Anywhere we could read or view it? Stockdale was a really interesting man - and I mean that completely sincerely. It’s a shame he is perhaps most often remembered for the 1992 election.
Be more careful with terminology. A known POW cannot be MIA. An MIA might be an unknown POW, or a deserter, or a refugee, or even someone somehow surviving on their own in the wild. Or long dead.
But the one thing an MIA cannot be is a known POW.
There might have been a defector or two (in fact there was one), and I am sure we could have done a better job of getting bodies back, but I concur - no live POWs.
They never asked for any.
Most, but not all POWs were actually held by the Chinese. On the one hand against secretly holding POWs after the war there’s the fact that 21 American and 1 Briton refused repatriation after the war. On the other hand, Cho Chang-ho escaped captivity in 1994 after being held by North Korea for 43 years, though North Korea keeping South Korean POWs after the war has more internal logic to it.
For what it’s worth, my opinion on the post-Vietnam POW/MIA issue is that the level of distrust in the American government to be honest about anything related to the war was a big factor in it. Regardless of one’s political leanings, the level of bad faith demonstrated by the US government during the entire course of American involvement in Vietnam was off the charts, from the Pentagon not believing the war was winnable virtually from the outset to public statements of the “light at the end of the tunnel” and the communists being ‘unable to conduct offensives’ right before Tet in 1968, to the Nixon administration having to strongarm the South Vietnamese government into agreeing to the Paris Peace Accords ‘ending’ the war in exchange for a worthless promise to return if the accords broke down.
This is a long running conspiracy theory popularized by movies like Rambo (whichever one was about rescuing POWs). It is not fact.
Agree w @Dissonance.
Both Watergate and darn near everything about the US involvement in Viet Nam shoved a huge wedge between ordinary mainstream citizen thinking and the federal government.
Americans prior to that time were not necessarily in love with their government, but they did not view them as inherently incompetent or inherently untrustworthy. All that was changed by Watergate & Viet Nam.
That loss of trust in government’s essential honesty and essential goodness (net of some rough edges) really opened the floodgates to CT-style thinking and a cottage industry duly sprang up to supply CTs in magazines and paperbacks. Some of which were about then-current events as they randomly occurred, and more of which were about events in then recent past, say 10-30 years ago then. e.g. The JFK assassination CTs had a lot more takers in the late 1970s than they did in 1965 a few months after the Warren Commission released their report. Why? Viet Nam and Watergate. Nothing to do with new evidence or JFK or the shooting itself. Same data, different Zeitgeist.
CT belief has exploded since the WWW enabled CT-sellers to readily access a credulous audience. And enabled credulous individuals to find one another to reinforce their wackiness.
Another issue IIRC was which PoW’s survived capture and were killed (or died) afterwards, the implication being the evil commies just got off on killing American airmen instead of keeping them for leverage.
I recall a discussion with someone from the US military(?) who was working with Vietnam after the war to help find and identify the remains of MIA’s. He mentioned one clue was if an airman died in a crash (instead of ejecting) then the sides of their shoes were blown out from the pressure from body fluids after a sudden stop at 600mph.
But basically, the Vietnamese and Americans did indeed work to try to recover remains of MIA’s after the war. presumably if irate soldiers had killed a captured airman or they were tortured to death, and the evidence would have been obvious, the Vietnamese would have a motivation to hide the body.
Maybe those buildings are part of the Department of Defense.
Yep, that was hammered home in “Rambo: First Blood Part II” - Vietnam was keeping the POWs in shitty jungle camps just so they could keep torturing them - any useful information they had would have been far, far out of date by the 1980s, but they kept torturing them anyway.
It’s quite literally a Federal Law that the POW/MIA flag be flown daily over many federal facilities, including the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon, major military bases, VA facilities, National Cemeteries, and Post Offices.
Local villagers may have had even more motivation than any local soldiers. And just dumped the American’s remains wherever they dump the debris from dead farm critters.
Of course nobody in the village ever told the local authorities a thing. Why bother?
A vet friend of mine replied to the title question, “I think they are too damn mean for any POWs to be left alive”.
I wasn’t there during the war, but I’ve spent some time teaching in Vietnam and everyone is very gracious about having won.
For the Vietnamese, America was just one war. Right before America, it was fighting off France. Then right after America, it was fighting off China.
To us, it was the war, but to them it was just one in a series.
And before France, it was Japan?
I recall that part of the resistance against the Japanese occupation was led by a fellow called Ho Chi Minh. In fact, the Americns were very grateful for his help, and in return he expected them to let Vietnam become an independent nation. Instead, the Americans handed it back to France.
I watched the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War just before I visited Vietnam briefly in 2019. I didn’t know much about the history prior to the US involvement, and my biggest take-away is how Ho Chi Min tried to get help from anyone, at all, to make Vietnam independent. He ended up going Communist largely because the Soviets were the only ones who would give him the time of day.
If almost anyone else had given him a chance, the history of that period would have been very different.
Ho was a Communist long before the Japanese occupation, and he would’ve remained a committed one no matter who was helping him.
If handled correctly, he could have been a thorn in Mao’s side as much as Tito was in Stalin’s. But in McCarthy-era USA, red was only seen in one shade.
Yeah, Ho Chi Mihn was a communist. He was also a nationalist. He went communist all the way back in his education in France in 1919, he was a founding member of the French Communist Party and the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1930. He didn’t just turn to communism because they were the only ones willing to give aid to him post-WWII. As @Slithy_Tove notes, the problem was communism was seen at the time as Communism with a capital C, a monolith being directed by Moscow with no shades to it.
Handled differently, Ho was probably a nationalist first and a communist second. But communism wasn’t seen that way, and supporting France in the emerging Cold War was (understandably) seen as being far more important than the nationalistic desires of a colony in Southeast Asia that most American policy makers couldn’t even find on a map.
Its also just the human desire for hope. If someone has a love one who is listed as MIA, they hold out hope that somehow they are still alive being held somewhere and so unable to contact you. Even after the war is over and everyone else comes back some still hold onto that the hope that they are somewhere out there and can be rescued even if its totally irrational. To give up on that hope is to give up on them.
That’s why I pointed out that after most of the pre-WWI wars, the US or allies controlled the battlefields and/or enjoyed much greater trust from the populace. So the family of someone who was MIA after WWI, WWII or Korea could reasonably expect that the government had done what it could to find their loved one, and that if they were MIA, they were legitimately MIA, and probably dead.
After Vietnam, there was a lot less trust in the government which was coupled with the fact that the North Vietnamese held the “battlefield” (the vast, vast majority of MIA after WWI have been aircrews), and there was no way of verifying by finding the crash site, etc.
So there was fertile ground for the more conspiracy theory-minded to believe that some proportion of the MIA weren’t people whose planes crashed in the mountains and nobody saw where, or who bailed out and died somewhere on the ground, but rather were captured and held by the NVA. I mean, it could have happened I guess, but logically, there was nothing in it for the North Vietnamese, and Occam’s Razor points toward it being unrecovered plane crashes that nobody knew where they were, not long-term prisoners in hidden jungle prisons deep in the Vietnamese jungle somewhere.
I’ve never transcribed it or posted it I’m afraid.