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Vietnam said Monday it would open up new areas to American teams searching for missing war-time soldiers, the latest sign of closer ties between two countries that are wary of China's growing power. Vietnamese Defence Minister Phung Quang Thanh announced the move after talks with his US counterpart Leon Panetta, whose two-day visit has underscored Washington's determination to shore up its influence in the face of a more assertive China.
Panetta said the United States had an "enduring commitment" to build a strong defence partnership with its former foes in Vietnam. "We have taken some very important steps in advancing that relationship in our meeting," he said at a joint news conference. Panetta and Thanh also exchanged artifacts - a Vietnamese soldier's frayed diary and a collection of long lost personal letters written by a US Army sergeant - that were found by troops decades ago during the Vietnam War.
The Pentagon chief thanked the Vietnamese side "for their longstanding assistance in efforts to identify and locate the remains of our fallen service members and those missing in action in Vietnam". The three new excavation areas include two aircraft crash sites in central Vietnam and an area where a US soldier went missing in Kon Tum province bordering Cambodian and Laos.
"His unit was on a search and destroy mission around the time of the Tet Offensive. It was quite a fierce battle," said Ron Ward of the US Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, which handles the search for MIAs. The 1968 offensive by the communist North, which violated a truce marking the traditional Tet Lunar New Year, caught US and South Vietnamese forces off-guard and marked a turning point in the war.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012

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