Is there any credible evidence of living POWs from the Vietnam war still being held as captives in Asia?
Not to my knowledge. It seems there was evidence of American POWs being held in North Korea in contravention of the Armistice, although I am not an authority of what that proof is.
So if we accept that the PRDRK/PRC held onto prisoners, it is not too far a stretch to think that the Vietnamese did too. (And if you accept the US/US let the North Koreans get away with it, then it is easier to accept the US also let the Vietnamese to do it too.)
On the other hand, even if POWs were being held for whatever reason, it seems that anyone in the chain of custody over the years could have killed them to eliminate any evidence. That being the case, it is easy to imagine that someone in the last however many years decided the usefulness of illegally held prisoners was at an end and killed them.
There’s no reason to believe that Vietnam held any prisoners. Understand that Vietnam is seeking closer ties with the US. The situation is nothing like the adversarial relationship between the US and North Korea.
Vietnam has been very cooperative in allowing access to resolve questions about MIA’s. Vietnam tore down most of the “Hanoi Hilton” where POW’s were imprisioned. You can say that’s just symbolic but they did it to send a clear message that they had no interest in holding any prisoners. There is very little anti-American sentiment in Vietnam, if anything the people are very pro-American.
At lot is made of the unaccounted MIA’s. What usually goes unsaid is that the Vietnamese have 100,000 MIA’s of their own. The type of warfare and the geography made it very common for soldiers to go missing. The jungle will absorb a body very quickly.
If you want a good read on modern day Vietnam I recommend “Vietnam, Now” by David Lamb.
Thank both of you for your thoughful answers. To clarify, I am wondering if there could still be living POWs, not just in Vietnam but in any country that had an involvement in that war - Cambodia, Laos, China, Russia, anywhere else. Leaving aside speculation of why a country might think there was an advantage to continuing to hold them all these years (by now the only one I can think of is not having to admit you did it), is there a reasonable case to be made that there might still be people out there?
I happened across a criticism of a book I bought, The Cage, by Tom Abrahams. He claimed to be a POW in Vietnam and his book recounts his time in captivity. The book was debunked by a POW organisation with the following to say on their site;
What about guys who simply “had enough”-and escaped/desrted to cambodia? Some of these guys wound up living in Thailand or Australia-I suspect they prefer to remain anaonymous. in any case, did the USA grant a general amnesty to all Vietnam-era deserters?
I’m not aware of any type of amnesty for deserters. Seems like I remember something about Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft dodgers, but that’s an entirely different situation.
From the above post: (Spartydog)
“Vietnam has been very cooperative in allowing access to resolve questions about MIA’s. Vietnam tore down most of the “Hanoi Hilton” where POW’s were imprisioned. You can say that’s just symbolic but they did it to send a clear message that they had no interest in holding any prisoners. *There is very little anti-American sentiment in Vietnam, if anything the people are very pro-American.” * (Italics mine)
I wish LBJ could have realized this back in the day. The war seemed SO important back then but now isn’t even a issue. How many killed, maimed, dead. For What? 
Pfft, for a lot, guy. Ever here of Pol Pot? Stalin? Mao?
What’s your point except to get the thread moved?
After the “American War” the Cambodians picked a fight with the Vietnamese and got their butts kicked. There was no alliance between the Vietnamese and the Cambodians. North Vietnam used the Russians and allowed them to fight a proxy war with us but they never liked the Russians. As soon as the Vietnamese were done with the Russians they dismissed them. There is hardly any Russian influence in Vietnam now. The Vietnamese fought with the Chinese for 1000 years. It was always about the Vietnamese having their own country and not being a colony of China, France or anybody else. Ho Che Min tried to get Truman to help him out and was rejected because Ho was a “socialist”.
In Vietnam today, English is the official second language, not French. Credit card transaction are billed in dollars, not Dong so there are no currency conversion fees. When Bill Clinton and Bill Gates visited it was like the second coming. One of the most prominent office towers in Ho Chi Min City (formally Saigon) has a huge lit up sign that says “Citibank”.
Now tell me that Vietnam is some kind of “enemy state”. We got it so wrong in fighting a war over there that no rationalization can account for the lives lost.
To update: I have since done some searching. The website of the National League of POW/MIA Families includes a list of 47 postwar sightings of live American POWs which they call “unresolved”; four are from 2001 - 2005. They provide no details, so I can’t judge their credibility. They claim the list is from the Dept. of Defense POW/MIA office, but I couldn’t corroborate. Here’s a link to the page:
http://www.pow-miafamilies.org/powmiastatistics.html
Apparently the Pentagon is convinced that there are no living Americans still being held as prisoners in SE Asia, with the symbolic “empty casket” burial of Col. Charles E. Shelton in 1994 closing the book.
If there have indeed been “live” sightings since then, why haven’t we heard about them?
It’s interest that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who was a hawk for the Viet Nam War, regardless of his motivation or rationalization) says essentially the same thing in In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy, and of course the Errol Morris documentary, The Fog Of War. Setting aside McNamara’s tendency to rationalize his decisions as the actions of a man who was just trying to be loyal to his President (something that he, at least in some ways, seems to sincerely regret), his essential point is that our reasons for being involved in Viet Nam were based on completely erroneous understandings of what was going on and what the objectives of the Viet Minh were. Communism was, as the saying goes, a red herring; Ho Chi Minh was never going to join the hated Chinese in solidarity of the Socialist brotherhood, and their associations with the USSR were nothing more than a matter of convenience for both parties. The tragedy of Viet Nam is that some many lives–the vast majority of them noncombatants–were lost over a lack of communication and dogmatically reflexive opposition to communism in any form.
Mind you, not to exonerate the Viet Minh and associated groups who often demonstrated great brutality toward opposition, but there was never a reason for carpet bombing or scorched earth assaults.
Stranger
Just wondering (maybe it really should be a separate thread) - would all that be true now if we hadn’t gone into Vietnam then?
I’m not going to pretend to be the authority on the “what if” of history but as I pointed out, and others have supported, Ho Chi Min was first and foremost a nationalist. He was the guy that inspired the Vietnamese to take control of their own country. The Vietnamese hated the French because they wanted to colonize them. Ho did not want Vietnam to be the puppet of anybody.
Ho died before hostilities ended. Yet, he was quoted as saying, “When the Americans leave we will roll out the red carpet for them. Then we will invite them back because we need their technology.” When Saigon was evacuated, the helicopters were sitting ducks yet they were not fired on. Ho’s words held.
I’d say we blew it when we didn’t make Ho Chi Min an ally. The fact that we lost 58,000 lives, spent tons of money and fractured a generation tells me that the cost was misguided not matter how you try to cut it.
To the OP: Rumor and innuendo* throughout the 80’s implied that there could indeed be POWs still alive - usually this was in Vietnam; but North Korea, Laos and China were often fingered as culprits.
Usually but not always this was presented by what most people would call the “far” (but not “fringe”) Right and became a bit of a bugaboo for them. In 1991 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigated and issued a Minority Report that allows those taking the pro-alive position to say essentially, the U.S. Government worked from the presumption that all POWs were dead and so never seriously investigated reports that POWs were alive.
Here is a guy from the middle of it the POW MIA Office calling it “Mythology Galore”
FTR the Senate Minority report says: We acknowledge that there is no proof that U.S. POWs survived, but neither is there proof that all of those who did not return had died. And that seems a fair GQ answer to the OP to me.
*Ross Perot, Jesse Helms were leaders and Bo Gritz (Who launched several missions into Laos to look) was its main poster boy. Many of the leaders had a conspiratorial bent and charged that the Pentagon, and sometimes the Bush/Reagan White House, was “covering up” the fact that POWs were still alive. Movies like Left Behind (Chuck Norris), Uncommon Valor (Gene Hackman) and Rambo II played on the theme that POWs were still alive and also helped move the idea to the mainstream.
Thank you jimmmy for your reply and links. The “mythology” site covers a lot of ground and makes for very interesting reading.
My sympathies to anyone who had a MIA/POW family member but realistically there’s no way that there are any living POW’s being held in Southeast Asia (or North Korea). Any use they served as “bargaining chips” or as a source of military intelligence ended in the 1970’s. By 1980, the only thing they would have been was a liability and risk to their captors whose potential danger increased every year. The unfortunate truth is that if any POWs were still being held by that time they (along with their guards) must have been quietly executed to ensure their captivity would never be exposed.
I was fortunate enough to interview VADM James Stockdale about eight years ago. I asked him if he thought that there were POWs still there. I was surprised to hear him say that he was sure they were not. He continued to say that he felt there was no way that they would survive in Viet Nam due to the medical issues alone. The conditions in the prison camps we terrible-yet better than the treatment in the villages. Even with the care given to the POWs, they still struggled to survive. (Yes they were tortured brutally, but the North Vietnamese still wanted them alive.) It’s hard to imagine they would have survived into the 1980s.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a few Americans decided to stay in country voluntarily and “go native.” Maybe that is the source of some of the sightings.
I think you mean “Missing In Action”.