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One columnist of a major news periodical thinks so.
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You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
--
You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
Racism
POW/MIA
Politics
Posted 9 y ago
Responses: 801
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HOW can the POW/MIA flag be racist ? ALL colors of people (male & female) have been POW or MIA over the years. Only a racist would make that claim, because that is all they know, bellyache and complain about anything.
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Pathetic! Next thing will be changing our own flag from red & white to pink & green (we'll have to lobby the blue).
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This so call columnist is so full of shit he should wipe every time he opens his mouth. The POW MIA Flag is not a racist flag it is not about Vietnam it is a flag that spans all wars and actions the US Military has had lost of life or missing in action. In other words the flag stands as memorial to all Pow’s and Mia’s. I fly my POW MIA FLAG with pride to honor my fallen and missing brothers and sisters . I real wish he would come to my front door and call me a racist, first I would school him and then stomp the ever living crap out of him.
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I'd like to say that I learned something new. I'd like to say that references were enclosed so that I can make an educated opinion. I'd like to say this rant was educational. Unfortunately, I can't say any of that. This is yet another attempt to rewrite American history to suit the vocal minority in order to make this country appear to be the "bad guys"s in yet another fact shattering attempt to tear down the fiber of our nation. I do not believe that this type of rant should appear in this forum.
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Words fail me. It's impossible to respond to all this crap in the short space available. Imagine, "The Deer Hunter" as a serious film depicting America's Vietnam experience. Christopher Walken playing russian roulette as the ultimate rendition of the American soldier. Rubbish! Even Walken doesn't believe that.
I'll be brief. Sort of . . .
First, let's get things straight. President Kennedy started the war to shore up the South Vietnamese government's attempt to forestall North Vietnamese aggression encouraged and supplied by the Chinese in an effort to strengthen their influence in Southeast Asia.
Second, President Johnson enhanced the War by sending combat troops and preventing them from actually using their power to defeat the North Vietnamese. This set us up for failure.
Third, President Nixon ended the war by using American power to force the North Vietnamese and the Viet Congress to negotiate and sign the Paris "Accords.
Fourth, although it took years for the North to recruit and train enough soldiers to sweep south and capture Saigon, they did so in violation of the accords and congress and the rest of the administration did nothing to enforce the accords, thus betraying the South Vietnamese and 58000 young Americans who went there and died at their country's. behest.
Now along comes this clown to twist all the facts and label the POW flag racist. The war had nothing to do with racism, it had to do with stopping communist aggression. To a large extent it worked. Although South Vietnam was ultimately conquered, the slaughter later experienced in other parts of Southeast Asia, notably Cambodia, was avoided there because of world attention focussed by the United States' ultimately unsuccessful stand there. South Vietnam today is largely prospering and it's residents are friendly to Americans.
Where American and South Vietnamese prisoners were treated harshly, tortured and murdered, many being still missing and bones being eventually turned over were held for political purposes (and until their wounds disappeared due to decomposition), North Vietnamese and Vietcong prisoners were largely treated humanely in the full view of the press and all were released when the war ended through the Paris Accords.
Racism? The author just hasn't made the case for it. All he's done is to reinvent the usual lies about the Vietnam War in a new format, twisting the facts to suit his agenda.
There's enough of this crap festering in modern society pushing the view that everything comes down to racism. Don't let it penetrate the military.
I'll be brief. Sort of . . .
First, let's get things straight. President Kennedy started the war to shore up the South Vietnamese government's attempt to forestall North Vietnamese aggression encouraged and supplied by the Chinese in an effort to strengthen their influence in Southeast Asia.
Second, President Johnson enhanced the War by sending combat troops and preventing them from actually using their power to defeat the North Vietnamese. This set us up for failure.
Third, President Nixon ended the war by using American power to force the North Vietnamese and the Viet Congress to negotiate and sign the Paris "Accords.
Fourth, although it took years for the North to recruit and train enough soldiers to sweep south and capture Saigon, they did so in violation of the accords and congress and the rest of the administration did nothing to enforce the accords, thus betraying the South Vietnamese and 58000 young Americans who went there and died at their country's. behest.
Now along comes this clown to twist all the facts and label the POW flag racist. The war had nothing to do with racism, it had to do with stopping communist aggression. To a large extent it worked. Although South Vietnam was ultimately conquered, the slaughter later experienced in other parts of Southeast Asia, notably Cambodia, was avoided there because of world attention focussed by the United States' ultimately unsuccessful stand there. South Vietnam today is largely prospering and it's residents are friendly to Americans.
Where American and South Vietnamese prisoners were treated harshly, tortured and murdered, many being still missing and bones being eventually turned over were held for political purposes (and until their wounds disappeared due to decomposition), North Vietnamese and Vietcong prisoners were largely treated humanely in the full view of the press and all were released when the war ended through the Paris Accords.
Racism? The author just hasn't made the case for it. All he's done is to reinvent the usual lies about the Vietnam War in a new format, twisting the facts to suit his agenda.
There's enough of this crap festering in modern society pushing the view that everything comes down to racism. Don't let it penetrate the military.
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"One" columnist of a major news periodical... his has a right to his delusional opinion. Just goes to show you that the major networks will hire any liberal.
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Should we have been there? No, it was all political. We're there terrible things done on both sides, yes, it was war, unfortunately that happens. But to drop this pile of manure on to of it, come on man, let's have a real objective look at the subject, not what your lib professor taught you. Sounds like Traitor Jane helped you write this.
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