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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 >1 y ago
Responses: 801
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This whole story is pure bullshit. A fictitious "look at me, I need attention" contrived BS story with half-truths and a punk ass caveat .."I'm offended that they call the POW/MIA flag racist". Never heard anybody, anywhere, at anytime...use that word in the same sentence with the POW/MIA flag. Do like other Jews kid, and write another book about Lincoln. This site isn't provocative....it's pitiful and childish. Own it.
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SFC (Join to see)
To have this subject of race even brought up is ridiculous. Regardless if the original article is true or not, I find it terrible this was brought up. Some time people need to be reminded what this flag represents.
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He failed to make his point. Great history lesson...even though he spun some of the facts. Overall useless and a waste of time. The Confederate flag represented a time of slavery...that's obvious. He didn't convince me why the POW flag COULD be considered racist.
Conclusion: More of an Op Ed piece than a scholarly article.
Conclusion: More of an Op Ed piece than a scholarly article.
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Cpl Gabriel F.
The Confederate flag that has bee incorrectly demonized was one of several Confederate flags used during the war between the states. The one you are most likely thinking of was the first Confederate battle flag not the stars and bars national flag. Adopted from the flag of Saint Andrews as a battle flag it did not and does not represent slavery. The flag was used in battles fought by men that did not own slaves or even support slavery and whose grandfathers fought against the British Crown for the same reasons. Unlike the POW/MIA Flag that most folks with a little knowledge of history understand the POW/MIA Flag does not represent racist views the demonetization of the Confederate flag was made so by the same type much easier. If one defended the Confederate States of America or the flying of the flag those folks must be racist. General Robert E. Lee CSA never owned a slave. His wife inherited slaves from her father along with Arlington. Yes, the property confiscated by the federal government where union soldiers were unceremoniously buried that has now became Arlington National Cemetery.
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No, I do not think so, but I have never heard that line of thinking before. I think I need to do some research. Sounds like conspiracy theory, and those theories surround every event in history. They only ones who really know if there are in fact real MIAs... in Vietnam... would be those were there.
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TSgt Joshua Copeland
Does this mean I'm going to have to remove the POW/MIA patch from my motorcycle vest?
I think not!
Does this mean I'm going to have to remove the POW/MIA patch from my motorcycle vest?
I think not!
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It is disgraceful to dishonor POWs and MIAs from any war. There are troops out there now still searching and conducting recovery missions of remains throughout the Pacific region to hopefully bring closure to their families. Stating the POW/MIA Flag is racist and hurtful is completely uncalled for. The enemy does not discriminate on who they captured based off of race, religion, or personal backgrounds. They were captured simply because they were American. The same goes for MIAs as well. The U.S. Armed Forces as a whole is the most diverse workforce in the world and the least racist and/or prejudice in my humble opinion. Although we all raised our right hand to support and defend the Constitution which includes this knucklehead's right to free speech does not mean we have to like what he says.
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MSgt Gilbert Jones
I have been reading a lot of the comments made here and the real problem I see is not the article written but what is really important to all of you today with what is happening to our country and possible freedom. We have a Command and Chief who doesn't know his head from his butt, who feels the constitution doesn't apply to him and he can do whatever he wishes. What really is bad is we have part of our government that don't care what he does, but only interested in staying in office. I don't know for what reason you served in the military but I served to protect our freedom and flag, not to have someone come along who is only interested in becoming a ruler or king or whatever. If you have to bitch, then bitch about what is happening to our country. Come on people, wake up to what is really happening, it doesn't matter what race or color you are we are all Americans, and we are one big family. Don't let hatred destroy our county. Stalin said that America wouldn't be destroyed from the outside but from within, and that is what is happening right now.
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I think we're all misinterpreting the accusation here. To me it's obvious that the article writer is talking about the Asian man in the watchtower. The flag is OBVIOUSLY racist towards Asians. They are not spiteful overlords, as this flag would have you believe...
There, did you giggle a bit? Just trying to bring a little light-heartedness to a heavy conversation. :)
There, did you giggle a bit? Just trying to bring a little light-heartedness to a heavy conversation. :)
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If people knew the full history of the POW/MIA flag they would be less likely to fly it on the same pole with the American Flag if at all; and it has nothing to do with racism.
In short, the origin of the POW/MIA flag is the National League of POW/MIA families, an organization that represents the family of POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War. The flag was intended to convey the message that Vietnam continued to hold live Americans following Homecoming in 1973. A claim for which there has never been any credible evidence and which has been thoroughly investigated for years by Congress, the Federal Government and objective independent investigators. Between the end of the Vietnam War and The beginning of the Reagan Administration, the Carter Administration contributed to the myth by not reaching out to the NLF and sharing classified intelligence with them. When president Reagan came to office he made resolving the POW/MIA issue a top priority and reached out to the NLF, conceding to many of their demands and requests. With this came the acceptance of their NFL flag.
In 1992 and 1993, when I was the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/MIA affairs, at the behest of the Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs, President George H.W. Bush directed the declassification of "all" Vietnam era classified documents regardless of classification. My office reviewed millions of documents and declassified them, redacting only sources and methods information. This extensive process and two years of Senate Hearings chaired by Senators John Kerry and Bob Smith resulted in no evidence that Vietnam retained live POWs/MIAs. In other words the symbolism was there for political purposes--to promote the NLF's agenda.
Don't get me wrong, I worked directly with the leadership and members of the NFL during my tenure and have great respect for them because of the visibility they brought to the issue. Given all the false information flying around at the time, they had good reason to believe that Vietnam may be holding live POWs. Nevertheless, I question the appropriateness of the images in the flag today. Remains of more than 80,000 remain unrecovered from WWII and subsequent wars. Live POWs from the Gulf War and subsequent wars have all been known and accounted for. Now if you want real controversy a good look at POWs and MIAs from the Korean War have never been adequately investigated.
http://ewross.com/the_pow_mia_dilemma.htm
http://ewross.com/John_McCain.html
In short, the origin of the POW/MIA flag is the National League of POW/MIA families, an organization that represents the family of POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War. The flag was intended to convey the message that Vietnam continued to hold live Americans following Homecoming in 1973. A claim for which there has never been any credible evidence and which has been thoroughly investigated for years by Congress, the Federal Government and objective independent investigators. Between the end of the Vietnam War and The beginning of the Reagan Administration, the Carter Administration contributed to the myth by not reaching out to the NLF and sharing classified intelligence with them. When president Reagan came to office he made resolving the POW/MIA issue a top priority and reached out to the NLF, conceding to many of their demands and requests. With this came the acceptance of their NFL flag.
In 1992 and 1993, when I was the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/MIA affairs, at the behest of the Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs, President George H.W. Bush directed the declassification of "all" Vietnam era classified documents regardless of classification. My office reviewed millions of documents and declassified them, redacting only sources and methods information. This extensive process and two years of Senate Hearings chaired by Senators John Kerry and Bob Smith resulted in no evidence that Vietnam retained live POWs/MIAs. In other words the symbolism was there for political purposes--to promote the NLF's agenda.
Don't get me wrong, I worked directly with the leadership and members of the NFL during my tenure and have great respect for them because of the visibility they brought to the issue. Given all the false information flying around at the time, they had good reason to believe that Vietnam may be holding live POWs. Nevertheless, I question the appropriateness of the images in the flag today. Remains of more than 80,000 remain unrecovered from WWII and subsequent wars. Live POWs from the Gulf War and subsequent wars have all been known and accounted for. Now if you want real controversy a good look at POWs and MIAs from the Korean War have never been adequately investigated.
http://ewross.com/the_pow_mia_dilemma.htm
http://ewross.com/John_McCain.html
THE POW/MIA DILEMMA - EWRoss.com
The Pentagon’s activities to account for over 80,000 Americans missing in action from World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War were back in the news last week. This time it was about an internal report by Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) employee Paul Cole. In it, Cole asserts that DoD’s POW/MIA accounting is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from “dysfunctional to total failure.” When I...
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PO1 David Jordon
with all due respect, sir............
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/01/03/Agent-says-Vietnam-POWs-were-shipped-to-Russia/ [login to see] 800/
http://kpows.com/thesoviets.html
http://www.vvof.org/rhupdate.htm
now that may be a lot of hoopla to you. and i don't know for sure if these reports are true. but i will say this. as long as there is MIA'S and reports of this kind, and until EVERY person who went to Vietnam is accounted for. i will STILL FLY THAT FLAG. that flag is a reminder for us to never forget ANY POW/MIA that never came home.and there are still good people who are not accounted for.so the flag still flies.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/01/03/Agent-says-Vietnam-POWs-were-shipped-to-Russia/ [login to see] 800/
http://kpows.com/thesoviets.html
http://www.vvof.org/rhupdate.htm
now that may be a lot of hoopla to you. and i don't know for sure if these reports are true. but i will say this. as long as there is MIA'S and reports of this kind, and until EVERY person who went to Vietnam is accounted for. i will STILL FLY THAT FLAG. that flag is a reminder for us to never forget ANY POW/MIA that never came home.and there are still good people who are not accounted for.so the flag still flies.
Agent says Vietnam POWs were shipped to Russia
A retired intelligence officer for the National Security Agency claimed in a report published Friday that North Vietnam shipped as many as 300 American...
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