Mayaguez Rescuers’ Remains Found? Americans Were Killed In Battle After Seizure Of Ship In 1975

Investigators have found human remains that may be those of Americans missing from a 1975 mission to rescue the crew of the U.S. freighter Mayaguez from Khmer Rouge forces in the Gulf of Thailand.

A large number of bones and some teeth were found just 5 yards off Tang Island, about 140 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, according to U.S. military officials.

They were found with the wreckage of a helicopter and some personal effects.

“It is a successful mission,” one of the investigators, U.S. Army Capt. John Collie, told reporters Saturday. The team’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Roger King, said residents of the island were leading them to buried remains.

U.S. and Cambodian teams are searching for the bodies of 18 Americans killed in the bloody battle that followed the seizure of the Mayaguez in May, 1975, shortly after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia.

The U.S. team includes military specialists and civilian anthropologists from Hawaii and the crew of the Navy salvage ship USS Brunswick.

The missing include 13 people aboard an Air Force CH-53 helicopter shot down on May 15, 1975. It crashed in shallow water off the eastern end of Tang Island, a tiny spot of land covered with coconut and mango trees.

Also missing are a crewman from another downed helicopter, and four Marines who were lost on the island. A total of 38 members of the U.S. Navy, Marines and Air Force died in the rescue attempt.

In the end, all 39 members of the Mayaguez crew were released unharmed.

The Khmer Rouge were overthrown by Vietnamese forces in 1979, but Cambodia remained closed to outsiders during a civil war that lasted through much of the 1980s.

U.S. specialists searched Tang Island in vain in late 1992.

On Saturday, a U.S. salvage vessel was siphoning off tons of sand covering the helicopter wreckage offshore. On land, a dozen Cambodian soldiers with buckets, spades and axes dug in the sand and cut the roots of trees in areas where remains were said to be buried.

An American officer shoveled sand into buckets, and Cambodian soldiers carried to the sea to sift for remains. Chances of finding the five bodies believed to be on land are slim, since the team has no idea where they are.

But reporters were shown an array of other items retrieved, including a pilot’s flight log, an instrument gauge, a mask, a handset radio, part of an M-16 rifle, a machine gun bullet, part of a compass and socks.

The search is part of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting program set up in 1992 to find the remains of more than 2,200 U.S. pilots and other military personnel missing and presumed dead in Southeast Asia.