John Kerry: “Now, let me just say, Madam President, after I went to this dig, I flew up into the highlands. I landed in a place where…”

“Now, let me just say, Madam President, after I went to this dig, I flew up into the highlands. I landed in a place where our special forces used to work. There I saw the most remarkable sight. We landed in the midst of 2,000 Montagnard tribespeople who welcomed us there to help dig up their field and look for American remains. There was a huge hole in the middle of this extraordinary plateau and there were 100 Vietnamese troops in a bucket brigade working alongside Americans, bucket for bucket, lifting out the dirt from this hole in order to find out whether three bodies might still be within this aircraft because we do not know what happened to three crew members, although we recovered two of the crew members in this explosion in the loss of this aircraft. I walked down 3 meters into the Earth, right beside the wheel base of this aircraft, and all around me in the red earth was disintegrated aluminum, shreds from this aircraft which I could pull out of the Earth with my hands, and did. Bucket for bucket, this is being sifted in order to discover whether or not there might be the remains of the three people we cannot find to determine whether or not they might have been alive. Were they prisoners somewhere? Were they not? One hundred Vietnamese soldiers. Now, we have a decision to make. We can lose this cooperation if we do not begin to act in a mature and sensible fashion with respect to this relationship. This cannot be a one-way street.”