Posted on Aug 11, 2015
TSgt Joshua Copeland
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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
Posted in these groups: Racism logo RacismPow logo POW/MIA6262122778 997339a086 z Politics
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Responses: 801
SPC Marc Hensley
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Even if everything in this article is true, where is the racism? There are no claims that POW/MIAs were only one "race". There is nothing related to the issue of POWs or MIAs that in anyway indicates race. The article doesn't even try to point out any supposed racism. It starts with and assertion, then throws a bunch of "facts" out that don't even support the initial assertion. Based on this article I could see a case being made that it represents jingoism because it supposedly overstates the experiences of American POWS and downplays those of the enemy but that isn't racism.
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SPC David Buttrey
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WTF?!? Obviously this dude has lived under a rock or something but then again everything is racist now.
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Sgt Robert Beckwith
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The POW/MIA flag was created by one guy. I had a letter from him around 1985. He said he was too tired to continue his POW/MIA flag business and was offering to sell it to any like minded other who ( like me ) were advertising in SOF and Shotgun News. For $1000. In one of several major mistakes I have made in business I declined. I may have his letter somewhere in my storage files . But if you don't believe me Fuck you.
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Sgt Robert Beckwith
Sgt Robert Beckwith
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Hum. A couple more things ... When they were shooting our wounded in the head ( 1/9 wounded were shot twice) our corpsmen would patch their wounded up and send them off in a chopper. Most of them anyway. I will not return for one of those Vietnam tours because evil is still in charge there. The image in the flag is black. And, finally, people taste like snake.
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SMSgt James Rorie
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The writer of this message/article needs to go visit with those families that had a POW or are still 50 years later holding on to what hope they can muster and tell them this flag is racist. Just goes to show what direction this country is heading.
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SPC Ramiro Magallon
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Who was the idiot that said the MIA/POW flag is racist, what part of this flag is racist.
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SN Jay Perry
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What was that article about? The black on the Flag represents those that are lost and unknown and honors the dead. It has nothing to do with racism! Just for further information the youngest! Repeat youngest! Man on pow list turns 80 this year. He will have spent more of his life is a captive than free by a factor of 2! How many of these guys are on the pow list, am I a list that we know are gone? Find the remains clear this mess up and let's be done with it... p. S. Son and brother of retired Navy officers, 6-year usn vet, have friends and relatives who all served in Vietnam including at least three who were pows. My sister-in-law works for the company that helped identify the Pearl Harbor casualty last week and works regularly trying to identify remains from Vietnam.
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CPO William Ward II
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Wow, you need to calm down. The only thing you can see is color then you need cultural training. We are all of the same. If we don’t start thinking
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SGT Tim Tobin
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It has gone past the time that we as veterans and active duty troops need to come together as a group against the growing prejudices and political correctness that is becoming more radical every day. It doesn't matter where you land on the political spectrum but it does matter that we all need to take an active roll in protecting all soldiers past,present and future. This is an open attack. Do we want to go back to the days during Vietnam when we were spit on and called baby killers?? That is the next step!!
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SP5 Thomas Carpenter
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If we want to overcome racism in this country, we shouldn’t throw the phrase racism or racist around so fluidly. It’s a real issue, but this is not a case of it.
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SSG Omar Ruiz-Canales
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Im thinking this person has read someones self created conspiracy theory editorial and is easily influenced.
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