U.S. remains in N. Korea lost in political limbo

RYONGYON-RI, North Korea -- The village elder put his shovel aside, stooped down by a scraggly bush and pulled a sack from the freshly turned dirt. Spreading open the sack, he reached in to reveal femurs, skull and jaw fragments, boots and a rusted green helmet.

"These are your American GIs," Song Hong Ik said at a burial mound near the top of a small hill.

Perhaps they are. But for more than a decade, no one has been trying to find out.

"Until They Are Home" is one of the most sacred vows of the U.S. military, yet Washington long has suspended efforts to look for 5,300 American GIs missing in North Korea whose remains potentially are recoverable. The countries' abysmal relations suggest no restart is coming soon.

In the meantime, possible remains and recovery sites are being lost as North Korea works to improve its infrastructure with projects such as the Chongchon River No. 10 Hydroelectric Power Station. The bones Song revealed came from that project's construction site.

His village, the hamlet of Ryongyon-ri, is nestled among low, rolling hills in the heart of a Korean War battleground almost 100 miles north of Pyongyang. The 90-minute drive from the capital runs through mostly flat land covered by rice paddies or fields of corn and potatoes. The scene is quietly rustic. Farmers use oxcarts to transport produce, and villagers can be seen walking in the distance on narrow dirt roads.

Not far from the highway that leads past the village, a shallow river runs through a wide valley. Song, polite but to the point, explained as he climbed the hill the valley will be flooded when the dam is completed.

Song said construction on the plant, which involved a lot of digging, began in earnest four years ago.

That's when the bones started piling up, he said. Enough, he added, to fill a half-dozen makeshift burial mounds on the hill -- maybe 70 or 100 sets in all.

He dug up a few other mounds to make his point. Then, after a smoke break, he and the plant's construction supervisor put the bones back in their bags and reburied them.

Between 1996 and 2005, joint U.S.-North Korea search teams conducted 33 joint recovery operations and recovered 229 sets of American remains. Washington broke them off because it claimed the safety of its searchers was not guaranteed. Critics of the program argued the North was using the deal to squeeze cash out of Washington -- "bones for bucks," they said.