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Vietnamese communists officials told the U.S. government early last year that Army Master Sgt. Mateo Sabog was dead. They said Sabog, who vanished in Vietnam in 1970, should be removed from the list of missing servicemen which the U.S. has linked to the withholding of normalized trade relations with Vietnam.

To prove his death, the Vietnamese took U.S. POW/MIA investigators to a grave in Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam, which they said contained the remains and effects of Sabog. The remains were returned to the U.S. in April 1995.

Soon after, U.S. government officials notified the Sabog family that they had received human remains "tentatively" identified as Sabog. The remains, U.S. Army officials reported, included 22 teeth with five possible restorations, personal effects and clothing.

For nearly a year, the Army studied the remains. U.S. Army gravediggers then began sharpening their shovels in preparation for the final identification and burial of Sabog's bones and the subsequent removal of his name from the MIA list.

Ironically, in February 1996, a 73-year-old, white-haired man known to his friends and neighbors in the north Georgia town of Rossville as Robert N. Fernandez, walked into a Social Security Office to apply for benefits.

Unable to provide any proof of his identity, the man referred Social Security officials to his brother in Hawaii, Kenneth Sabog. The brother immediately called officials at the Pentagon, saying his dead MIA brother Mateo apparently was walking around alive in the little town that straddles the Georgia-Tennessee border. Army Criminal Investigation Division agents were dispatched to Rossville and took Sabog into custody.

After checking his fingerprints against his records in Washington, Sabog was whisked to Augusta, where he was confined under medical treatment and interrogated.

Army officials refused to say much about the case. "We are treating him with as much dignity and respect as we can muster. We're treating him as an old soldier who has been missing for a long time and suddenly showed up," said Army Col. Don Maple, a spokesman for the Pentagon.

But neighbors in the mountain community of Rossville, where Sabog lived for the last 15 years, painted another picture of the man they knew as Bobby Fernandez.

Sabog apparently knew he was wanted by the Army. Rossville Police Chief Roger Blackwell said a retired patrol officer told him that Sabog/Fernandez once asked him to check the national crime computer to see if his name was on it. Sabog confided to some people in Rossville that he had been in the Army and thought military authorities might still be looking for him. He lived with a woman named Juanita Collins, caring for her house and garden from the time he arrived in Rossville in 1979.

Neighbor Edna Halsey said Sabog/Fernandez, who never held a paying job and always rode a bike wherever he went, always got concerned whenever anyone in uniform showed up in the neighborhood. "I had seen the police outside Juanita's house and went over to see what was wrong. She told me that Bobby had called them to find out if he was wanted by the Army," Halsey recalled.

Halsey told her that Sabog/Fernandez "was confused about who he was and thought he might have taken the dog tag he was wearing from a dead soldier." More than two months after Sabog surfaced following a 26-year disappearance, the questions continue to outnumber the answers being provided by the Pentagon and the 73-year-old Filipino about this most bizarre and puzzling case.

What information did the U.S. government provide the Vietnamese that enabled them to identify Sabog as dead by using bones unearthed in April 1995? Since those bones obviously do not belong to Sabog, who do they belong to?

Why would an E-8 with nearly 25 years of service, who according to an FBI report had reenlisted in Vietnam and had just finished his tour of duty there and was eligible for retirement, desert the Army and go into hiding?

What happened to his pay and allowances from the time he disappeared in February 1970 until the Army, following inquiries from his family, declared him a deserter in 1974?

What evidence did an Army board of inquiry use in 1979 to change . Sabog's status from deserter to MIA and issue a presumptive finding of death?

What evidence was used to convince the keepers of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in 1993 to put Sabog's name on the wall, even though there was no evidence that he was dead?

These questions and many others now confront officials in the Pentagon and puzzle those with an interest in the unresolved issue of prisoners of war and missing in Southeast Asia.

POW/MIA family members have complained that U.S. government officials are more concerned with removing names from the POW/MIA lists than with accuracy and care in the identification process. The families have long claimed that U.S. officials encourage cheating in the accounting process by ignoring Vietnam's obvious tampering with crash sites.

In 1991, Frances Zwenig, then chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs, which was chaired by the pro-Hanoi Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), was caught during one of her trips to Vietnam instructing Vietnamese officials how to write off unresolved POW/MIA cases using circumstantial evidence.

Zwenig is now Vice President of the influential U.S./Vietnam Trade Council, a private membership organization that lobbies furiously against any U.S. laws its members believe hinder U.S. companies from doing business with Vietnam. Some in Sen. Kerry's family have lucrative real estate contracts with Vietnam's Communist Party.

Although little information has been made public about the Sabog case, POW/MIA family concerns about U.S. and Vietnamese fraud in the accounting process have received validation by Sabog turning up alive. This much is known about the aging soldier: He served the United States well before he disappeared.

Sabog's career in the Army began in December 1945 shortly after the end of World War II, when he enlisted at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. A transportation specialist, Sabog served faithfully in assignments that took him to Japan, Europe, Korea, Hawaii and the continental United States. On 25 February 1970 Sabog finished his year's tour in Vietnam with the 507th Transportation Group in Saigon.

He checked out of his unit that day and was given his personnel file, his pay records, his health records and his new orders for Fort Bragg, N.C., before being told to go to Tan Son Nhut Air Base to catch the first available flight to the U.S. At that point Sabog disappeared. There is no record he ever got on a plane to the U.S., or that he ever got off one. "The Army has not been able to find any documentation that he ever left Vietnam," said Col. Maple.

It was not until 1973 that Sabog's family wrote to the Pentagon asking what had happened to him. Why did they wait so long? Was it common practice for Sabog to go more than three years without writing or calling any member of his family?

Army officials believe the question of his pay during that time is easily answered by the fact that it was common practice in the pre-computer era for soldiers to carry their pay record from one duty station to another. The pay pipeline was shut off when they left a duty station and was not turned on until they reached their next duty station, so it is likely that Sabog was not paid during that time.

But, Army officials said they are still searching through warehouses and old pay vouchers to try to find some record of Sabog.

Because of the constant movement of thousands of soldiers during that time, it would not have been difficult for Sabog to get lost in the shuffle. In addition, the Pentagon says officials at Fort Bragg were never told that Sabog was supposed to report there following his tour in Vietnam.

Following the inquiries in 1973 by Sabog's family, the Army went through its normal procedure of declaring him AWOL and asked the FBI for assistance in locating him. The FBI was unable to find any evidence that he was alive and in 1974 Sabog was declared a deserter and dropped from the Army rolls.

In 1979 Sabog's family approached the Army once again and asked that his status be reviewed. A board of inquiry, based on information the Army has refused to divulge, changed Sabog's status from deserter to MIA/PFOD.

But on what evidence did the board base that decision? Did it look at any of the FBI reports on Sabog's disappearance? Just how thorough was that FBI search for him?

"We're working to get that and a number of other holes in his records, plugged up," said Col. Maple.

Following the change of status, Sabog's family began petitioning to get his name put on the Vietnam Memorial, which it succeeded in doing in 1993.

Two years later, in 1995, the Vietnamese came up with some bones that they said were Mateo Sabog. Where was Sabog from the time he was supposed to leave Vietnam in February 1970 until he showed up in Rossville in 1979?

There are some indications he may have been in California. There are also indications his family knew he was alive and living in Georgia. Rossville neighbors said Sabog was visited regularly by a young Filipino girl. "It was his niece," said Halsey. "She was very pretty. Started coming when she was about 14 or 15 and came every year until the year before last (1994). She would be in her twenties now."

Sabog's case was turned over to officials at Fort Gordon for adjudication in what appeared to be an attempt by the Pentagon to minimize the fallout from whatever decision they made. Although the case has far-reaching implications for the POW/MIA issue, handling it on a local level rather than through the Pentagon served to curtail adverse publicity.

Sabog was held at Eisenhower Medical Center at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., where he remained unwilling to talk and surrounded by family members and military officials who also apparently did not want him to talk.
Major Gen. Douglas Buchholz, commander of Fort Gordon, who conducted the investigation into Sabog's disappearance, made the final decision April 25 announcing Sabog's retirement with full benefits.

Despite Sabog's continuing reluctance to explain his actions over the last 26 years, it is incumbent on the Army to publicly answer as fully and in as much detail as possible the numerous questions that persist in this case.

Because Sabog was allowed to retire on the salary of an E-8 circa 1970, he will receive $1,785 a month for the rest of his life. If he is allowed to claim back pay for six of the years he was missing (all that is allowed under the statute of limitations) the government will owe him $117,215.

Despite the Army's decision on this case, it will never be settled until all the questions are answered.

F.A. Wright, a former Marine and veteran journalist, and U.S. Veteran Dispatch publisher Ted Sampley contributed to this article