when the first missing man
walks alive out of that green tangle
of rumors and lies,
I shall lie
down silent as a jungle shadow
and dream the sound of insects
gnawing bones.
W. D. Ehrhart, "POW/MIA"
...The Vietnam War has given the United States a second national flag, the black and white POW/MIA flag.
That flag is the only one besides the Star-Spangled Banner that has ever flown over the White House, where it has fluttered once a year since 1982. As visitors from around the world stream through the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, they pass a giant POW/MIA flag, the only flag that has ever been displayed amid the epic paintings and heroic statues, given this position of honor in 19878 by the Congress and president of the United States. Thanks to a law passed by Congress and signed by the president in 1997, the POW / MIA flag must fly several times a year over every U.S. post office (and many post offices fly it all year long). During the 1980s and 1990s, the legislatures and governors of each of the fifty states issued laws mandating the display of this flag over public facilities such as state offices, municipal buildings, toll plazas, and police headquarters. The POW / MIA flag also hangs over the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, waves at countless corporate headquarters, shopping malls, union halls, and small businesses. It is sewn onto the right sleeve of the official Ku Klux Klan white robe and adorns millions of bumper stickers, buttons, windows, motorcycle jackets, watches, postcards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and Christmas tree ornaments.
The flag thus symbolizes our nation's veneration of its central image, a handsome American prisoner of war, his silhouetted head slightly bowed to reveal behind him the ominous shape of a looming guard tower. A strand of barbed wire cuts across just below his firm chin. Underneath runs the motto: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.
This colorless banner implies that the Vietnam War may never end. It demonstrates to the world both the official United States government position since 1973 and a profoundly influential national belieef: Vietnam may still secretly hold American prisoners of war. This was the official reason why every postwar administration - Nixon, ford, Carter, Reagan, bush, and Clinton - reneged on the 1973 treaty pledge that the United States would help rebuild Vietnam and instead waged relentless economic and political warfare against that nation for decades. Even when President Clinton announced in 1995 that Washingon was finally establishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam, he claimed the primary motive was to further "progress on the issue of Americans who were missing in action or held as prisoners of war."
To begin to understand what this all means, it is first necessary to recognize that there is simply no rational basis or evidence for the belief that Americans are still imprisoned in Vietnam. Indeed, it runs counter to reason, common sense, and all evidence.
None of the armed forces has listed a single prisoner of war (POW) or even a single person missing in action (MIA) since 1994, when the only person still listed as a prisoner, for "symbolic" reasons, was reclassified as deceased at the request of his family. There are, it is true, 2,020 Americans listed as "unaccounted for" from the war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but not one of these is classified as a prisoner, a possible prisoner, or even missing. Most of the "unaccounted for" were never listed as POW or even MIA because well over half were originally known to have been killed in action in circumstances where their bodies could not be recovered. Their official designation has always been "KIA / BNR": Killed in Action / Body Not Recovered. Crews of airplanes that exploded in flight or crashed within sight of their aircraft carrier, soldiers whose deaths were witnessed by others unable to retrieve their bodies, or men blown apart so completely that there were no retrievable body parts - all these are listed in the total of "unaccounted for." All that is missing is their remains. This KIA/BNR category was never included with the missing in action during the Vietnam War; it was lumped together with the POW/MIA category only after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed.
The confusion thus created was quite deliberate. But this miasma was relatively mild compared to that generated by the "POW/MIA" concoction itself. Arguably the cagiest stroke of the Nixon presidency was the slash forever linking "POW" and "MIA." In all previous wars there was one category, "prisoners of war," consisting of those known or believed to be prisoners. There was an entirely separate and distinct category of those "missing in action." The Pentagon internally maintained these as two separate categories throughout the war and its aftermath. But for popular consumption, the Nixon administration publicly jumbled the two categories together into a hodgepodge called POW/MIA precisely in order to make it seem that every missing person might possibly be a prisoner. Because this possibility cannot be logically disproved, the POW/MIA invention perfectly fulfilled its original prupose: to create an issue that could never be resolved.
It also created an almost impenetrable fog of confusion that clouds the issue right up to the present. Although prisoners of war were not previously considered either missing or unaccounted for, once the MIAs became defined as possible POWs, then all the "POW/MIAs" could be dumped into the category "unaccounted for," which then became synonymous in the popular mind with "POW/MIA." So when it is reported that there are still more than two thousand "unaccounted for" from the Vietnam War, people assume that any or all of them might still be languishing in Vietnamese prisons. "MIA" and "POW" and "unaccounted for" have even become interchangeable terms, as manifested by a question I am frequently asked, usually in an incredulous tone, " Don't you believe tehre are MIAs?" - or, even more revealing, "Don't you believe in MIAs?"
In all major wars, many combatants die without being identified or having their bodies recovered. There are more than 8,100 unaccounted fro from the Korean War and 78,794 still unaccounted for from World War II. So the total of 2,020 unaccounted for in the Indochina war is astonishingly small, especially since 81 percent of the missing were airmen mainly lost over the ocean, mountains, or tropical rain forest, many in planes that exploded. In fact, the proportion of unaccounted-for Americans to the total killed in actions is far smaller for the Indochina war than for any previous war in the nation's history even though this was its longest war and ended with the battlefields in the possession of the enemy. For World War II, after which the United States was free to explore every battlefield, those still unaccounted for represent 21.8% of the total killed in combat. For the Korean War, more than 24% of the combat dead were never found. In contrast, the unaccounted for from the Indochina war constitute only 3.4% of those killed in combat. To get another perspective on these numbers, consider the fact that on the other side there are between 200,000 and 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action.
