I came here to post Haney’s description from his book inside delta force, but this sums it up well.
I would add a couple of points to this post however. According to Haney, the assumption was that if the raid had gone down successfully, then large numbers of Americans would’ve been horrified to find that POWs were left to rot in southeast asia for years and years, and would start demanding investigations and accountability as to why US soldiers were just left there for years and years. Some higher ups in the US government didn’t want that, so someone in the government kept leaking hostage rescue plans to some paramilitary wannabe so he’d go on TV and say he was going to rescue the hostages, which jeopardized the actual delta force mission. That was the impression he gave, someone in the US government kept sabotaging the actual raid by encouraging some narcissistic paramilitary type to go on TV and say he was going to do the raid by himself, which caused the Vietnamese to tighten security and end up just killing all the hostages instead.
Also as a technicality, the hostages were supposedly kept in Laos across the Vietnamese border so that people could honestly claim ‘there were no POWs in Vietnam’, because there weren’t, they were being held in Laos across the border.
Haneys book also has interesting and unrelated stories of them being sent to kill people the Delta force operators felt were actually CIA assets. The US government is big and complex.
Considering that Haney was, according his memoir, part of the team that would have rescued the POWs, it sounds pretty credible. They even did a “rescue” of American pilot trainees who were undergoing SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training so as to have realistic practice as to what rescuing the Vietnam POWs would be like - the Air Force trainees behaved very much like actual captives would. Some of the trainees cowered in fear and would not go to the rescue helicopter on their own; some others, on the other hand, had to be prevented from assaulting their SERE captors once they realized they were now free.
I’m having trouble understanding this claim. Were the Vietnamese holding U.S. POWs in Laos so American officials could “truthfully” tell their public there were no U.S. POWs in Vietnam? Or was it so the Vietnamese officials could “truthfully” say that to U.S. officials? In either case, what would be the point? Were the officials issuing the denials under a Zone of Truth Spell? If you’re secretly holding POWs in violation of the peace treaty and international law, what possible additional benefit could you get from such sophistry?
This just sounds like a story detail that might sound vaguely plausible to someone inclined to believe the story in the first place. It’s useful as a reinforcement to believers in the secret POWs, but it doesn’t sound at all like something that anyone would actually do in real life.
The whole motivation story is crazy as well. Vietnam is secretly holding American POWs to pressure the US into making reparations? Secret from whom? If the US government doesn’t know, then the POWs aren’t leverage. They’re completely pointless. If the US government does know and is keeping it secret, then the leverage would be public outrage that the government isn’t trying to get the POWs back, and the incentive for Vietnam would be to leak the existence of the POWs in such a way as to force the US govt to the table instead of continue to keep secrets from the public. In no universe is it plausible to keep prisoners in secret as leverage and then fail to use that leverage. I suppose someone might argue that Vietnam would suffer international criticism if it came out that they hadn’t released all POWs, but that would happen anyways if Vietnam succeeded in getting the reparation payments in exchange for releasing them. Unless the conspiracy theory is that they wouldn’t have released them even then, because they’re evil or something? None of it makes sense.
I read something a very long time ago now, by someone on the ground as the final troops left, I think. Military anyway. Their take was that by the end of the war there were a LOT of broken soldiers, the ones from deep Red states, with family history of honourable military service fighting for freedom. They found themselves not knowing what they were fighting for or why they weren’t winning. In the end they couldn’t face returning and facing adoration for their actions. And they couldn’t face the scorn of their community if they turned peacenik and they couldn’t face a lifetime of pretending it was about honour and freedom. Apparently some number of them just walked away near the end. The COs couldn’t bring themselves to record them, soldiers who’d given sooo much, as deserters. It was just better to call it MIA. Sightings of them, from time to time, in part gave rise to the theories the Vietnamese are holding POA’s he said, etc.
It was so long ago, over 30yrs, that I read this interview. And I admittedly cannot provide a site. But I remember it because it had the ring of truth to it, for me, and was something I had never even considered.
According to Haney’s own account, he’s basing his beliefs on something a Vietnamese government official told him. Why did this guy choose to reveal a major government secret to a member of the American armed forces?
Three explanations that are more likely than Vietnam holding American POW’s:
Haney is delusional.
Haney is lying to sell books and make money.
If the conversation did happen, it was an attempt by the Vietnamese government to spread disinformation by passing a fake story on to a dupe who was known to be open to conspiracy theories. Oliver Stone wasn’t handy so they used Eric Haney. This dupe would swallow the story, pass it on, and discredit the American government.
I had the pleasure of spending a day with VADM Stockdale in 2000 and I asked him this very question.
His answer was an emphatic ‘no.’ He had two reasons. The first was that the POWs, if they were in Vietnam, would have been held in small groups at best, or singly at worst, deep in the countryside. He felt that the opportunity of these men to survive was extremely limited due to disease and lack of medical treatment.
Secondly, he said that the Vietnamese knew the only surefire way get the the United States back in Vietnam in large numbers was for them to find POWs being held there. Vietnam wanted none of that, and were sure to either turn over POWs, or, unfortunately kill them if found.
Stone gave a talk on campus while I was in grad school (1997 or so). When the topic of Platoon and the mid-to-late-80s boom in Vietnam movies came up, he dismissed the Rambo/Delta Force/Missing In Action type of films with “I was there. I saw what the weaponry was could do to a man. The reason many soldiers weren’t recovered was once they got hit there was nothing left to recover.”
Here is a site, written by a retired Colonel who once headed part of the effort to account for all missing American military from the Vietnam (Cambodia, Laos) War. Hasn’t been updated for awhile, but doesn’t really need to be.
It’s a bunch of linked articles that go into extreme detail, and collectively explode the myth of US government abandonment. Quite a rabbit hole, so prepare to get your waders wet. (Conspiracy theories? Those guys were pikers!)
I have a great-great-grandfather who died on the Home Front in WWI. His job was patrolling train tracks to look for sabotage. He got caught in a tunnel and hit by a train. In that specific case, we know what happened to him… but it’s not hard to imagine a similar circumstance where nobody knew, just that he never came home.
Back when I was corresponding with Kathy Reichs she was part-timing with the government’s recovery and identification office in Hawaii. The Vietnamese had found an American fighter that had augered into the jungle many years before. She went over to see what she could find. An F-105 traveling full bore into the ground left the cockpit about 35’ underground and there was barely enough left of the pilot to identify him with DNA.
I did a CACO call for the Navy about twenty years ago to a family whose love one was lost in the US during WWII and was presumed lost in the Pacific. Their plane was found on Mount Rainier in Washington state as the snow and ice cover receded due to warming.