I’m not sure if this the right place to ask this so if it isn’t please move it mods. I’m currently reading The Women by Kristin Hannah. One of the things she said in the book was that the US government at one time during the Vietnam war had denied there were any POWs. Now I know it’s a work of fiction but some of the things she wrote were true. Is this? I’ve tried looking it up and they lied about a great deal but I can’t find this specific lie.
Not really but kinda. After the war, after the peace settlements and all the on site investigations, Vietnam returned a lot of POWs- about 600- After that, the US Government said there were no longer any left alive.
Years and decades of "recovery missions "and non-governmental investigations failed to turn up any living Servicemen.
They did find a few bodies, iirc.
The book Inside Delta Force, by former Delta commando Eric Haney, goes into significant depth about this topic. Haney states that the US government knew there were American POWs still MIA in Vietnam, and furthermore, that the North Vietnamese knew the Americans were aware of the existence of such POWs. The North Vietnamese were most likely hoping to extract concessions from America the way they did from France years earlier. However, the US government did not want to trade concessions in return for the POWs (because America was so sick and tired of the Vietnam War by that point) so the POWs were abandoned.
Since the publication of Inside Delta Force in 2002 and Haney’s subsequent success with The Unit television show, three of his former Delta colleagues accused him of embellishing his accomplishments within the unit and fabricating several of the events depicted.
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This has been a very common conspiracy theory, especially back in the 1980s. One of the Rambo movies (part 2 I think) even used it as the basis for the movie’s plot. There were several other movies and TV shows that featured missing POWs as part of the plot.
There are a lot of stories about POWs left alive in Vietnam, but they are usually from an unreliable source. Companies were making lots of money from families of MIA soldiers by promising to find them alive and bring them home, but no live soldiers were ever brought home.
Did the U.S. government intentionally lie? It’s difficult to prove one way or the other, but so far no one has found any proof that they did.
Could the U.S. government have pushed harder to resolve MIA issues? Probably. Would any more live POWs have been found? Hard to say for certain, but probably not. As much as people want it to be true, there is just no evidence to support the live POW theories.
This is one of those things that is accepted to be true by a lot of folks, with no real proof behind it. Their acceptance is based on popular culture and little else. It’s not as common now as it was back in the 1980s, but there are still plenty of folks out there who believe it.
I can’t imagine why, after it was all over, the Vietnamese would want to keep any POWs. I’d think they would return them or kill them and tell the US that soldier had already perished.
There is no upside to the Vietnamese to keep POWs after it was over and done with.
If the Vietnamese wanted concessions in return for the hostages, why hide them from the American public? Governments don’t care about hostages - voters care about hostages.
I haven’t read or heard about the book, so maybe I’m missing some context here, but the idea that the US would deny that there were any POWs during the Vietnam war while it was actively going on is absurd. It saw the longest held US POWs, at 9 years, house at what was dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. North Vietnam enjoyed putting them in front of the camera, leading to the famous incident of Jeremiah Denton giving a bizarre, stiff series of responses to his interviewer about how well they were all being treated and fed. What they didn’t catch onto was he was blinking the word “torture” in morse code.
Yes, that was my question. Thanks.
Given a choice between the preposterous and the mundane, a lot of people will always opt for the former.
This whole story seems so obviously false to me. What possible reason would the Vietnamese have for keeping it secret? I mean how did the negotiations go, something like this:
Vietnamese government: Hey evil American capitalists, we have a bunch of your people in captivity. If you want them back you need to give us all these concessions.
US government: nahh we are just going to keep it secret and give you nothing at all. Suck it
VG: Damn, that’s us foiled. As there is no way to publicly prove to the world we have all these prisoners, by say, having them speak at a press conference in front of the worlds press. We will just have to keep the whole thing secret for the next few decades. Grrr cunning capitalists shakes fist
Its patently unbelievable.
It’s pretty special that way.
All CTs require a wildly improbable ability to keep hard-to-hide facts secret. This is the only one I know of which requires the cooperation of a party who would have a strong interest in breaking the secrecy and are beyond the normal power of the conspiracy to silence them (as a sovereign nation already in active warfare).
A real head-shaker.
I guess I didn’t express what I was looking for very well. Which is not surprising if you know me. Dissonance was the only one who got it. I’ve read all about the Pentagon Papers and I knew about the conspiracy theories over POWs still incountry. What she said in the book was that the US had denied there were ANY POWs during a part of the war. Which just doesn’t seem possible to me but again we didn’t have internet and all the available ways for people to find out things either.
The only logic I can think of that would make plausible sense for a CT would be something like this:
The Vietnamese Communists have, say, 200 American POWs in their possession. Yet they know that if they publicize this fact, it would not lead to the U.S. government giving them concessions for it, but rather, inflame the U.S. public into demanding sanctions or some other way to penalize Vietnam in order to coerce the release of the hostages (in return for Vietnam getting nothing.)…at a time when VIetnam was getting invaded, or about to get invaded, by China (a huge neighbor that was a problem for Vietnam for a much longer time than the USA was.)
Even then, such a CT argument is full of holes (wouldn’t Vietnam be best able to curry favor with the USA and get America to be its ally against China by freeing the POWs publicly as a good-will gesture)?
I feel like this whole MIA nonsense after the end of the Vietnam War was an outgrowth of the rising distrust in government at that time (post-Watergate most likely) coupled with the fact that we did NOT retain control of the battlefields after the end of the war.
I mean there are many times more MIA from WWI and Korea, and orders of magnitude more from WW2, and there was never the outcry about them like there has been about Vietnam. Why? Probably because in most of those cases, the US or allied forces had control of the battlefields and families could be assured that all reasonable efforts took place to find the MIA.
But after Vietnam, the US didn’t have control of the battlefields and people trusted the government a lot less, and it was a lot easier to fantasize that the North Vietnamese had Americans imprisoned in bamboo shacks in 1980, than it would have been in 1947 to imagine anything similar for aircrew downed over Germany in 1943.
I don’t think there were actually any POWs kept for any reasonable amount of time post war. What would the Vietnamese get from doing that? They could either embarrass the US by trotting them out, or they could piss off the administration of the day and get some sort of retribution exacted on them. There isn’t any situation where the silent long-term captivity of US prisoners makes a lot of sense. It would have cost them money and left them exposed to unwanted political and military attention from the US.
It occurs to me that you could have plausibly seen a similar POW issue raised after the Korean War since North Korea controlled half of the Korean peninsula and it was plausible to believe that North Korea could have had American POWs MIA in North Korea and refuse to release them (America has no jurisdiction or ability to search inside NK), but there wasn’t any Korean MIA POW conspiracy theory either.
I think it’s because Vietnam was the first major American defeat and the public needed a direction to vent the upset-feelings towards. What I do find odd is seeing some U.S. governmental buildings flying the Vietnam POW MIA flag. One would think those would be banned on government property for obvious saving-face reasons.
I had the honor to conduct a four hour interview with VADM(ret.) James Stockdale in 2000. I asked him this very question and I was surprised but his answer. He felt there were no POWs left in Vietnam.
I won’t recount the entire portion of the discussion, but he said when POWs were captured, they were immediately sent to the ‘authorities’ so he didn’t feel they were scattered around the county side. If they had been left in a village, the standard of health care, combined with the ‘bugs’ they would have been exposed to would have drastically shortened their life span. Lastly be felt (and he made it clear he was told by the highest levels of government) that the only thing that would bring American troops (or fire power) back to SE Asia would be for POWs to be found alive, and neither side had any reason to want that.
That’s a really bizarre claim. It wasn’t like any of this was secret. The status of American POWs during the war (like John McCain, an admirals son!) was front page news. No one was going to deny their existence.
Which phase of the war did she make this claim about do you remember? I mean I can see the US denying the North Vietnamese were treating US POW as international law says they should be treated, but denying they exist during the war makes zero sense.
That’s the flip side of the “Corrupt America” conspiracy. Vietnam was keeping POWs because they were just that evil. They enjoyed torturing them so much they just couldn’t give it up.
But in that, case, why would the US deny the existence of the POWs? Coming off a humiliating defeat in a hugely unpopular war, why not take the opportunity to show, “Look! See how E-VIL those fuckers are? We were RIGHT to bomb the shit out of them for so long! It’s the hippy-dippy commies in our own country that made it impossible for us to win, and bring them home!”