."

When missionary Larry Ward visited the leprosarium in the fall of 1961 on a World Vision tour of leprosy facilities, he was surprised to find a hospital in hostile territory staffed entirely by women.

"No matter where I went after that, I talked about those brave girls," Ward says. "The nine miles from Ban Me Thuot to the leprosarium was the longest nine miles in the world."

Late in 1961, Gerber, a Mennonite farm boy from Ohio, arrived at the leprosarium to oversee its farm. Early in 1962, Mitchell was assigned to the leprosarium to see to the spiritual needs of patients. He brought his wife, Betty, and their four children.

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In 1961, Teresa Vietti visited Ban Me Thuot on the way to a one-year pediatrics appointment in Turkey. "We drove all over Vietnam. Ardel would say, `We can't go down that road because the Viet Cong have that road.' The amazing thing is, she didn't feel frightened at all. She felt this was what God wanted her to do."

Ardel's world was a far cry from the one Teresa knew in St. Louis, where she was assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine and a pediatrician at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

"She only had 35 beds in her hospital, and she had 1,200 outpatients," Teresa Vietti recalls. "I remember her saying that a patient didn't get blood if they only needed one unit. They had to be almost in shock."

But Teresa saw that Ardel was making a difference. She was saving lives and altering perceptions about leprosy. People who might otherwise be shunned, put out of their villages or, even worse, set afire, were able to return home healed. "She was very well received by both the Vietnamese and the Montagnard."

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Although Teresa was impressed with the medicine her sister was practicing, she disagreed with the religious aspects of Ardel's job. "I didn't see why she should change their religion."

Eventually, though, she says she realized, "Their religion was so restrictive that they didn't live well. They had so many fears and superstitions and taboos that it really interfered with the quality of their lives. She tried to change it simply because what they were doing to themselves was so destructive. It ended up, I saw, that Ardel was right."

The twins would have the opportunity to visit again in April 1962, when Ardel accompanied an ailing missionary home to the United States. She stayed six weeks, observing patients at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital for leprosy patients at Carville, La., and taking a crash course in cleft-palate repair at St. Louis Children's Hospital. She admitted to her sister that it hardly qualified her to perform surgery on cleft palates, but it was the best she could offer patients who needed the operation: "As she pointed out, if she didn't do it, they would die. She practiced the best medicine she could."

In St. Louis, Teresa says, Ardel was awed by contrasts that were so apparent. "Her remark to me was, `You spend more on one patient in a day than I spend in a month on all my patients.' "

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The trip allowed Ardel to visit her family in Houston and attend her home church. Says Julia Wallace, "I've often thought, how good of the Lord to let her parents see her one last time."

When the time approached for Ardel to return to Vietnam, her family and friends pleaded with her to stay.

Victor says it wasn't just friends and family. "The State Department told Ardel not to go back, because they (the Viet Cong) were waiting for her. Sources had informed them that if Ardel went back to the leprosarium, they were going to take her captive."

Suspicious of all Americans, the Viet Cong considered the missionaries spies. Because Ardel traveled often throughout the countryside and into town, she was considered especially dubious.

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She shrugged off the warnings and arrived back at the leprosarium in time to help Archie and Betty Mitchell celebrate their 15th anniversary.

Gerber and one of the nurses, Ruth Wilting, had fallen in love and were planning their wedding.

Ardel was eager to share what she had learned at Carville, so she scheduled a seminar for the last week in May at the leprosarium. Missionaries from all over Vietnam attended, including Charles Long and his wife, E.G., who had flown in from Pleiku, north of Ban Me Thuot.

The out-of-town missionaries were still there on Sunday, May 27, 1962, when the Viet Cong closed the only avenue leading from the leprosarium into town by burning three bridges and felling trees over a section of the road.

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At eye level on one side of the road, the communists had strung a large straw sleeping mat between two poles. The words scrawled on it in charcoal were so ominous that Charles Long has never forgotten them: "Whoever opens this road is the agent of Ngo Dihn Diem, and off will go your head!" Diem was the American-backed president of South Vietnam, and he was considered the No. 1 enemy of the communists.

An uneasy mood permeated the camp. Missionaries who were not on staff at the leprosarium would be evacuated after lunch with the help of South Vietnamese Marines. As for the road, it had to be opened if the leprosarium was to continue operations.

"Mrs. Mitchell had prepared lunch for a large group," Long says. "We ate lunch on the screened-in porch of the Mitchells' residence."

The Rev. Bob Reed and his wife, Bobbie, were there for lunch that day. A question was posed: If you were marooned somewhere and could have only one type of food and only one medicine, what would those be? Dried beans were Ardel's food choice. "She knew what it was like to live in Third World country conditions," Bob Reed says. To the question of medicine, "Without hesitation she said, `Aspirin, because it reduces pain and fever, and it improves circulation.' "

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After lunch, Long says, evacuees walked three miles and were met by South Vietnamese Marines. "We were loaded onto military trucks and driven into Ban Me Thuot. The men returned to help open the road on Monday morning."

Under Gerber's direction, the missionaries and ambulatory patients from the hospital worked for hours to clear the road. Rebuilding the bridges wasn't possible, Long says, so "they gave me the job of putting stones in the streams to make them fordable."

When the work was completed, Long and the other missionaries returned to town. That evening Ardel rode a bicycle into Ban Me Thuot. She treated one of the Long children for a high fever and helped another doctor perform surgery. She returned to the leprosarium the next morning.

Since several days before, Ardel had been nursing a painful ulcer on her leg. By Wednesday evening, May 30, it was bothering her enough that she requested the weekly prayer meeting be moved from the Mitchell house, where it was usually conducted, to her quarters.

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Those who survived that night would never forget the events that followed.

"It's as vivid as anything," Betty Mitchell recalls. "I had just put my youngest daughter to bed. Dan and Ruth walked by. Ruth yelled, `Dan and I are going for a walk. We'll be back in time for prayer meeting.' They walked on."

It's odd the things that stand out in the moments before tragedy strikes, Mitchell says. "I remember Ruth's shoes. She was wearing red shoes, and she didn't wear those very often. The ground was hard as cement, and I could hear those heels."

As she walked out of the bedroom, "Archie was reading to the other three children. I heard a noise, and I told Archie, `You go ahead, because Ruth and Dan are coming back.' That's all I said, and suddenly they were cutting the window screens and coming into the house."

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The Viet Cong ordered everyone out into the center of the compound. The children tried to hide, but they were dragged out with the others. Betty Mitchell wanted to go back into the house for her youngest, but the men refused.

"They cut ropes from the kids' swings and tied Archie," she says. Archie Mitchell was forced to stand near Gerber, who had been accosted as he and Wilting strolled outside the compound.

When one of the men tried to tie Betty, her husband pleaded for her to be left with the children. Then she heard the one who seemed to be in charge say, "No, she isn't the one."

The leader then sent someone off to find the doctor. Limping, she was brought at bayonet point to join Archie Mitchell and Gerber.

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The intruders took a Land Rover, medicine and equipment. They took the sheets from every bed with the exception of the one where the Mitchells' daughter still slept.

After lecturing the missionaries, the Viet Cong instructed them to leave the leprosarium at daylight and never return. The Viet Cong then left, taking Ardel Vietti, Archie Mitchell and Dan Gerber with them.

Dawn Deets, one of the four missionary nurses, watched as the three disappeared into the darkness. "I felt so badly for Dr. Vietti. I remember seeing her being walked away. She had trouble walking. That night we waited and prayed that they might come back."

The remaining missionaries notified authorities in Ban Me Thuot. South Vietnamese marines joined U.S. military advisers the next day in a search. They found the Viet Cong force, but their ranks had been heavily reinforced. An attack would have met certain failure and heavy casualties. There was no sign of the three missionaries.

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The war escalated, and reports drifted in from Montagnard tribesmen and other Vietnamese who claimed to have seen the three captives. The reports mentioned mobile prison camps and included sightings of two white men and a white woman in the company of Viet Cong guerrillas.

A 1967 report had the woman asking for a Bible as the three were herded past a village.

Reports continued into 1970, when a group of Montagnard reported encountering three American captives near the Cambodian border. They are reported to have confirmed that they were the ones taken eight years earlier.

Victor Vietti doesn't put much stock in the reports. Some returned missionaries wondered if the later reports were about other Americans. Michael Benge, a U.S. aid worker; Betty Ann Olsen, an Alliance Church nurse; and Hank Blood, a translator, had been captured at the Alliance Church clinic in Ban Me Thuot on Jan. 30, 1968, during the Tet offensive. Six missionaries also were killed, including Ruth Wilting.

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Of the three Tet captives, Benge was eventually released and returned to the United States to report that Olsen and Blood had died in captivity and that he had buried Olsen somewhere along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Classified documents and reports of sightings relating to the disappearances fill filing cabinets at church headquarters, now in Colorado Springs, Colo. Through the years, church officials have worked through all diplomatic channels available to bring the missionaries home. Church envoys have traveled to Vietnam on behalf of the three, all to no avail.

Theories abound about the communists' motives. In one scenario, the Viet Cong knew that a medical seminar had been conducted at the leprosarium. They needed doctors, so they took Ardel and the two men, thinking all were physicians.

Charles Long has his own theory: "The Viet Cong usually did what they said they were going to do. When the communists came in, they took the three people they thought to be in charge of the leprosarium. I have always said they killed them that night, but other missionaries don't want to hear that."

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Something that took place shortly before the May 30 raid may have contributed to the Viet Cong belief that the missionaries were spies. After a nearby skirmish between the communists and the South Vietnamese military, Betty Mitchell says, a villager came to the leprosarium and sought out the doctor, pleading with her to come and treat someone who had been wounded.

Ardel went to the village and ended up bringing the wounded man back to the leprosarium, where she performed surgery to remove a bullet. He was still at the hospital when two U.S. military advisers made a friendly call on the missionaries. The man glared from his bed as the doctor took the soldiers on a tour of the facilities.

Later, after the raid on the leprosarium, Mitchell remembers one of the two advisers sought her out in Ban Me Thuot and said, "Mrs. Mitchell, can you ever forgive me? I should have arrested that man that day."

On his tour of the leprosarium, the soldier had recognized the man as Viet Cong. Mitchell concludes, "Because they (the soldiers) came out in a jeep, that man thought we were involved with the military."

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When the missionaries opened the road May 28, the Viet Cong chalked up one final strike against them.

Long says the Land Rover taken the night of the raid eventually was found buried not far from the leprosarium, but there were no bodies with it.

Mitchell has continued to pray for the return of her husband and the other missionaries. She stayed in Vietnam until early in January 1968, when she came home on furlough and visited with the Vietti family in Houston.

She returned to Vietnam. Three of her children were grown and back in the United States and one was in school in Malaysia when she was taken prisoner herself in March 1975 along with several other Americans in Ban Me Thuot. The captives were moved to several prison camps before ending up in a Hanoi prison.

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Her captors found that interrogating Mitchell resulted in her turning the tables and demanding information from them about her husband and the others. When she was released in November 1975, one of Mitchell's captors assured her, "If I ever hear anything about your husband, I will let you know." She adds, "Of course, he never has."

In 1995, Betty Mitchell and Dawn Deets made a trip back to the leprosarium at Ban Me Thuot. Run by the Vietnamese government, Deets says, the hospital was in amazingly good condition. "The Mennonites had built it, and they had done a very good job."

Once again Mitchell came home without her husband or information about his whereabouts. Now, she says, the U.S. government is trying to determine whether some remains found in the Central Highlands are those of her husband. She is doubtful, since there seems to be a discrepancy regarding height.

Family and friends of Ardel Vietti have finally accepted the inevitable. "All of us who loved her and knew her wondered how the end came," Marian Carlson says.

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Victor Vietti still holds out hope that his sister's fate will be revealed one day. "The Viet Cong have never to this day admitted that they took her. But somebody knows what happened, and someday they are going to surface."


Binnie Fisher is a free-lance writer and marketing/communications consultant living in the Houston area.
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