The MIA Story: Misled Again

Two days of Senate committee hearings this week made it clear that the American people were misled in April, 1973, when their government assured them that all U.S. servicemen held prisoner by communist forces in Vietnam had been repatriated under terms of the Paris peace accords. In fact, as testimony and documents show, the Pentagon knew that at least 80 Americans who may have been prisoners of war were still unaccounted for when U.S. forces left Indochina.

This does not necessarily mean that scores of Americans in fact remained in communist prison camps, let alone that any may be alive today. When the prisoner exchange was completed, according to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, 244 Americans who had been officially listed as prisoners were not among the returnees. The Pentagon subsequently established that some of these had died in captivity. But Kerry, citing classified documents, charges that the Pentagon ignored evidence that as many as 133 survivors could have been left behind. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s own list of missing prisoners, he says, contained 80 or so names.

No one who participated in the hearings suggests that a deliberate policy was in effect to hide the existence of unreturned POWs. And in fact there are plausible explanations that could account for the discrepancies. War is organized confusion in the best of circumstances, and warfare conducted in and over jungles further distorts what can be seen and known. It’s possible that some men, downed fliers especially, who were believed to have been captured in fact died in action or before they reached prison camps. It’s probable that there will never be definitive answers on the fate of many of the missing.

What is known now is that the assurances given by government officials 19 years ago--that all prisoners had been accounted for--did not reflect the facts then known. Why? The most obvious answer may be that by 1973, after nine years of war and more than four years of frustrating peace talks, the U.S. government simply wanted to be done with the nightmare, and chose not to make an issue of the missing-prisoners matter. And so it gave assurances that were not accurate. In doing that, could it have sealed the fate of an unknown number of Americans who may have been left behind?