Hanoi Must Account for MIAs, and if Any Survive

Earlier this week Gen. John Vessey, the President’s special envoy on POW-MIA affairs, met with Vietnamese officials in Hanoi; 14 1/2 years after the January, 1973, Paris “peace” accords ended American involvement in the Vietnam War, Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was attempting to resolve the longstanding issue of American servicemen still missing in Vietnam.

As the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery attests, it is not uncommon in war that soldiers disappear in battle. In World War II and Korea they represented 22% of battlefield losses. There are still 78,751 Americans missing from World War II and 8,177 from the Korean War. In Vietnam, by comparison, the 2,413 still missing represent only 4% of battlefield losses.

Why then are the Vietnam War missing still an issue when the others, generally speaking, are not? First, the prisoner-of-war (POW) and missing-in-action (MIA) issue was politicized from the very beginning. Following the example that was set during the Korean War, the enemy saw American concern for the sanctity of human life as a vulnerability that could be exploited, and the POWs became hostages to the negotiating process. Enormous public pressure was put on the U.S. government to come to terms and “bring our POWs home.”

And the U.S. government is not without blame. After the return of nearly 600 American POWs following the Paris accords, the Nixon Administration seized on the almost 2,500 Americans who were still unaccounted for and launched a nationwide POW-MIA campaign to catch public attention in order to gain support for continued military assistance to South Vietnam.

Responding in kind, the North Vietnamese linked repatriation of American remains under Article 8 of the Paris accords with Article 21, which promised American aid to rebuild Vietnam. Even though they made a mockery of the Paris accords with their 22-division cross-border blitzkrieg that overran South Vietnam in the spring of 1975, they are still using these bodies as bargaining chips to gain U.S. economic assistance.

There is another factor that makes the Vietnam experience unique. As many as 300 of the POW-MIAs still unrepatriated were positively identified as being in North Vietnamese hands. Pictures of them while in captivity were published in newspapers and magazines both in Vietnam and abroad. Still others were seen being taken into captivity or otherwise identified as POWs. Yet the Vietnamese claim no knowledge of their existence.

And then there is the question of Laos. As a former POW, retired Navy Capt. “Red” McDaniels said in a recent interview, “During the Vietnam War we lost 569 airmen over Laos. Over North Vietnam . . . 39% of us who were shot down survived. My logic tells me that in Laos there were the same anti-aircraft guns, the same terrain and the same aircraft . . . . Yet not one of those pilots has ever returned.”

But those who have been there on the ground do not agree. “Laos is not at all like North Vietnam,” says Army Col. Rod Paschall, who served in Laos with the Army Special Forces in the early 1960s. “The terrain is unbelievably rugged, and, unlike North Vietnam, most of it is uninhabited. There are no villagers to take injured pilots into custody and turn them over to the authorities. And even if they did fall into enemy hands, the Communist Pathet Lao were not above brutally beating their prisoners to death, as they did with Army Special Forces Capt. Walter Moon in 1961.”

Finally there is the issue of live sightings. Since 1975 there have been 965 such reports. Of these, 624 reports were correlated with known individuals and 205 were judged to be untrue. Of the remaining 136 reported sightings that remain to be resolved, more than half of which occurred more than 10 years ago, 94 involve American POWs and 42 involve Americans in non-prisoner status.

Two conventions were held in Washington to call attention to this issue--one by the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia (whose director, Sue Mills Griffiths, accompanied Vessey to Hanoi) and another by the newer POW Policy Center, which offered a $2.4-million reward to any Vietnamese, Laotian or Cambodian who defects and brings along an American POW.

The sad truth is that the chances that there are still Americans being held against their will in Indochina are slim indeed. Only Hanoi knows for sure, but, as the Vessey commission rediscovered, Vietnam is still more interested in playing politics than in resolving this tragic issue.