Americans with loved ones dead or missing from the Vietnam War are welcoming President Bush's decision to hold Cambodian peace talks with the heirs of Ho Chi Minh.
Richard Cockrell of Sandusky, Ohio, moist-eyed after viewing the names of friends and classmates on the Vietnam Memorial wall, spoke for many."Somebody's got to start talking," the veteran of Navy service in Vietnam said. "We've been to war with them and that didn't solve anything."
Randy Elmore, a member of the Vietnam Veterans of America post in Bellingham, Wash., which has kept a chair vacant at its meetings for a local man who disappeared in the Southeast Asia fighting, agreed.
"The Vietnamese hold all the cards on the prisoners of war," Elmore said. "Opening the dialogue is a good idea."
Except for limited contacts concerning servicemen still listed as prisoners of war or missing in action, the United States has shunned talks with the Vietnamese regime since Ho Chi Minh's communist North Vietnamese defeated U.S.-backed South Vietnam in 1975.
Secretary of State James A. Baker III ended that era Wednesday, disclosing in Paris that the administration will take up the question of peace in Cambodia directly with the Hanoi government, which installed the current government in Phnom Penh. A Baker aide said the decision was approved by the president.
Gareth Porter, who was in Vietnam during the war as a journalist and now teaches international relations at American University, found it not surprising that Americans welcome the talks with the regime that nearly 60,000 of them died fighting.
"I think they have been ready for far longer than the administration," said Porter. "The administration has lagged behind public opinion on the question of letting bygones be bygones."
Before Baker's announcement, members of Congress had urged Bush to change policy in Cambodia, where a U.S.-backed coalition that includes the communist Khmer Rouge is battling Cambodian government forces.
Representatives of organizations seeking the recovery of the estimated 2,302 Americans still missing in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia said they welcome the administration's initiative.
"If the U.S. government feels that announced official Cambodian discussions with the Vietnamese will help bring a solution to the Cambodian problem, then I think all Americans would have to applaud that," said Ann Mills Griffiths, executive secretary of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
Dolores Alfond of Seattle, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen, said, "We are very anxious for dialogue, but of course we feel that in the dialogue, there should be negotiations for our prisoners of war."
George A. Carver, a former CIA specialist on Vietnam now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the memory of the unpopular war is no reason for America to shun Hanoi.