Immediately after the Paris Peace Accords were signed on Jan. 27, 1973, Operation Homecoming returned 591 prisoners of war who had been captured in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (two Vietnam POWs and a Cold War POW were released from China).
Some families and government officials expected a greater number of returnees, which gave rise to the urgency of the accounting mission. Although Article Eight of the Accord called for mutual assistance among the parties in accounting for the missing Americans, immediate postwar hostilities limited access to many sites. In 1973, the U.S. listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for from the war, with roughly equal numbers of those missing in action, or killed in action/body not recovered.
From February 1973 to March 1975, teams from the U.S. and the Republic of Vietnam conducted joint, but restricted searches for Americans missing in South Vietnam. These searches met with limited success, recovering and identifying 63 personnel, 23 of whom had died in captivity in North Vietnam, and five of whom had been killed in Laos. On Dec. 15, 1973, U.S. Army Capt. Richard M. Rees was killed by guerrilla fighters while conducting search efforts, which caused restrictions of the ongoing recovery work. On April 30, 1975, searches ended completely when the Communists took over Vietnam.
