Budget cuts have sharply reduced the Defense Department's efforts to find and recover troops who went missing in previous wars.
And the impact is hitting one group of families especially hard: those of the missing from the Vietnam era.
"Southeast Asia missing in action, time is not on our side," said Raymond Echevarria Jr. of Roxboro.
He was four years old in 1966 when his father was reported missing. Raymond Echevarria Sr. — a Fort Bragg Green Beret attached to a secretive joint special operations unit - was part of a small reconnaissance team that came under heavy fire in Laos.
Family members hold out hope his remains can be recovered. But it gets harder as the Vietnam War slips further into history. Echevarria said veterans from both sides whose accounts can help U.S. search teams find remains are dying off, and the acidic soils of the region are dissolving remains and artifacts.
"Time is passing, and they don't seem to be getting any closer to finding answers for a lot of Southeast Asia families," he said.
The U.S. government's efforts to bring MIAs home sprang from a grassroots movement in the 1960s. More than 3,800 troops have been recovered; about a thousand of those are from the Vietnam War.
But federal budget cuts this year and next would slash by more than two-thirds the number of recovery missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. That's according to information given to families by the Pentagon office responsible for the recoveries and identifications, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA.
Many of the more than 1,500 still missing from the Vietnam War are considered unrecoverable for various reasons. But others – like Echevarria's father – vanished under circumstances that make finding them more likely, at least if recovery missions can get going again.
"They know where the helicopter landed. They have done interviews with various (North Vietnamese Army) soldiers that participated in the battle around that time," he said. "They've got a pretty good idea where they can go and excavate and look for him."
The DPAA said the budget cuts are part of Pentagon-wide reductions, and the effects were worsened by last year's government shutdown and fuel shortages in Southeast Asia tied to the war in Iran.
As a percentage, the cuts to Southeast Asia missions are much greater than those to the DPAA budget generally.
This summer, the agency was placed under the Defense Department's Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness, former Wake County schools superintendent Anthony Tata. At a recent meeting, he told Vietnam MIA family members that he'll lobby Congress and department leaders to get the funding restored.
"I'm fully committed to, within the larger defense budget, increasing the budget for DPAA, because it's a direct correlation for how much we can get out, how many teams we can deploy into the field and how much research we can do and how many remains that we can process," Tata said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican, has introduced a bill to restore $40 million in funding, which could boost DPAA funding to a new high. But the measure's chances of passing are unclear.
Former Air Force Major General Kelly McKeague, director of the DPAA, told the families that the Vietnam War accounting mission remains the agency's most important task.
"And while the overall budget … is coming down … it is still the number one operational priority," he said. "We will send more teams. We will expend more resources on this mission than we do for the other conflicts."
Ann Mills-Griffiths, whose brother, James Mills, went missing in 1966 when his plane crashed off the Vietnamese coast, was a long-time leader of the National League of POW/MIA Families.
A skilled political operator who was close to President Ronald Reagan, she fought for decades to get more funding for what became the DPAA. But she has long said the agency isn't prioritizing Vietnam cases as much as it should, and she said she remains skeptical, especially given the depth of the reductions in Vietnam missions.
"It's not at all satisfactory, especially with how hard we've worked and defended and fought for their assets and resources and priorities," she said.
Even before the budget cuts, Vietnam War identifications were just a fraction of those completed by the DPAA. Of a record 231 identifications completed last year, just eight were from the Vietnam War. So far this year, out of more than 170 service members identified, only one was from the Vietnam War.
The bulk of the agency's recoveries have come from World War II and the Korean War, where missing troops were much more numerous and are often easier to find in places like POW cemeteries.
In Southeast Asia, recoveries tend to require teams of people to locate and carefully sift through possible sites where small numbers of troops died. The recovery missions, which can be similar to archeological digs, are particularly expensive.
Still, Mills-Griffiths and Echevarria say Vietnam War recoveries should get more priority, because family members who knew missing troops – like Echevarria's father – are more likely to be alive.
"The opportunity to bring them home would mean more to me and my sisters than it would be to three or four generations down the line," he said. "They weren't there when the casualty officers were coming to the house, and seeing the effect it had on our mother when he went missing."
Echevarria said he knows the DPAA has to operate within constraints. One is that Congress limited its budget, but also mandated that it make at least 200 identifications a year.
"They can't meet that mandate going to Laos and searching for two or three Americans at a time," he said. "So it seems to me their priority now is digging up large loss sites, where they can get 30, 40, 50 bodies to meet that mandate."
Mills-Griffiths said she and other advocates are lobbying members of Congress to force the DPAA to focus more on Vietnam-era recoveries. That, she said, was the main reason the DPAA was created.
"We want to fight for the money, but we want to fight also to redirect their priority," she said.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
