I remember news stories from the 1990’s when John MCCain Jr went to Vietnam (back to) to investigate any remaining US POWs there.
That was decades after though; so why was the “bring our POWs home” thing so long lasting from Vietnam?
Why would the (originally) North Vietnamese keep hidden pows years after the unification of Vietnam? Why did this myth last so long? I don’t get it.
I think it might have something to do with the fact that we didn’t win that war. We quit before the issues were settled, so there was a cultural feeling of incompleteness. Toss in the unknowns of jungle warfare, where bodies can just disappear into the undergrowth, and you get people feeling that there must be more of our people out there somewhere.
And because the theme was a good hook for one or two action movies, including a Rambo blockbuster, and another one I saw bits of about some vets banding together for a private rescue mission (one of them was crazy and always wore a grenade on a thong around his neck so if things ever got to be too much he could just pull the pin - imagine trying to live like that post-9-11).
Because there were quite a few MIA’s still in Vietnam when we left, and there was really no way for us to verify what happened to them…or whether or not some were still held prisoner. I mean, it wasn’t exactly an open and free society, transparent and allowing for full inspection, so questions remained. I think it was as simple as that.
-XT
Still, of what value would live POWs have been to the Vietnamese government post-war? I’d expect they’d either free them or shoot them, either is cheaper than guarding and feeding them. I don’t even see any profitable slave-labor potential, we’re talking about a country where it’s cheaper to hire free laborers (at least, in the first couple of decades after the war).
Revenge? Insurance? Possibly as further intelligence assets? Who knows?
I expect that this is exactly what they DID do. However, if it was your father or brother or son, you might want to continue to hold out hope that they were still alive but prisoners in Vietnam. That might be easier to accept than that they were shot, or died of their wounds or were simply killed and left unburied in the jungle somewhere.
I only have vague memories of the various movies about such prisoners, but I don’t remember anyone thinking that they were used as slave labor…more like just held and tortured by the Vietnamese for reasons of their own.
-XT
I always wondered how many of these MIAs just got sick of the war…and deserted…and wound up living in Thailand, Australia, etc.?
Or in Vietnam, free as anyone there.
No, it pretty clearly isn’t as simple as that, because MIAs are a feature of all wars. The phenomenon of many people being unaccounted for is a universal one in large scale wars; the Battle of the Somme alone increased Allied MIA rolls by over fifty thousand men. But it’s ONLY Vietnam that created a huge MIA mythology.
I think BG had it right; it’s because the USA lost the war. Countries usually don’t take losing wars well; it’s a blow to the national psyche, and those gurdges and refusals to accent the outcome can be carried for generations upon generations. There are countries still bitter over wars they lost before the American War of Independence; to Serbs, the Battle of Kosovo, which happened before Columbus sailed, is still a matter of serious nationalistic complaint. Keeping the MIA myth alive gave the USA the feeling that something could still be saved, even won, from that horrible disaster; hence the popularity of movies about saving Vietnam POWs, which provide the fantasy of America somehow winning Vietnam in some way.
Why would they be welcome in Australia? We were fighting in Vietnam as well, so I can’t see why deserters would think they would be greeted with open arms.
There were also active scams with false evidence and some amateur Sherlock Holmes work that convinced people there were still POWs alive. There had also been some sort of tradition of long captivity of POWs in Indochine, the French possession that is now Vietnam. This convinced people that POWs were not simply executed, and might still be alive.
Apparently, it isn’t an unheard of thing to keep prisoners for extended periods even after hostilities have ceased. This may be why the Vietnam POWs were such an issue.
Also, with the give and take, oneupmanship, walkouts, etc… that went on with all of the negotiations for peace, it isn’t unreasonable for either side to suspect that the other is holding something back as a further item to be traded…not putting all of the cards on the table, so to speak.
Additionally, I’m reminded of the one defector that we kept locked up and tortured/interrogated, for all those years. Yuri Nosenko? Perhaps the other side wants to keep and interrogate a POW that may be helpful for a few years. 5 years after hostilities cease, what, kill him? Return him? After 5 years? Quite untenable. What to do??? I don’t have a dog in the fight, so I don’t care to explore further about any of reasons, repercussions, etc… I just read something last week, and that’s why I bothered to look up the above link.
(Haven’t slept all night, so, this may be ramblesome…)
Unless there were some persons with special knowledge which would be useful to the the Vietnamese or their sponsors, say B-52 crews (who would know about plans to attack the USSR), I don’t see why the Vietnamese would keep them.
Incidentally there are what…800,000 Vietnamese still missing? Never a peep about them.
800,000 missing or deceased?
Like the legend of Yamashita’s Gold, there are some people who have made a pretty good living out of never finding anyone.
More prosaically, there have been some remains traced and handed over in recent times, mostly killed in air crashes at the time and not kept captive for no real purpose for decades.
Most losing wars that create long term resentment result in territorial cessions, though. The Vietnam war is a bit unique in that it’s one of the few (maybe only) examples of a war in which the losing side’s people universally suffered not even 1 100th the suffering of the victors, the losing side lost no territory, barely lost any strategic power or relevance (any arguable decrease in our overall strategic position was quickly offset by the Soviet boondoggle in Afghanistan) and even in terms of economic losses the United States’s losses compared to the Vietnamese is like comparing a candle flame to the fiery ball of the Sun.
It made sense the French remained bitter about the Franco-Prussian War, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was a constant reminder of that defeat. However losing an “expeditionary war” in which we never really had any skin in the game, I don’t knot that it makes sense you’d have the same type of long standing bitterness and etc about the war.
From what I’ve seen the people most likely to be bitter about the Vietnam war are the veterans who feel like they never got the appreciation that the WWII veterans received. No big parades, no respect from the public and etc. Having been around at that time I know why some veterans might feel that way (although I think from the 1990s on Vietnam veterans have received a lot of respect as people began to separate their opposition to the war from the individuals who in many cases were forced by law to join the military and wage that war.)
That last sentence carries an odor, a faint scent of rightish propaganda. There was no such “beginning”, opposition to the war did not extend to our soldiers. We didn’t blame them, we blamed the men who sent them. If you walked the crowd at an anti-war demonstration, you would have been hard pressed to find someone who didn’t personally know a Vietnam vet, or was related to one.
Further, the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War had a major impact. You could see it on the faces of people watching. First time I saw it, I was marching next to a man wearing his right sleeve pinned up over the missing arm with a Purple Heart. From where I walked, you could see down the street at men shouting epithets at the marchers. Until he got there, and then they stared in gap-jawed silence. Hit like a ton of bricks, it did.
So, no, we didn’t start coming around to respecting our veterans in the 90’s. We always did. We knew who to blame, and it wasn’t them. Returning veterans were the best allies the anti-war movement had, may the Goddess bless them and keep them close to Her warm and bountiful bosom all the days of their lives, amen.
I recalled hearing this often around the end of the war, but didn’t recall any more information on the subject. Here’s some information about French POWs held for years in Vietnam, an apparent myth that motivated concerns about MIAs.
Air Force brat. One of the explanations I most commonly heard was that MIA status carried a more generous set of benefits for dependents. That it was considered perfectly legit to imply or suggest that maybe you saw a parachute. Someone else can verify or debunk, it was a loooong time ago…
There were earlier rumors of American POW’s being held by North Korea or China after the Korean War.
I think the foundation of these rumors is that the United States historically had won its wars pretty completely. We defeated the Confederacy, Germany, and Japan and we knew that they had returned all our POW’s.
But in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we never had that control over the enemy. We had to rely of the enemy government to turn over our POW’s to us. Or in the case of POW’s who died in captivity, we had to rely on reports from the enemy government.