George S. Prugh, 86; He Got POW Status for Foes in Vietnam War

Retired Army Maj. Gen. George S. Prugh, 86, who was credited with helping to save the lives of American prisoners of war in Vietnam, died July 6 in Moraga, Calif., of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

In his role as an Army lawyer, Prugh persuaded the South Vietnamese to grant POW status to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers during the war. The U.S.-backed designation gave the enemy combatants international protections and set humane standards for their treatment under the Geneva Conventions.

“Prugh realized that if the South Vietnamese continued to treat the Viet Cong as criminals and dealt with them in their own way, there was no way captured Americans would survive,” retired Col. Fred Borch, a U.S. Army historian, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

As the Army’s top lawyer in the early 1970s, Prugh stood up to President Nixon. The case involved the 1968 My Lai massacre in which U.S. soldiers, under the command of Lt. William Calley, killed many South Vietnamese civilians.

In a military trial, Calley was found guilty; Nixon wanted to decide Calley’s appeal but Prugh held firm that the president did not have the authority to make that decision.

Prugh was born in Norwalk, Va., in 1920. He studied law at UC Berkeley and the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.