GERBER, DANIEL AMSTUTZ     MITCHELL, ARCHIE EMERSON    VIETTI, ELEANOR ARDEL
 

GERBER, DANIEL AMSTUTZ
Name: Daniel Amstutz Gerber
Rank/Branch: Civilian - Missionary
Unit: Mennonite Central Committee
 

Date of Birth: 14 August 1940
Home of Record: Dalton OH
Date of Loss: 30 May 1962
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 123250N 1075927E (ZU250888)
Click coordinates to view maps
Status in 1973: Prisoner of War
Category: 1
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Other Personnel in Incident: Rev. Archie E. Mitchell and Dr. E. Ardel Vietti (both captured)

MITCHELL, ARCHIE EMERSON
Name: Archie Emerson Mitchell
Rank/Branch: Civilian - Missionary
Unit: Christian & Missionary Alliance
 

Date of Birth: 01 May 1918 (Franklin, NE)
Home of Record: Ellensburg, WA
Date of Loss: 30 May 1962
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 123250N 1075927E (ZU250888)
Click coordinates to view maps
Status in 1973: Prisoner of War
Category: 1
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground

VIETTI, ELEANOR ARDEL
Name: .Eleanor Ardel Vietti
Rank/Branch: Civilian - Surgeon
Unit: Christian & Missionary Alliance
 
 
Date of Birth: 05 November 1927 (Ft. Worth, TX)
Home of Record: Houston, TX
Date of Loss: 30 May 1962
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 123250N 1075927E (ZU250888)
Click coordinates to view maps
Status in 1973: Prisoner of War
Category: 1
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
REMARKS: TAKEN FROM LEPROSARIUM
SYNOPSIS: Ardel Vietti was a twin and was born on November 5, 1927 in Ft.
Worth, Texas. Her father was a geologist and provided Ardel, her sister and
brother with a comfortable youth, as well as the experience of living in
South America for several years. Ardel attended Rice Institute, Nyack
Missionary College (one summer), and attended medical school at the
University of Texas. Following her residency, she applied for foreign
service with C&MA and was certified for appointment to the Ban Me Thuot
Leprosarium in Vietnam.
The Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium was located in dense jungle terrain in Darlac
Province, South Vietnam, near the provincial capitol of Ban Me Thuot. The
Leprosarium was jointly financed by The Christian and Missionary Alliance,
the Mennonite Central Committee and American Leprosy Missions, Inc. There
were 56 Alliance church groups in the areas outlying Ban Me Thuot in 1962.
 
The Leprosarium had a staff of nine, including Rev. Archie Mitchell, the
administrative officer; Dr. Ardel Vietti, a surgeon, Daniel A. Gerber, and
nurses, Misses Craig, Deets, Kingsbury and Wilting. There were two others on
staff; also, the Mitchell's four children lived at the Leprosarium.
Late afternoon on Wednesday, May 30, 1962, a group of about 12 armed Viet
Cong entered the Leprosarium compound and abducted Dan Gerber, Dr. Vietti
and Rev. Mitchell. The nurses were sternly lectured on their betrayal of the
Vietnamese people and assured that they deserved immediate death, but were
not molested or abducted. Mrs. Mitchell and her four children were not
harmed. The VC ransacked all the buildings for anything they could use -
linens, medicines, clothing and surgical instruments. About 10:00 p.m., the
Viet Cong finally left, taking their three prisoners with them.
When the three were captured, the U.S. pledged all of its resources in order
to see that everything possible was done to get them back safely in 1962.
At the time, U.S. and South Vietnamese intelligence discovered their
probable location, but were never able to rescue the three. Reports have
continued to surface on them through the years since 1962. Some of the
members of their families believe them to be still alive.
Now, 25 years later, Gerber, Vietti and Mitchell are still missing. They
were not military personnel, nor were they engaged in highly paid jobs
relating to the war. They were just there to help sick Vietnamese people.
Although the U.S. has given the Vietnamese information on Gerber, Vietti and
Mitchell, the Vietnamese deny any knowledge of them.
======================================
Oct. 25, 2001, 7:55AM
The Last Missing Woman
A Houston doctor remains the only American woman unaccounted for from the
Vietnam War
By BINNIE FISHER
Special to the Chronicle
The day had barely begun in Southeast Texas on May 30, 1962, but already it
was evening in South Vietnam. Chaos reigned at the Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium,
where Houston physician Ardel Vietti served as a missionary. Shrieking a
gospel of terror, ransacking buildings, and waving bayonets in the faces of
missionaries and patients, about a dozen armed men dressed in black invaded
the leprosarium at dusk.
Two hours passed like an eternity as darkness descended. The invaders
delivered a stern and chilling lecture to the missionaries standing helpless
in the dark. "You have betrayed the Vietnamese people! You deserve to die!"
They destroyed Bibles and hymnals, and gathered up anything that might be of
use.
Finally, they retreated. At gunpoint, they forced three missionaries -- two
men and a woman -- to go with them. Ardel Vietti, who had traveled half a
world away to fight a disease older than the Bible, was among the three. Her
parents, sister, brother, friends and colleagues would never see or hear
from her again.
The day the Viet Cong raided the leprosarium was a Wednesday. On Friday
morning, June 1, Dr. Teresa J. Vietti, then an assistant professor of
pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, heard
from a friend that radio reports were saying her twin sister had been taken
prisoner in Vietnam.
A headline in the New York Times that day read, "3 U.S. Missionaries
Kidnapped by Vietcong in Raid on Hospital." Photographs of Ardel Vietti and
fellow missionaries Daniel Gerber and the Rev. Archie Mitchell accompanied
the story.
After almost 40 years and the efforts of many people and organizations to
find the missionaries, their fate remains the jungle's secret. To this day,
Eleanor Ardel Vietti (she seldom used her first name) is the only American
woman -- civilian or military -- still considered missing in Vietnam. The
ratio of civilian to military women lost in Vietnam seems staggering; eight
military women, compared with 58 civilian women.
Houston Christian High School teacher Ron Rexilius grew up in Vietnam as the
child of missionaries. For his doctoral thesis at the University of
Nebraska, Rexilius researched the cases of civilians lost in Vietnam.
According to his research, "The oldest unresolved POW case in Vietnam is
that of Archie Mitchell, Dan Gerber and Ardel Vietti."
 
Although it's been decades since the three disappeared, they have not been
entirely forgotten. When the body of missing serviceman Rudy Ray Becerra was
returned to his family in Rosenberg recently, hope was rekindled that one
day information will surface about the Ban Me Thuot missionaries.
 
And in recent years, voices that demanded to know the fate of the three now
articulate their message via the Internet. Numerous Web sites dedicated to
the three have sprung up.
 
Pam Young, a Vietnam-era veteran in Seattle, is the author of one of the Web
sites. In 1993, Circle of Sisters/Circle of Friends, an organization that
honors the 58 American civilian women lost in Vietnam, asked Young to
contact the Vietti family. Young, who had worked on Operation Homecoming
beginning in 1973 to repatriate returning prisoners of war, escorted the
doctor's brother, Victor, and his wife, Marge, from their Houston home to
Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial on Nov.
11, 1993.
Although families and friends of military personnel know the risks inherent
in war, Young says, "We didn't comprehend that the same thing could happen
to civilians who went there for humanitarian reasons. I think it took
immense courage to go halfway around the world into hostile territory to
help others."
Those left behind when Vietti disappeared into the jungle that night can't
help but wonder about the Viet Cong's accusations of betrayal. Just who was
betrayed? The people whose lives Ardel worked tirelessly to improve or the
woman who went to Vietnam with the purest of motives?
front-page photograph in the Houston Chronicle Nov. 5, 1957, shows Vietti
packing for her missionary assignment in Vietnam as her parents, Victor and
Grace Vietti, watch. The day was the 30th birthday of Ardel and sister
Teresa, born Nov. 5, 1927, in Fort Worth.
When she was just a teen-ager, Ardel had burned with a calling her family
couldn't comprehend: to serve God wherever she was needed. The smiles her
parents wore in the newspaper photo masked what they really felt about their
daughter going to Vietnam.
"None of us liked it very much," Teresa Vietti recalls today.
The twins' younger brother had just returned from a tour of duty in Korea.
When he heard Ardel was being sent to Vietnam, he remembers, "I was dead set
against it."
But every move Vietti had made over the previous decade and a half had been
in preparation for this moment. She would go to Vietnam. It was God's will.
Even before Ardel entered Houston's San Jacinto High School in the early
1940s, the Vietti children had experienced far more than most of their
classmates. Their father, a scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of
California at Berkeley, took the family with him when his job in the oil
business sent him to Bogot , Colombia. For Ardel, life in Bogot  was a
fascinating introduction to Third World subsistence.
After three years in Bogot , Ardel contracted a serious strep infection of
the sinuses. She and her mother flew home to Houston, where doctors
performed surgery. With America's involvement in World War II, the other
Vietti children were sent to Houston to join their mother and sister.
Eventually their father joined the family and settled into a job with
Texaco.
Neither of Ardel's parents was particularly religious -- her mother
considered herself a Methodist, and her father considered himself to be no
longer a Catholic, according to Ardel's brother Victor. But somewhere
between the streets of Bogot  and Houston's developing Medical Center, Ardel
heard the call. She was to do more than worship God. She was to serve God.
At San Jacinto High School, Ardel transformed her dreams into a plan of
action. In the cafeteria one day, a group of girls had just begun to pray
over their lunches when the somewhat awkward figure of 15-year-old Ardel
Vietti cast a shadow over them.
She wanted to know what church they attended. With the words "Christian and
Missionary Alliance Church," Ardel knew she had found her way.
Marian Carlson, daughter of church pastor George W. Carlson, remembers that
first meeting. Ardel was tall, and she wore her thick, dark hair in braids,
one on either side of her head. "Even in those days, that was a little much
for high school kids."
Ardel was quick to investigate the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church
at 808 Anita. Soon she was a permanent fixture, riding up on her bicycle to
attend services and letting it be known God had a plan for her that involved
the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
"She was just a precious person," Carlson says. "She was very bright, very
gifted and very intellectual. She didn't participate in sports. She was
always just deep in thought and deep in contemplation."
Another teen-age friend, Marion Zapp, says Ardel was a born doctor. "I
remember that a group of us went out to the airport, and the planes were
going over. Ardel said something to me, and I didn't answer." From that,
Ardel diagnosed that Zapp had a hearing problem, which turned out to be the
case.
That kind of thing happened frequently. Church member Bud Zeigler recalls,
"One night a group of us was over at my sister's house. Ardel had her
stethoscope. She examined me and told me I had a heart murmur. I didn't know
it at the time."
Zeigler's sister and brother-in-law, Jessie and Bob Sylvester, often
provided lodging for visiting missionaries who came to speak at the Houston
church. Ardel hung on their every word as they related their stories from
the field. Bob Sylvester says it was no secret -- "she had in mind that she
would become a doctor and go into the mission field."
Because her illness had cost Ardel a year in school, Teresa was a year ahead
at Rice Institute. That first year without her identical twin went smoothly
for Teresa, but the second year, "professors were always getting us mixed
up. I remember being told by one professor that I was taking too many
classes. Of course, I wasn't." The professor was seeing double and didn't
know it.
After Rice, the Vietti twins applied to medical school. "I went to Baylor,
which was a very religious school at that time," Teresa says. "My sister was
the religious one. I'm not sure why Ardel didn't go to Baylor. Perhaps they
thought one of me was enough."
Instead, Ardel was accepted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in
Galveston. She graduated in 1954, one of seven women in a class of 133.
After an internship at South Shore Hospital in Chicago and residency at
Texas General Hospital in Wichita Falls, she was ready for the mission
field.
Victor Vietti recalls that his sister believed that the Christian and
Missionary Alliance, with headquarters then in Nyack, N.Y., was her best
route to the mission field. "She felt these were the only people who offered
her an avenue she could pursue."
Church member Julia Wallace says although it looked doubtful there would be
a place for Ardel in any of the Alliance missions worldwide, "I know she
felt the Lord called her to be a doctor. The minute she got her degree, the
door opened for a doctor in Vietnam."
The church, founded in 1887 by the Rev. Albert B. Simpson, a Presbyterian
minister, started its outreach with five missionaries in the Congo and
quickly expanded. By 1962 it had a substantial presence in Vietnam.
David Seckinger, the current pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance
Church in Houston, now called Parkway Fellowship, notes, "The Christian and
Missionary Alliance was at that point in time, for the most part, the only
Protestant, evangelical denomination in Vietnam."
n 1957 the French had finally ended their Indochine war. The 1954 Geneva
Agreement had split the country into two states, and refugees were pouring
by the thousands from the Communist-controlled north to the south.
The guerrillas who had fought with Ho Chi Minh against the French began
terrorizing the south. Their treatment of the Montagnard, the mountain
tribes of the central highlands, was especially brutal. It was into this
environment that Ardel touched down late in 1957.
The leprosarium was eight miles from Ban Me Thuot, the capital of Darlac
province between the Cambodian border to the west and the South China Sea to
the east and midway between the tip of the Mekong Delta and the
Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam.
With a 35-bed hospital for people in advanced stages of leprosy and another
facility for patients with other maladies, the leprosarium was situated on
150 acres in a green valley surrounded by dense jungle.
Patients included refugees from North and South Vietnam and the Montagnard,
who usually arrived clad in loincloths with limbs that had been grotesquely
damaged as a result of leprosy. On occasion, even Viet Cong showed up for
treatment. Vietti made no distinction.
She treated all patients with dignity and respect, regardless of birthright
or political affiliation. The once-awkward teen-ager who wore braids and
rode her bicycle to church was now a poised young woman and just the doctor
the leprosarium needed.
The staff at the leprosarium included four nurses from the United States and
local tribal nurses. The doctor had not been at the leprosarium long when
she realized she was seeing patients whose degree of disfiguration could
have been prevented by early treatment. Early detection meant making house
calls to tribal villages.
From time to time, she and a nurse would pack a few supplies and set out by
motorbike on rugged jungle trails or by launch on waterways punctuated by
rapids. Ardel feared nothing the jungle harbored, neither tigers nor the
Viet Cong.
At each village she would strong-arm the tribal chief into lining up his
subjects. She and the nurse went down the line, assessing each villager.
Those found to be in the early stages of the disease were shot full of
sulfa. Those with the most advanced cases were taken back to the leprosarium
for treatment.
"Dr. Vietti was just a tremendous doctor," says a fellow missionary, the
Rev. Charles Long, 66 and now retired. "She was very good at diagnosing
problems, and she would be on it in a minute."
It was pioneer medicine. She did whatever was needed, regardless of the
facilities or equipment at hand. Long remembers holding a light over a
dining table while Ardel and another doctor performed cataract surgery.
After a Vietnamese pastor had contracted malaria, Ardel arrived on the scene
to find him sweating under mounds of blankets.
Long says, "She sent everyone out to get all the ice they could. Then she
put the ice in a bathtub and filled it with water." Although the Vietnamese
questioned the strategy of placing a man who was already shivering into a
tub of cold water, "she saved that pastor's life."
When missionary Larry Ward visited the leprosarium in the fall of 1961 on a
World Vision tour of leprosy facilities, he was surprised to find a hospital
in hostile territory staffed entirely by women.
"No matter where I went after that, I talked about those brave girls," Ward
says. "The nine miles from Ban Me Thuot to the leprosarium was the longest
nine miles in the world."
Late in 1961, Gerber, a Mennonite farm boy from Ohio, arrived at the
leprosarium to oversee its farm. Early in 1962, Mitchell was assigned to the
leprosarium to see to the spiritual needs of patients. He brought his wife,
Betty, and their four children.
In 1961, Teresa Vietti visited Ban Me Thuot on the way to a one-year
pediatrics appointment in Turkey. "We drove all over Vietnam. Ardel would
say, `We can't go down that road because the Viet Cong have that road.' The
amazing thing is, she didn't feel frightened at all. She felt this was what
God wanted her to do."
Ardel's world was a far cry from the one Teresa knew in St. Louis, where she
was assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of
Medicine and a pediatrician at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
"She only had 35 beds in her hospital, and she had 1,200 outpatients,"
Teresa Vietti recalls. "I remember her saying that a patient didn't get
blood if they only needed one unit. They had to be almost in shock."
But Teresa saw that Ardel was making a difference. She was saving lives and
altering perceptions about leprosy. People who might otherwise be shunned,
put out of their villages or, even worse, set afire, were able to return
home healed. "She was very well received by both the Vietnamese and the
Montagnard."
Although Teresa was impressed with the medicine her sister was practicing,
she disagreed with the religious aspects of Ardel's job. "I didn't see why
she should change their religion."
Eventually, though, she says she realized, "Their religion was so
restrictive that they didn't live well. They had so many fears and
superstitions and taboos that it really interfered with the quality of their
lives. She tried to change it simply because what they were doing to
themselves was so destructive. It ended up, I saw, that Ardel was right."
The twins would have the opportunity to visit again in April 1962, when
Ardel accompanied an ailing missionary home to the United States. She stayed
six weeks, observing patients at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital for
leprosy patients at Carville, La., and taking a crash course in cleft-palate
repair at St. Louis Children's Hospital. She admitted to her sister that it
hardly qualified her to perform surgery on cleft palates, but it was the
best she could offer patients who needed the operation: "As she pointed out,
if she didn't do it, they would die. She practiced the best medicine she
could."
In St. Louis, Teresa says, Ardel was awed by contrasts that were so
apparent. "Her remark to me was, `You spend more on one patient in a day
than I spend in a month on all my patients.' "
The trip allowed Ardel to visit her family in Houston and attend her home
church. Says Julia Wallace, "I've often thought, how good of the Lord to let
her parents see her one last time."
When the time approached for Ardel to return to Vietnam, her family and
friends pleaded with her to stay.
Victor says it wasn't just friends and family. "The State Department told
Ardel not to go back, because they (the Viet Cong) were waiting for her.
Sources had informed them that if Ardel went back to the leprosarium, they
were going to take her captive."
Suspicious of all Americans, the Viet Cong considered the missionaries
spies. Because Ardel traveled often throughout the countryside and into
town, she was considered especially dubious.
She shrugged off the warnings and arrived back at the leprosarium in time to
help Archie and Betty Mitchell celebrate their 15th anniversary.
Gerber and one of the nurses, Ruth Wilting, had fallen in love and were
planning their wedding.
Ardel was eager to share what she had learned at Carville, so she scheduled
a seminar for the last week in May at the leprosarium. Missionaries from all
over Vietnam attended, including Charles Long and his wife, E.G., who had
flown in from Pleiku, north of Ban Me Thuot.
The out-of-town missionaries were still there on Sunday, May 27, 1962, when
the Viet Cong closed the only avenue leading from the leprosarium into town
by burning three bridges and felling trees over a section of the road.
At eye level on one side of the road, the communists had strung a large
straw sleeping mat between two poles. The words scrawled on it in charcoal
were so ominous that Charles Long has never forgotten them: "Whoever opens
this road is the agent of Ngo Dihn Diem, and off will go your head!" Diem
was the American-backed president of South Vietnam, and he was considered
the No. 1 enemy of the communists.
An uneasy mood permeated the camp. Missionaries who were not on staff at the
leprosarium would be evacuated after lunch with the help of South Vietnamese
Marines. As for the road, it had to be opened if the leprosarium was to
continue operations.
"Mrs. Mitchell had prepared lunch for a large group," Long says. "We ate
lunch on the screened-in porch of the Mitchells' residence."
The Rev. Bob Reed and his wife, Bobbie, were there for lunch that day. A
question was posed: If you were marooned somewhere and could have only one
type of food and only one medicine, what would those be? Dried beans were
Ardel's food choice. "She knew what it was like to live in Third World
country conditions," Bob Reed says. To the question of medicine, "Without
hesitation she said, `Aspirin, because it reduces pain and fever, and it
improves circulation.' "
After lunch, Long says, evacuees walked three miles and were met by South
Vietnamese Marines. "We were loaded onto military trucks and driven into Ban
Me Thuot. The men returned to help open the road on Monday morning."
Under Gerber's direction, the missionaries and ambulatory patients from the
hospital worked for hours to clear the road. Rebuilding the bridges wasn't
possible, Long says, so "they gave me the job of putting stones in the
streams to make them fordable."
When the work was completed, Long and the other missionaries returned to
town. That evening Ardel rode a bicycle into Ban Me Thuot. She treated one
of the Long children for a high fever and helped another doctor perform
surgery. She returned to the leprosarium the next morning.
Since several days before, Ardel had been nursing a painful ulcer on her
leg. By Wednesday evening, May 30, it was bothering her enough that she
requested the weekly prayer meeting be moved from the Mitchell house, where
it was usually conducted, to her quarters.
Those who survived that night would never forget the events that followed.
"It's as vivid as anything," Betty Mitchell recalls. "I had just put my
youngest daughter to bed. Dan and Ruth walked by. Ruth yelled, `Dan and I
are going for a walk. We'll be back in time for prayer meeting.' They walked
on."
It's odd the things that stand out in the moments before tragedy strikes,
Mitchell says. "I remember Ruth's shoes. She was wearing red shoes, and she
didn't wear those very often. The ground was hard as cement, and I could
hear those heels."
As she walked out of the bedroom, "Archie was reading to the other three
children. I heard a noise, and I told Archie, `You go ahead, because Ruth
and Dan are coming back.' That's all I said, and suddenly they were cutting
the window screens and coming into the house."
The Viet Cong ordered everyone out into the center of the compound. The
children tried to hide, but they were dragged out with the others. Betty
Mitchell wanted to go back into the house for her youngest, but the men
refused.
"They cut ropes from the kids' swings and tied Archie," she says. Archie
Mitchell was forced to stand near Gerber, who had been accosted as he and
Wilting strolled outside the compound.
When one of the men tried to tie Betty, her husband pleaded for her to be
left with the children. Then she heard the one who seemed to be in charge
say, "No, she isn't the one."
The leader then sent someone off to find the doctor. Limping, she was
brought at bayonet point to join Archie Mitchell and Gerber.
The intruders took a Land Rover, medicine and equipment. They took the
sheets from every bed with the exception of the one where the Mitchells'
daughter still slept.
After lecturing the missionaries, the Viet Cong instructed them to leave the
leprosarium at daylight and never return. The Viet Cong then left, taking
Ardel Vietti, Archie Mitchell and Dan Gerber with them.
Dawn Deets, one of the four missionary nurses, watched as the three
disappeared into the darkness. "I felt so badly for Dr. Vietti. I remember
seeing her being walked away. She had trouble walking. That night we waited
and prayed that they might come back."
The remaining missionaries notified authorities in Ban Me Thuot. South
Vietnamese marines joined U.S. military advisers the next day in a search.
They found the Viet Cong force, but their ranks had been heavily reinforced.
An attack would have met certain failure and heavy casualties. There was no
sign of the three missionaries.
The war escalated, and reports drifted in from Montagnard tribesmen and
other Vietnamese who claimed to have seen the three captives. The reports
mentioned mobile prison camps and included sightings of two white men and a
white woman in the company of Viet Cong guerrillas.
A 1967 report had the woman asking for a Bible as the three were herded past
a village.
Reports continued into 1970, when a group of Montagnard reported
encountering three American captives near the Cambodian border. They are
reported to have confirmed that they were the ones taken eight years
earlier.
Victor Vietti doesn't put much stock in the reports. Some returned
missionaries wondered if the later reports were about other Americans.
Michael Benge, a U.S. aid worker; Betty Ann Olsen, an Alliance Church nurse;
and Hank Blood, a translator, had been captured at the Alliance Church
clinic in Ban Me Thuot on Jan. 30, 1968, during the Tet offensive. Six
missionaries also were killed, including Ruth Wilting.
Of the three Tet captives, Benge was eventually released and returned to the
United States to report that Olsen and Blood had died in captivity and that
he had buried Olsen somewhere along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Classified documents and reports of sightings relating to the disappearances
fill filing cabinets at church headquarters, now in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Through the years, church officials have worked through all diplomatic
channels available to bring the missionaries home. Church envoys have
traveled to Vietnam on behalf of the three, all to no avail.
Theories abound about the communists' motives. In one scenario, the Viet
Cong knew that a medical seminar had been conducted at the leprosarium. They
needed doctors, so they took Ardel and the two men, thinking all were
physicians.
Charles Long has his own theory: "The Viet Cong usually did what they said
they were going to do. When the communists came in, they took the three
people they thought to be in charge of the leprosarium. I have always said
they killed them that night, but other missionaries don't want to hear
that."
Something that took place shortly before the May 30 raid may have
contributed to the Viet Cong belief that the missionaries were spies. After
a nearby skirmish between the communists and the South Vietnamese military,
Betty Mitchell says, a villager came to the leprosarium and sought out the
doctor, pleading with her to come and treat someone who had been wounded.
Ardel went to the village and ended up bringing the wounded man back to the
leprosarium, where she performed surgery to remove a bullet. He was still at
the hospital when two U.S. military advisers made a friendly call on the
missionaries. The man glared from his bed as the doctor took the soldiers on
a tour of the facilities.
Later, after the raid on the leprosarium, Mitchell remembers one of the two
advisers sought her out in Ban Me Thuot and said, "Mrs. Mitchell, can you
ever forgive me? I should have arrested that man that day."
On his tour of the leprosarium, the soldier had recognized the man as Viet
Cong. Mitchell concludes, "Because they (the soldiers) came out in a jeep,
that man thought we were involved with the military."
When the missionaries opened the road May 28, the Viet Cong chalked up one
final strike against them.
Long says the Land Rover taken the night of the raid eventually was found
buried not far from the leprosarium, but there were no bodies with it.
Mitchell has continued to pray for the return of her husband and the other
missionaries. She stayed in Vietnam until early in January 1968, when she
came home on furlough and visited with the Vietti family in Houston.
She returned to Vietnam. Three of her children were grown and back in the
United States and one was in school in Malaysia when she was taken prisoner
herself in March 1975 along with several other Americans in Ban Me Thuot.
The captives were moved to several prison camps before ending up in a Hanoi
prison.
Her captors found that interrogating Mitchell resulted in her turning the
tables and demanding information from them about her husband and the others.
When she was released in November 1975, one of Mitchell's captors assured
her, "If I ever hear anything about your husband, I will let you know." She
adds, "Of course, he never has."
In 1995, Betty Mitchell and Dawn Deets made a trip back to the leprosarium
at Ban Me Thuot. Run by the Vietnamese government, Deets says, the hospital
was in amazingly good condition. "The Mennonites had built it, and they had
done a very good job."
Once again Mitchell came home without her husband or information about his
whereabouts. Now, she says, the U.S. government is trying to determine
whether some remains found in the Central Highlands are those of her
husband. She is doubtful, since there seems to be a discrepancy regarding
height.
Family and friends of Ardel Vietti have finally accepted the inevitable.
"All of us who loved her and knew her wondered how the end came," Marian
Carlson says.
Victor Vietti still holds out hope that his sister's fate will be revealed
one day. "The Viet Cong have never to this day admitted that they took her.
But somebody knows what happened, and someday they are going to surface."

Binnie Fisher is a free-lance writer and marketing/communications consultant
living in the Houston area.