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Shot down over Hon Gai Harbor on
August 5, 1964, Navy pilot Lt. Everett Alvarez, Jr. became
the first American prisoner of
war in Vietnam. He would not be the last. During the course of the conflict,
hundreds of Americans served time in Vietnamese prisons in North Vietnam,
South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China. Many did so in barbaric conditions.
Of these, 591 were released during Operation Homecoming, the prisoner repatriation
program that was instituted at the war's end in the spring of 1973. More
than 2,000 Americans remained unaccounted for at that time. Over twenty
years later, many groups and individuals remain convinced that despite
the efforts of the US and Vietnam, a complete accounting of missing Americans
has yet to be delivered. As the United States attempts to forge an expanded
postwar relationship with Vietnam, the POW/MIA issue remains a morass of
incomplete data, shadowy reports of Americans still alive in Indochina,
insistence by the US and Vietnamese governments that no American MIAs remain
alive, and allegations by MIA advocates of cover-ups and foot-dragging
on the part of those same governments.
From 1964 to 1973, North Vietnamese
captured Americans, mostly pilots and crews of downed
aircraft, and delivered them to
jails. Among the most notorious of these facilities was Hoa Lo,
known by Americans as the Hanoi
Hilton. Conditions at "the Hilton," along with the other large urban prisons
and jungle camps throughout Vietnam were horrifying.
Although the Geneva Convention of
1949 called for the decent and humane treatment of
prisoners of war, these terms did
not apply in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were accused of brutally torturing
their captives -- beating them with fists, clubs, and rifle butts, flaying
them with rubber whips, and stretching their joints with rope in an effort
to uncover information about American military operations. GIs were forced
to record taped "confessions" to war crimes against the Vietnamese people
and to write letters urging Americans at home to end the war. Poor food
and medical care was standard. Prisoners were often isolated to prevent
communication amongst each other, in addition to being denied communication
with family members. American prisoners sometimes died in captivity, from
wounds sustained in combat, or at the hands of their captors.
Despite these oppressive conditions,
American POWs worked to confound their jailers, resisting torture, delivering
spurious or nonsensical "confessions" and developing clandestine
communication networks in prison.
POWs compiled mental lists of imprisoned personnel, along with information
about their physical conditions, in hope of delivering this information
to the outside world at the first opportunity.
Because the Vietnamese held many of their prisoners at facilities in well-defended urban areas, a military solution to the POW problem eluded US forces. On November 21, 1970, a unit of US Army Special Forces troops raided the Vietnamese prison camp at Son Tay, twenty miles from Hanoi. The raiders killed more than thirty Vietnamese troops, but no prisoners were freed -- the Americans had been moved some time earlier.
At home, Americans lobbied for the
decent treatment and rapid return of US prisoners of war.
Among the most active POW/MIA advocates
was Sybil Stockdale, wife of Navy Commander
James Stockdale, who had been shot
down in September 1965, and was held at the Hoa Lo. Mrs. Stockdale
organized the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs. She and millions
of other Americans used their pens, voices, and money in support of the
POW cause.
In Paris, on January 27, 1973, representatives
from the US and Vietnam signed agreements for a cessation of hostilities
and a repatriation of war prisoners. Operation Homecoming began the next
month and ended in April. During that period 591 American POWs returned
home.
Representatives of the US military
debriefed returnees for information regarding the more than 2,000 Americans
still listed as missing. According to the US, none of the POWs were able
to provide definite information about any remaining captives. Both the
Nixon administration and the Vietnamese government insisted that all living
POW/MIAs had been returned.
Some veterans and families of missing
soldiers insisted otherwise. Thus began a long period of
conflict between the US government
and its citizens over the MIA issue. While a series of
presidential administrations maintained
that no living American soldiers remained in Indochina, contradictory reports
from the intelligence community and from private citizens kept the hopes
of MIA families alive.
In 1989, former UN worker Ted Schweitzer,
who had risked his life to aid boat people fleeing
Vietnam after the war, gained access
to the Central Military Museum in Hanoi. During
subsequent trips to Vietnam, Schweitzer
photographed or scanned thousands of photographs and documents compiled
by the Vietnamese during the war. Schweitzer's search revealed that the
Vietnamese had information confirming the deaths of eleven American servicemen
--
information that Vietnam had previously
denied holding.
In April 1993, Harvard scholar Stephen
Morris discovered a document in a Soviet archive
indicating that Vietnam may have
misled Americans about the numbers of POWs it held at the war's end. The
document, a translation of writings allegedly prepared by North Vietnamese
General Tran Van Quang, states
that North Vietnam held 1205 American POWs as of September 1972, just a
few months before the release of 591 POWs in Operation Homecoming. US government
officials suggested that the discrepancy in numbers might have been an
exaggeration on the part of Tran Van Quang, or that a confusion of statistics
between American soldiers and South Vietnamese commandos caused by an error
in translation. Several independent analysts, however, including former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski, said that the document appeared authentic.
Veterans and families of MIAs cite
additional evidence that they believe shows American
soldiers may still be alive in
Vietnam. Thousands of live sightings of American soldiers in
Vietnam have been reported since
the war ended. Satellite photos have revealed images that
POW/MIA advocates insist are coded
distress signals burned or trampled into fields by American prisoners.
In 1980, a reliable CIA contact reported seeing about 30 Americans working
on a prison road crew in Laos. The US Joint Special Operations Command
prepared a rescue force, but press leaks and a badly bungled CIA reconnaissance
mission stopped the rescue before it started.
Since the war's end, official US
government investigations have consistently concluded that no
living GIs remain in Vietnam. In
1988, after hearing testimony from more than 20 witnesses,
including former POWs, intelligence
officials, and members of the families of MIAs, a panel
from the US House of Representatives
Committee on Veterans' Affairs found "no evidence to
support the belief that some Americans
were still held captive in Indochina," adding that there
was "only a small hope that a small
number of Americans might be alive." In January 1993, a
Senate committee released similar
findings, but added that Americans could have been left alive after the
war and since died.
In addition, official statistics,
and the way in which they are kept, have caused controversy. Of
the more than 2,000 American soldiers
still missing in Vietnam, most are listed as dead -- despite a lack of
supporting physical evidence. The US prefers to concentrate search efforts
on what it calls "discrepancy" cases -- those soldiers believed to be alive
when they lost contact with American forces. Such discrepancy cases now
number well below 100.
While some families of American
MIAs agree with the government's accounting of the war's lost soldiers,
many POW advocates insist that until an MIA is determined to be dead by
tangible physical evidence, he should not be considered so. Some members
of Congress share this opinion. In 1996, at the urging of California Republican
Bob Dornan, Congress attached a provision to the US defense budget requiring
that the Pentagon review the status of a missing
soldier every three years if the
soldier was last known to be alive. MIA families who wish to do
so can be present at the review.
The law also prohibits the government from declaring an MIA
dead without proof.
Years of hostile American/Vietnamese
diplomatic relations also hindered the resolution of the
POW/MIA issue. Slowly, however,
relations have improved, spurring more operations to locate
missing Americans. In a speech
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee explaining
President Clinton's 1994 lifting
of the US trade embargo on Vietnam, Winston Lord, Assistant
Secretary for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, cited hundreds of searches for the remains of
American soldiers conducted by
Vietnam. Yet few recoveries have resulted; the remains of only
67 Americans were returned home
in 1993.
While some POW/MIA advocates insist
on nothing short of a complete accounting of all
American MIAs, even some optimists
consider this unlikely. The heavy foliage in Vietnam's
jungles quickly covered many aircraft
crash sites, and Vietnam's hot, rainy weather caused rapid decay of clothing
and human remains. Many soldiers were buried hastily in unmarked graves.
Scores of Vietnamese families also
endure the pain of not having a full accounting of the fate of their missing
loved ones who fought in the war. The bodies of hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese soldiers have yet to
be recovered and given proper burial.
The Clinton administration has made
a public commitment to a full accounting of American
MIAs. Yet over the objections of
Republican congressmen and some MIA advocates, who accuse Vietnam of foot-dragging,
Clinton has resumed official diplomatic relations with Hanoi. By naming
Douglas "Pete" Peterson, a former Vietnam POW as the first US postwar ambassador
to Vietnam, Clinton insists he has sent a strong message -- that a complete
accounting of MIAs is the United States' first and foremost concern. Meanwhile,
POW/MIA advocates show no sign of letting the issue rest. According to
one of their slogans, "Only the United States Government has Forgotten."
Taken From Viet
Nam Online: The American Experience
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The Cross/MIA graphic was created by
Doc's Military Graphics
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