Vietnam War POW/MIA issue

The origins of the POW/MIA issue date back to the war itself. Suffering from a lack of accurate intelligence sources inside North Vietnam, the United States never had solid knowledge of how many U.S. prisoners of war were held. Indeed, the United States often relied upon possibly inaccurate North Vietnamese newspapers and radio broadcasts to find out who had been captured, as well as memorized lists of names brought out by the few U.S. POWs given early release. However, the Nixon administration had made return of the POWs one of its central arguments to the American public for prolonging the war and bringing North Vietnam to terms. In doing so, the administration overstated the number of POWs at issue, at one point stating that there were "fifteen hundred American servicemen" held throughout Southeast Asia. including about 1,350 prisoners of war or missing in action and roughly 1,200 reported killed in action and body not recovered. The low numbers of returnees from Laos caused some immediate concern, as previous Pentagon estimates were as high as 41 for prisoners held there, although only a few had been known to be captured for certain. By late 1973, the remains of over 700 Americans killed in Southeast Asia had been returned and identified. Investigation of the fate of all the missing service personnel would end up residing with the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command also played a major role in subsequent investigations. In 1973, the Defense Department established the Central Identification Laboratory–Thailand to coordinate POW/MIA recovery efforts in Southeast Asia. The United States conducted some limited operations in South Vietnam in 1974 to find the remains of those missing, and according to the Paris Accords, the North Vietnamese returned some remains too. These efforts halted following the collapse of the Accords and the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, and over the next ten years, little progress was made in recovering remains. In a court-martial shortly after his return, he was found not guilty of desertion, solicitation of U.S. troops in the field to refuse to fight and to defect, and maltreatment. However, he was convicted on February 5, 1981, of communicating with the enemy and of the assault on a U.S. prisoner of war interned in a POW camp. Later independent investigations found no substantial evidence to support Garwood's claims and a Department of Defense investigation published in 1993 concluded Garwood was a collaborator with the enemy. ==POW/MIA activist organizations==

; it was created in 1971 when the war was still in progress. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was created by Sybil Stockdale, Evelyn Grubb and Mary Crowe as an originally small group of POW/MIA wives in Coronado, California, and Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1967. Sybil Stockdale's husband, Navy Commander James Stockdale, was shot down in 1965 and she was determined to make the American people aware of the mistreatment of U.S. POWs. This publicity resulted in better treatment of U.S. POWs from fall 1969 on. After the war, the National League of Families became the leading group requesting information about those still listed as missing in action. It was led by Ann Mills Griffiths. Its stated mission was and is "to obtain the release of all prisoners, the fullest possible accounting for the missing and repatriation of all recoverable remains of those who died serving our nation during the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia." The League's most prominent symbol is its POW/MIA flag. Newt Heisley designed this flag to represent America's missing men. This group was more established, less radical, and more connected to the government. The National Alliance of Families For the Return of America's Missing Servicemen was founded in 1990. Its goal was and is to resolve the fates of any unreturned U.S. prisoners of war or missing in action from World War II on forward, not just Southeast Asia, and to gain the return of any live prisoners. It is a 1980s-origined splinter from the National League of Families, created by members who were dissatisfied with Ann Mills Griffiths' leadership. The group was visible during the Kerry Committee hearings of the early 1990s, Businessman and POW/MIA advocate Ross Perot, who had done much to help POW families during the war, was also very active on this issue. ==Recovery and "rescue"==

From the perspective of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's history of the issue, by the late 1980s, the United States and Vietnam increased the frequency of high-level policy and technical meetings to help resolve the POW/MIA matter. The Vietnamese began allowing U.S. government search parties to operate within the country. The Laotian government also agreed to joint crash-site excavations in the late 1980s. In Cambodia, similar joint efforts began in the early 1990s. By 1992, major joint field operations were taking place in all three countries, operations that would carry on for years to come. Several individuals were not satisfied with or did not trust U.S. government actions in this area and took their own initiative. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jack E. Bailey created Operation Rescue, which featured a former freighter and smuggling boat named the S.S. Akuna and solicited funds from POW/MIA groups. It was later revealed that Bailey had exaggerated his military record, claiming he had been a pilot flying combat missions when he had been a ground support officer and giving himself decorations he did not have. One such mission in 1982 was to free POWs reported to be in Laos; Gritz led fifteen Laotians and three Americans, but they were ambushed shortly after crossing the border from Vietnam to Laos, and the mission failed. The U.S. National Security Council would eventually say: "Throughout his years of involvement, Mr. Gritz contributed nothing of value to the POW/MIA issue. His activities have been counter-productive." Haney later said that years later, he met a former senior member of the North Vietnamese diplomatic corps, who asked him why the U.S. never tried getting their POWs back after the war's end. Another figure of the 1980s was Scott Barnes, who claimed he had both been in a secret operation in Cambodia and had seen an American POW. His actions caused significant dissension among POW/MIA activists, especially once he claimed that he had seen more American POWs in Laos but had been ordered by the Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate them. The National League of Families ended up accusing him of exploiting the MIA issue for personal gain, as one wife had mortgaged her house to fund him. A former American POW, Eugene "Red" McDaniel, also became convinced that American prisoners had been left behind, and became active in the issue during the 1980s and early 1990s. ==Effect on popular culture==

In the words of one analyst, "The notion that the United States may have left men behind was hard to fathom, and Americans chose to partly solve this complex problem through fictional characters." The most visible film in this theme was Sylvester Stallone's Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985, which did the most to popularize the idea that U.S. POWs had been left behind after the war and that the government had no real interest in their rescue. The Rambo character, who in this film may have been partly modeled after Bo Gritz, was a Vietnam veteran commando still haunted by the multiple failures of the war. The pivotal moment of the film occurs when Rambo, realizing he was betrayed by the U.S. government and under torture from the Vietnamese and their Soviet allies, is put into radio communication with the officer who ordered the mission and tells him, "Murdock. I'm coming to get you!" Rambo and the Norris films were commercially successful in both the United States and in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia, and did much to perpetuate the stock image of American prisoners held in bamboo cages. Rambo was followed by Norris's 1985 prequel Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, as well as other films such as P.O.W. The Escape (1986) and Dog Tags (1990) that shared similar conceits. The 1997 The X-Files episode "Unrequited" also dealt with this notion. The POW/MIA issue was also part of a key storyline in the series JAG in the late 1990s, where the father of central character Harmon Rabb had been an MIA in Vietnam. During the second, third, and fourth seasons, evidence gradually mounted that Harm Sr. had been relocated to the Soviet Union, where he had later escaped and been killed by Soviet soldiers in Siberia. Many Vietnam War songs released in the United States dealt with various aspects of the POW experience, with over 140 such songs identified by the Vietnam War Song Project. Many were obscure and never reached a popular audience or achieved commercial success. In the early-to-mid-1970s, they largely looked at welcoming the prisoners home, and the impact of the war on veterans and their families. The only one to become a hit was Merle Haggard's 1972 number one country single "I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me". In the 1980s, some POW/MIA songs took a similar approach to American Vietnam War films, which suggested that many hundreds of U.S. prisoners remained in Vietnam and that the U.S. government had abandoned them. ==The "live prisoners" debate==

Several committee investigations within the U.S. Congress took place over the years. His interest was partly motivated by his own experience growing up without knowing how his father died in World War II. Reagan termed Hendon "way out yonder" on the issue, and after Vice President George H. W. Bush reported that even Smith would not agree with Hendon on some of these claims, Reagan concluded that "Bill is off his rocker". The POW/MIA issue heated up in the early 1990s. Serious charges were leveled at the Bush administration (1989 to 1993) regarding the POW/MIA issue. The United States Department of Defense, headed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, was accused of covering up information and failing to properly pursue intelligence about U.S. POW/MIAs. Ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, became interested in the matter. In October 1990 his chief staff aide, James P. Lucier, prepared a report stating that it was probable there were live POWs still being held and that the Bush administration was complicit in hiding the facts. The report also alleged that the Soviet Union had held U.S. prisoners after the end of World War II and more may have been transferred there during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The issuance of the report angered other Republicans on the committee, and after charges were made that the report contained errors, innuendo, and unsubstantiated rumors, Helms distanced himself from the POW/MIA issue.) A July 1991 Newsweek cover photograph purported to show three U.S. POWs still being held against their will, which increased general public interest in the issue. However, the photograph turned out to be a hoax. a July 1991 Wall Street Journal poll showed 70 percent of Americans believing this, and that three-fourths of them believed the U.S. government was not doing what needed to be done to gain their release. Interest in the matter intensified in June 1992 when President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin told NBC News in an interview that some Americans captured during the Vietnam War may have been transferred from Hanoi to the Soviet Union: "Our archives have shown that it is true, some of them were transferred to the territory of the former U.S.S.R. and were kept in labor camps. We don't have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive." and that government officials were hindering POW/MIA investigations in order to conceal a drug smuggling operation used to finance a secret war in Laos. Retired United States Army general, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and head of the U.S. POW/MIA delegation in Hanoi, John Vessey, defended administrations' and the military's role in trying to get the Vietnamese to improve their efforts in ascertaining the fate of missing U.S. personnel. United States Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said that Vietnamese cooperation was improved but still needed much more improvement. For critics and skeptics, the allegations failed to convincingly answer the question as to what reason the Vietnamese (and other neighboring countries) would have to keep living prisoners. They could have been returned post-war, or, being inconvenient witnesses, simply executed. Proponents of the theory often claimed that the prisoners were initially held back as part of a scheme to gain war reparations from the United States, as cheap labor, or both; after the U.S. refused to pay reparations, they then continued to be held so that the Vietnamese, wanting to be accepted and taken seriously by the international community, would not have to admit to what they had done. ==Kerry committee==

Senator Bob Smith introduced a 1991 resolution to create a Senate Select POW/MIA Committee. Senator and fellow Vietnam War veteran John Kerry was the chair of the committee, and its third key member was Senator and former Vietnam War POW John McCain. Compared to earlier congressional investigations into the POW/MIA issue, this one had a mandate to be more skeptical and ask harder questions of government officials than before. Kerry and McCain said that they had gotten the Vietnamese to give them full access to their records, and that they had spent thousands of hours trying to find real, not fabricated, evidence of surviving Americans. Schlesinger said, "As of now, I can come to no other conclusion. [But] that does not mean there are any alive today." stressing his partial dissent from the majority report and touting new evidence of North Vietnam having held back prisoners in 1973, Kerry and McCain both denounced Smith's actions, with McCain saying, "In my dealings with these people, it is clear that mistakes may have been made in a very complex set of issues. But at no time was there any indication that they were giving anything but their most dedicated efforts. I frankly don't feel it's appropriate to publicly make these charges without public substantiation." Schanberg stated that key committee staff had had too close a relationship with the Department of Defense, and that while other committee investigators were able to get evidence of men left behind into the full body of the report, the report's conclusions "were watered down and muddied to the point of meaninglessness." Believers continued to strongly reject such notions; as Schanberg wrote in 1994, "It is not conspiracy theory, not paranoid myth, not Rambo fantasy. It is only hard evidence of a national disgrace: American prisoners were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War. They were abandoned because six presidents and official Washington could not admit their guilty secret. They were forgotten because the press and most Americans turned away from all things that reminded them of Vietnam." ==Normalization with Vietnam==

The actions of the committee were designed to allow for improved ties between the United States and Vietnam, for which the unresolved fate of U.S. MIAs had long been a sticking point. By the mid-1990s, the belief by Americans from a few years earlier that live prisoners still existed had mostly passed; in the words of Time magazine, "most people seemed resigned to the idea that the fortunes of war are bound to leave a few mysteries." When President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo on February 3, 1994, he stated: In response, newscaster and columnist Dan Rather wrote the following: In 1995, President Bill Clinton normalized diplomatic relations with the country of Vietnam, with McCain's and Kerry's visible support during the announcement giving Clinton, who came of age during Vietnam but did not serve in the military, some political cover. During his time on the committee and afterward, McCain was vilified as a fraud, traitor, In return, McCain continued to attack those he saw as profiteers exploiting the families of those missing in action. In the 1990s, the Joint Task Force–Full Accounting in conjunction with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was established to focus on achieving the fullest possible accounting of Americans missing from the Vietnam War. It has interviewed thousands of witnesses regarding the fate of missing Americans, and conducts ten missions per year in Southeast Asia to search for remains of those still listed as missing. ==Diminished in impact but not gone==

During the twenty-first century, the Vietnam POW/MIA issue became less in the public eye, but did not disappear. As one National Public Radio report said, "The POW/MIA movement isn't the cultural and political force that it once was, but it's still hard to ignore. The iconic black-and-white POW/MIA flag is seemingly everywhere ..." In a 2002 interview, the Cambodia politician Pen Sovan reported hearing about U.S. POWs from his guards during his imprisonment in Vietnam, and believed that some had been taken by the Soviet Union. He said he had spoken to U.S. MIA officials about this. Schanberg returned to the POW/MIA subject during John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign in a series of articles for The Village Voice; he claimed that Kerry had shredded documents, suppressed testimony, and sanitized findings during his time as chairman of the committee. Kerry denied these allegations and responded overall by saying, "In the end, I think what we can take pride in is that we put together the most significant, most thorough, most exhaustive accounting for missing and former POWs in the history of human warfare." A companion website allowed readers to examine actual intelligence reports and decide if the Defense Intelligence Agency acted properly in dismissing each case. The book ranked to #34 on the New York Times Best Seller list. A year later, Schanberg again published articles, this time for The Nation and The Nation Institute, during John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, in which he recapped his previous arguments and additionally claimed that McCain had helped cover up the long suppression of evidence concerning live prisoners. Former Congressman LeBoutillier was also vocal in his opposition to McCain, in part due to McCain's failure to acknowledge what he saw as evidence of live U.S. POWs left behind. However, while the group of activists on the topic still felt very strongly about it, the matter had largely faded from the U.S. public, and McCain's actions with regard to the POW/MIA issue never were never mentioned as a serious factor in his eventually losing campaign. The controversy continued to pop up on occasion in the 2010s. The Canadian documentary Unclaimed told in 2013 the story of an elderly man in Vietnam claiming to be a U.S. soldier thought killed in action in 1968. However, Defense Department officials said the man was an imposter with a history of impersonating U.S. POWs. The case of Baron 52, the call sign of a U.S. Air Force EC-47 carrying eight crew members that was shot down over Laos in 1973, was reopened for examination by the Air Force and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in 2016, after decades of pressure from family members who believe that four of the crewmen might have escaped the crash. ==Continued accounting==

Efforts continue to recover Americans; the U.S. Department of Defense spends over $110 million per year in the effort, and the number unaccounted for gradually decreases. 1,592 by December 21, 2018,, 1,587 by February 7, 2020 Working jointly, U.S. and Vietnamese experts focus on "Last Known Alive" cases, which involve missing Americans whom the United States believed might have survived their initial loss incident. Outcomes of these investigations help resolve the live prisoners question. The United States has identified 296 individuals as Last Known Alive cases in all of Southeast Asia, and following full investigations, the Defense Department had confirmed the wartime death of 245 of these individuals by March 2012. One important result of the movement was that greater pressure was put by family members on the U.S. government towards recovering and identifying the missing from other past conflicts, some of which had seen far greater numbers of missing in action. Indeed, the majority of the some 150 new identifications made each year are from the Korean War or World War II. As historian Michael Allen has said, "This [pressure] result[ed] in renewed efforts to recover the missing from earlier conflicts, and that effort has over time become institutionalized, so that it's ongoing. It's just part of the military bureaucracy." ==See also==