My title is my question. Is there credible evidence that Vietnam did not return all the POWs?
None.
Are you saying the flags and bumper stickers aren’t convincing?
In his memoir, Inside Delta Force, (published early 2000s), former Delta commando Eric Haney stated that a significant number of Americans were POWs (a Vietnamese official even asked Haney post-war why the U.S. didn’t try to get their POWs back) and that there were rescue missions planned but that they were scrapped after leaks to the media jeopardized them. The explanation Haney put forth in the book was that the Vietnamese were planning to use them as hostages to demand reparation money from the U.S. government but the U.S. was thoroughly sick of anything Vietnam by then and would rather let the men die a quiet death, ignored. Haney stated in the book that the abandoning of those POWs was a rude shock to SpecOps forces, as it told them the U.S. government could very well choose not to rescue them either if they were ever captured in combat, all the more so given the secret nature of SpecOps.
What evidence does he offer?
I’d question how much Haney might have known during his Delta Force time, being born in 1952 and all; he’d have been a very junior member by say… 1975, when he was 23, and possibly not privy to all the plans and reasoning behind them like that. It’s possible that they were training for something like that and then stopped, and he’s extrapolating why combined with internal unit lore about POWs, etc…
I think that the real genesis of the whole POW myth is that unlike previous wars, the US was not left in control of the battlefield at the end of Vietnam, and the perceived large number of MIA. Similar to WWII, a whole lot of the MIA are air crew who were shot down and their bodies never found, but after WWII there was a surprisingly large effort to comb the European and Pacific battlefields and bombing targets to recover bodies.
So at the end of WWII, there was some reasonable assurance that at the end of the war, anyone not accounted for was almost surely dead, but their bodies couldn’t be found or identified, mostly because nobody knew exactly where they were shot down, bailed out, etc… And there was no question of anyone remaining in German or Japanese captivity. After Korea, there was a repatriation effort to return all the POWs who were still alive- apparently it was good enough to allay any questions of remaining unreleased POWs.
But in Vietnam, there wasn’t really an “end” to the war, and apparently the repatriation effort wasn’t enough to allay fears and doubt, so there was always that question as to whether the unrecovered air crews were alive or dead, and if they were alive, if they’d been captured and never returned. The climate of distrust of government and media at the time and afterward did not help calm that fear and doubt down either.
Also, by the end of the Vietnam war, trust in the government was at a nadir. People no longer accepted the government’s word.
Shouldn’t this be real easy to account for? There should be records of everyone who served who was shipped over to Vietnam. And there should be records of anyone who was Missing in Action. Is their a list anywhere of soldiers who went missing in Vietnam who are not accounted for?
Yes but OP is asking about undisclosed POWs still held by ‘the enemy.’ MIA = POW + KIA (+ some deserters).
There are a couple thousand MIAs even today.
All we know is that on date {something} somewhere near the village of {wherever} they disappeared. Either their ship sank, their aircraft was shot down, or they got separated from their ground combat unit. In any case, we know for sure they didn’t come back from that particular mission. And that is all we know.
Were they killed promptly by the crash, or drowning, or gunfire/ explosion? Were they wounded then died alone an hour, a day, or a week later? Were they eaten by wildlife? Were they captured by somebody ranging from an angry farmer to Viet Cong guerillas to ARVN regulars and later died or were killed? Were they still in captivity in 1980, 1990, 2021? We have zero idea today and no practical way to ever find out more.
I think you meant NVA regulars; I doubt many U.S. troops were captured by the Army of the Republic of [South] Viet Nam…
D’oh! :smack: Yeah. You can tell I wasn’t there. Too young.
Exactly. I saw something the other day about Dorothy Marian Shelton. Her husband was a POW shot down over Laos, but apparently died during his captivity. She became convinced he was still alive. Her efforts resulted in her husband being the last American still listed as a POW instead of KIA (he was finally declared dead at the request of his children). Ultimately, she shot herself. It was all so sad and I became curious what evidence there was that some servicemen were kept as POWs after the war. I certainly can understand why she held out hope.
Unless one is found, it can’t be proven.
True. And even if one is found, that says nothing of the fate of the other ~2000.
Yes, it increases the likelihood. But from one nebulous controversial probability to the same nebulous controversial probability plus a nebulous controversial incremental probability.
No satisfying answers lie in that direction.
Well, if one is found, I think it does more than incrementally increase the likelihood. It’s like the 99 foot tall man. A 100 foot tall man seems like an impossibility. But if you find a 99 foot tall man, while it doesn’t prove the possibility of a 100 foot tall man, it sure seems like it does a lot more than incrementally increasing the odds.
There is no obvious reason why Vietnam would continue to hold such people, if they were still alive (and they would be very old by now).
Of course a lot of people have made a good living out of never finding anyone (c.f. 'Yamashita’s Gold).
Yeah, that’s what’s so sad, an entire industry sprung up to give people false hope.
“MIA” is government-speak for “we have no clue what happened.” As such, anybody listed as MIA is “accounted for” only in a bureaucratic, only-on-paper sense, and not in any real-life sense.
I understand MIA means they haven’t recovered the body. About half the original MIA figures were known to have been killed in action:
From the link in the 2nd post:
A 1991-93 congressional investigation by John McCain and John Kerry found, “no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.” Currently the Department of Defense spends $110 million per year tracking down MIAs. The majority of the 150 or so newly identified each year are from wars before Vietnam. Vietnam War POW/MIA issue - Wikipedia