How The US POW MIA Issue Was Fake From the Beginning

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Executive Summary

The entire Vietnam War US POW/MIA story turned out to be false.
This fake story captured the US imagination for decades.

Introduction

In the mid to late 1970s, a movement started called POW/MIA for US servicemen supposedly kept in Vietnam. This issue became extremely popular, fit into the narrative that the US, rather than Vietnam, was the actual victim in the Vietnam War, and inspired movies starring Chuck Norris and Rambo.

Hollywood Movies Based Upon an Entirely False Premise

The idea, which was aggressively promoted and symbolized by the widely used POW-MIA flag, was that our POW/MIAs were being mistreated in captivity and needed to be saved.

Interestingly, there was never any evidence for the Vietnam POW/MIAs; it was merely asserted that the Vietnamese were keeping them. Growing up in the US in the 1980s, I saw several movies based upon this false idea — and I never questioned its validity because, in my teens, I did not know how often people and institutions lie.

Rambo Rescued POWs in the 1980s

First, Blood 2 was based upon the POW/MIA premise.

Uncommon Valor Promoted the POW-MIA Concept

The 1983 movie (which I saw as a teenager) was one of several movies about Americans going back to break out POWs being kept in Vietnam. I liked this movie and rooted for their cause.

Virtually no one watching these movies had any idea the POW/MIA issue for Vietnam never had anything to support it.

What Was The Political Motivation to Create the POW/MIA Issue?

How did such an evidence-free idea become so captivating? Even today, the POW-MIA flag is widely seen. When does the flag stop being placed on flagpoles? At this point, any POW would be dead a long time ago.

The following quote explains how the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue began.

As the Department of Defense built up lists of those in the categories of killed in action, killed in action/body not recovered, prisoner of war, and missing in action, its tentative numbers fluctuated, but most of the time, the number of expected returnees upon war’s end was around 600.

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.(Emphasis Added)

In doing so, the administration exaggerated the number of POWs at issue, at one point stating that there were “fifteen hundred American servicemen” held throughout Southeast Asia.

These higher numbers would be the focus of much of the controversy in the issue to come. – Wikipedia

As with most wars, the politicians and military look for a reason to continue the war.

The POW/MIA issue originated from this seed of false information provided to the public by the Nixon Administration.

The story of the Nixon Administration’s central role in promoting the POW-MIA issues continues.

Following the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, U.S. prisoners of war were returned during Operation Homecoming during February through April 1973.

During this, 591 POWs were released to U.S. authorities; this included a few captured in Laos and released in North Vietnam. U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that all U.S. servicemen taken prisoner had been accounted for.

At that time, the U.S. listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for, 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. – Wikipedia

The only issue is the discrepancy between the forecasted POWs and the actual.

However, in the case of Laos, the disparity was off of a low 41 estimate.

The quote continues.

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. – Wikipedia

It is still not clear what The National League of Families knew.

Reviewing The Scam Factor to the POW-MIA Issue

However, as the POW/MIA issue continued, it gradually enticed individuals who saw a way to make money from the claim. This is explained in the following quotation.

A number of 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 Bailey created Operation Rescue, which featured a former smuggling boat named Akuna III and solicited funds from POW/MIA groups.

Bailey never produced any prisoners and the boat spent years never leaving its dock in Songkhla in Thailand, but the effort proved adept at bringing in money through the Virginia-based Eberle Associates direct mail marketing firm.^[27]

It was later revealed that Bailey had greatly exaggerated his military record.

During the 1980s, former United States Army Special Forces member Bo Gritz undertook a series of private trips into Southeast Asia, purportedly to locate U.S. POWs whom some believed were still being held by Laos and Vietnam, for example at location Nhommarath. These missions were heavily publicized, controversial and widely decried as haphazard—for instance, as some commentators stated, few successful secret missions involve bringing to the border towns women openly marketing commemorative POW-rescue T-shirts. – Wikipedia

The Fundamental Innumeracy of the POW/MIA Debate

There is something very odd about the entire POW/MIA debate.

First, it is well known that all wars have POW/MIAs. This is because, during wars, people are killed that cannot be accounted for.

These POW/MIA figures for various wars are presented by the Rolling Thunder Run (a motorcycle run started in the early 1990s to promote the POW/MIA issues). See this accounting of POW MIAs from the following wars on the Rolling Thunder Run website.

Can you spot what looks odd about these numbers?

Well, first, the number of POW/MIAs from the Vietnam War is not exceptionally high. There were 9,087,000 who served active duty between 1964 and 1973, with the peak deployment being 543,482 (April 30, 1968).

There were 58,202 US casualties in the Vietnam War. 1,597 POW/MIA individuals are 2.7% of the casualties.

If we compare this to WWII, there were 416,800 military US deaths. Yet there were 72,906 POW/MIA or otherwise unaccounted for. This is 17% of the total number of casualties.

Therefore, the Vietnam War had an extremely low number of POW/MIA soldiers versus the total number that served. However, after WW2, there was no such focus on POW-MIA soldiers.

If the Vietnam War had such a low POW/MIA number, where did the idea first spring forth that these POW/MIA servicemen had a high or reasonable likelihood of still being alive? The proposal by POW/MIA advocates was that many of these MIA individuals were POWs. Recall that MIA means “missing in action.” But in all wars of any significance, bodies disappear. They are blown up; they crash from planes into the ocean, never to be seen again, etc..

The type of servicemen marked as POW/MIA is explained in the following quotation.

Many of these were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos. Investigations of these incidents have involved determining whether the men involved survived being shot down. If they did not survive, then the U.S. government considered efforts to recover their remains. – Wikipedia

This is precisely the type of people who would die in a crash without anyone being able to find them.

There was a Senate investigation into this issue, which was the finding.

Popular culture has reflected the “live prisoners” theory, most notably in the 1985 film Rambo: First Blood Part II. Several congressional investigations have looked into the issue, culminating with the largest and most thorough, the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs of 1991–1993 led by Senators John Kerry, Bob Smith, and John McCain.

It found “no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

Yet the POW/MIA continued long after 1993. It continues today, although nowhere near how it was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Logic for Keeping POWs For Decades After the War Ended

This is another question that seemed to be rarely asked, which goes to the motivation to keep POWs long after the war had ended.

For critics and skeptics, the allegations fail to convincingly answer the question as to what reason the Vietnamese (and other neighboring countries) would have to hang on to living prisoners. They could have been returned post-war, or being inconvenient witnesses to abuse more easily simply murdered. – Wikipedia

How the POW/MIA Issue Was Effective at Tugging at Heart Strings

The concept is that while the Vietnam POW/MIA issue never had any evidence, it still tugged at heartstrings. This is a common issue: when a topic is intertwined with emotion, it is far less likely that the claim will be verified.

How Scammers Love Using Emotional Arguments

Because noted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes claimed to want to improve people’s lives with her blood-testing machine, there was less emphasis on verifying the technical claims.

The story she tells about her uncle becoming sick is mainly made up. Her uncle did become sick, but she was not close to him and did not participate in his illness. But notice how her story enraptures the audience. This story was not exposed as false for many years.

A big part of sales is telling people what they want to believe, and the more they want to believe it, the less effort they put into checking into the claims.

Discussion on the Math of The Vietnam POW/MIA Issue

In all the times I recall the POW/MIA issue being brought up, I don’t recall anyone performing a numerical analysis of the numbers of reported Vietnam POW/MIAs. The issue was brought up, but the numbers were entirely ignored. It was agreed that Vietnam should not be keeping POWs and should send them back to the US, but there was never a focus on whether the POW-MIA issue was real.

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Conclusion

The POW/MIA issue was a fake issue, but it was never discredited, and still, the vast majority of people who are old enough, if asked, would say that POW MIAs in Vietnam are an issue. There is excellent information on Wikipedia that it seems very unlikely that much of the US population knows anything about it.

Why the POW/MIA Issue Had Such Staying Power

Years after the issue should have blown over for lack of evidence, the POW/MIA flag shown at the beginning of this article continued to fly outside of many locations in the US.

Why?

There is little effort to discredit it in the US because doing so would make a person seem unpatriotic and generally unpopular.

It illustrates how long a fake issue can persist if it has a suitable emotional component and if it is tied to broader issues that keep it from being questioned.

Losing Sight of the Large Numbers of Victims of the Vietnam War

What is far less discussed is that it is estimated that somewhere between 3.5 million and 5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were killed by US forces in the Vietnam War. There has been, for decades, unexploded ordinance in at least three countries.

The sheer amount of bombs dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is nearly impossible to fathom. This was to win a war that the Pentagon Papers showed (internal US government documentation) was primarily continued for political purposes. This damage to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (which is also thought to have destabilized Cambodia, leading to the rise of Pol Pot). However, the horrendous damage done to these countries has proven to be of little interest to Americans. All that one hears about is US POWs, not the damage done to Vietnam.

This is further illuminated by the following quotation from an article as recent as 2018, or 43 years after the Vietnam War ended.

For the Vietnamese, the war continues. Loss of arms, legs and eyesight are for the more fortunate ones. Others have lost their family breadwinners, or their children.

Children find baseball-size metal objects and unwittingly toss the “toys” to one another in games of catch until they explode.

Nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed since the end of the war in 1975, and 67,000 maimed, by land mines, cluster bombs and other ordnance. – New York Times

What is left out of the discussion of the POW/MIAs is what those pilots and airmen were doing as part of their military service.

Let us review their activities.

They were scouting locations for the bombing.
They were bombing.
They were dropping Agent Orange, dropping all manner of toxic chemicals that would lead to birth defects even up to the present day.
The US military had a program that was designed to target agriculture. This was so that the Vietnamese would be starved out, which is, of course, a violation of the Geneva Convention and a war crime. The sort of amusing thing about this is that while the US is the number one user of chemical weapons against a population, the US often uses small-scale or fake chemical weapons attacks to justify false flag operations.

Modern Fake Stories About Wars

The US likes to fake chemical weapons attacks by foreign countries that the US would like to attack. The typical US citizen has no idea that it would be virtually impossible for another country to match the US’s use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War.

Seeking to defoliate entire forests to expose enemy forces to spotter planes, the Americans dropped 18 million gallons of chemical herbicide over South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. There were several defoliants used, but the best known was Agent Orange. In 20,000 spraying missions, planes drenched the countryside and an estimated 3,181 villages.

While entire forests dried up and died typically within weeks of spraying, it would be years before scientists established that one of the active ingredients in the defoliants, a group of compounds called dioxin, is one of the deadliest substances known to humankind. Just 85 grams of dioxin, if evenly distributed, could wipe out a city of eight million people.(emphasis added)

But illnesses and deaths from Agent Orange exposure were only the initial outcomes. Dioxin affects not only people exposed to it, but also their children, altering DNA. Large numbers of Vietnamese babies continue to be born with grotesque deformities: misshapen heads, bulging tumors, underdeveloped brains and nonfunctioning limbs. – New York Times

Agent Orange

The US Government massively lied about the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons that it dropped during the war. Internal Dow documentation showed the reality of what Dow thought of the toxicity of Agent Orange. Yet, in public, as shown in this video, Charles Carey of Dow called Agent Orange a “safe product.” How a product that contains dioxin can be considered safe is ridiculous. Both the US Government and Dow Chemical lied to the most extreme levels to cover up the reality of Agent Orange. The US Government knew precisely what Agent Orange was — which is why they used it. Dioxin stayed in the environment for decades after its use, and the US military dropped enormous quantities of both Agent Orange and other chemical weapons on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

The evidence for the effects of the chemical war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was overwhelming, yet while the topic was discussed in the US, no “Agent Orange” flag flew in many locations as the evidence-free POW/MIA flag did.

Is Dow Chemical or the US military going to pay reparations to Vietnam? Did the US ever think of paying to remove the unexploded ordinance left that continues to maim, or is it preferable to keep talking about 1600 or so faux MIA individuals? Also, why didn’t Sylvester Stallone make a movie about Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian birth defects?

Here is the Dow Chemical position on Agent Orange from their website.

Amazingly, both of these videos have been taken down. Increasingly controversial content is being removed from YouTube.

Dow’s Position: “We Bear No Responsibility — And Are Only Sorry for the Effects of Agent Orange on US Service Members”

Dow has great respect for the men and women who served in Vietnam and all who were affected by the war.

As a nation at war, the U.S. government compelled a number of companies to produce Agent Orange under the Defense Production Act. The government specified how Agent Orange would be produced and then subsequently controlled its transportation, storage, and use.

All historic wartime issues, including the use of Agent Orange, are appropriately a matter of resolution by and among the governments of the United States, Vietnam, and the allied forces. The U.S. government has committed resources to address this issue and collaboration between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments continues on a number of fronts.

The scientific investigation of Agent Orange has gone on since the Vietnam War and continues today. The very substantial body of human evidence on Agent Orange does not establish that veterans’ illnesses are caused by Agent Orange.

See..Dow Chemical is not responsible for Agent Orange?

Dow Chemical was compelled to make Agent Orange and certainly did not try to make money selling Agent Orange. Also, notice that the only concern listed is for the Americans who served in the Vietnam War—nothing about those who were bombed with Agent Orange. US servicemen became ill from Agent Orange from merely handling containers. Imagine being bombed with Agent Orange as the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were.

One of the better-known scenes in cinema is the Ride of the Valkyries in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Some Americans find this scene very inspirational. However, one might ask, why did the US use such advanced weapons against a peasant society?

What is the objective? What is the threat posed by the Vietnamese against the US? The entire basis of the claimed reasons for the Vietnam Was was fake. There was no authentic South Vietnam that wanted support from the US to fight the North. It was all a defense industry concoction.

Any of the physical structures being bombed by the US in this video are shacks. One has to question if the US military and politicians that supported this war were quite simply insane.

How Ridiculous is the POW/MIA Obcessesion to the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodians?

The Vietnamese must find our obsession with a tiny number, relatively speaking, of POW/MIAs. These are the millions that were killed in the Vietnam War, primarily through bombing and the use of chemical weapons dropped from airplanes. They must find the obsession with this small number of POW/MIAs, as most of the vast majority of whom are simply MIA versus the destruction that the Americans caused. Specifically, the airman must seem extremely self-centered to the Vietnamese.

Another point is that the Vietnam War began officially (although it goes back to the 1950s), with a false flag operation, where a sonar operator thought he might have seen a torpedo fired from a Vietnamese vessel. The US knew the report was a phantom, yet President Johnson pushed through the Gulf on Tonkin Resolution. This kicked off the bombing.

The Vietnam War was a shameful episode in US history. It is one of the most excessive uses of military power in human history.

The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue has been a sideshow. It illustrates how much more a country cares about its people, even if the numbers are minute and unsubstantiated, versus the damage it does to other countries’ people.

References

*https://www.rollingthunderrun.com/

*https://www.uswardogs.org/vietnam-statistics/

https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/about/legal/issues/agent-orange.html

*https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/opinion/vietnam-war-agent-orange-bombs.html

These findings, published in 2003, put an end to the longtime denial by the government that Agent Orange spraying did not harm American troops. The Department of Veterans Affairs now assumes, as a blanket policy, that all of the 2.8 million troops who served in Vietnam were exposed to chemical defoliants, and provides some medical coverage and compensation for that. But the United States has never acknowledged that it also poisoned millions of Vietnamese civilians in the same way.

For the US government, one of the positives of doing nothing to remove bombs and to detoxify Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is they were able to run a long-term test on the effect of these items on a human population at zero cost.

American combat deployments ended in 1973 and all American personnel were removed from Vietnam by 1975, but the explosive ordnance and dangerous chemicals remained. Polluted soil and waterways were left untouched. Innocent children and families would serve as human guinea pigs to test the long-term results of exposure.

My father’s generation served in Vietnam, but the war’s continuing impact is no longer theirs alone to bear. The United States used weapons against civilians contrary to widely accepted international standards, and has skirted its responsibilities to clean up what was left behind. Working to enforce international law, and to assist the Vietnamese in addressing the deadly mess that remains, is a burden now resting on the shoulders of a new generation of Americans. – New York Times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_POW/MIA_issue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxin

Interesting history on the Vietnam War from Noam Chomsky.

The US military also poisoned Okinawa, Japan, where it flew from to bomb Vietnam. In the same way that the US lied about Agent Orange in Vietnam, it lied to Okinawan authorities about Agent Orange in Okinawa.