When Bill Clinton came to Vietnam in November 2000 as the first US president to visit the country since Richard Nixon, the most memorable event of this historic visit, Clinton says in his autobiography, was the trip to a mud field in the west of Hanoi. That place was believed to be the crash site of an F-105 fighter-bomber in November 1967, and it was where a team of American forensic anthropologists was in search of the remains of the pilot Captain Evert, one of the US servicemen listed “missing in action” from the Vietnam War. At the excavation site, Clinton thanked the large group of local Vietnamese villagers hired for digging, “Once we met here as adversaries. Today we work as partners.” Evert's two sons, standing on each side of the president, told him how in their childhood they dreamt about rescuing their father from Vietnam, where they imagined he was kept as a prisoner of war. Later it was reported that Clinton's visit was “to bury the Vietnam War” in preparation for a new diplomatic relationship with Vietnam. The exhumation of the missing soldier was an important symbolic gesture for this important political burial.

Clinton was not the only American state official interested in MIA affairs. A tour of the MIA excavation sites became an essential part of the itinerary for most official American delegations to Vietnam in the 1990s, and MIA issues were at the center of the congressional debates about the normalization of diplomatic ties with Vietnam.