Into GQ territory: Do MIAs still get scheduled promotions up until when they are declared dead? How long does that take? Are any of the Vietnam-era MIAs still on the government payroll? How does “missing in action” differ from “missing, presumed dead?”
We stayed home on the Fourth of July this year. I watched the official celebrations from Washington, DC, on PBS. The POW/MIA flag was flying prominently directly underneath the Stars and Stripes from the flagpole atop the West Portico of the United States Capitol.
Source: U.S. Department of Defense
Technical question: Cocheo was a civilian, not a combatant. How can he be a prisoner of war?
Here’s some interesting info on the flag: http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/powday/flaghistory.htm
I sent an email to these guys asking if it is strictly for Vietnam or if other wars can hijack it. I’ll let you know if I get a response.
In at least one case, yes. In Iraq, Matt Maupin was promoted from PFC to Staff Sergeant by the schedule, as if he were not missing.
RTFirefly, am I to understand by your ??? that you didn’t know that “wingnut” was an insult? If someone you cared about ever went missing you’d surely feel the same way and you know it, so stop with the act. People who display the flag do so out of respect due the lack of knowledge of their family members’/brother-in-arms’ final disposition. Are we all wingnuts? I frequently wear a POW/MIA patch on my flight suit out of respect for all MIA/POWs, not because I think that the dastardly North Vietnamese are still holding people captive. I wish you would take stuff like that into account before you open fire.
That was not the place where I got the information that Cocheo was still listed as a prisoner of war. As I stated in the quote you took from me, he is listed as such in the Library of Congress database. The POWnetwork site had the most information about his case of what google brought up, so I added that, since I had already posted the link to the Library of Congress database.
Or are you trying to demonize the Library of Congress database cite for his being a prisoner of war, by association? And the POWnetwork site actually lists references used on their Cocheo information; if you’d like to refute the information they provide about Cocheo, feel free.
dropzone, I’m guessing that Cocheo was a civilian contractor for the US of some sort in the Vietnam war, and so probably listed as a prisoner of war because of that. It was hard to tell from what google brought up; that POWnetwork blurb was about the extent of what I found after a quick search.
The site seems to indicate that the flag encompasses the Korean War as well. But it appears from the wording of U.S. Public Law 101-355 that Americans missing and unaccounted for anywhere other than southeast Asia are out of luck.
Maybe that’s part of the answer to the OP’s question: because, while we may be trading partners with Vietnam these days, we’re still pissed at North Korea.
I daresay you could probably fly the flag in acknowledgement of other wars, and nobody would complain. They’d just laugh quietly and mock you from afar over your ignorance of flag etiquette and Congressional law, and the spirits of dead American servicemen everywhere would hate you from beyond the grave.
Actually, this brings up a significant issue: legally, any American MIAs from Iraq or Afghanistan have no official flag! They have no flag! There’s absolutely nothing to hang on a flagpole and look at, in their honor! People may be forgetting them even now!
Fortunately I have total confidence that sooner or later the government will rectify this terrible burning oversight. Personally I would have thought that the “not forgetting MIAs” sentiment was sort of implicitly encompassed by the American flag itself, but I gues not.
what about MIAs from the Spanish-American War? Are they still getting promoted?
Dude, POW/MIA from more recent wars don’t need a flag. They get magnetic ribbon decals for people to put on their cars and ruin their paintjobs.
That’s stupid. You should just fix the hole in the sheetrock.
I’ll have to remember this thread the next time some anti-war lefty tries to put on an earnest face and claim “Oh, I support the troops, they’re just doing their duty, it’s the war I’m against”.
This article is pretty interesting on the different sides of “full accounting” and “bring them home”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/laos.html?c=y&page=1
Yes, I did.
If something bad happened to someone I knew, and were unable to speak for themselves anymore, I’d be pissed as hell if some bunch of liars with an axe to grind used my friend’s life as a tool for promoting their biased agenda.
You know me well enough to know that.
Look, if you’ve been duped by wingnuts into wearing their symbol, you’re not the wingnuts, and it’s not your fault. Ignorance happens.
Well, the owner of the email address is MIA. It came back undeliverable.
This country is flag-obsessed. It’s not enough to BE a patriot or a mourner or whatever…you have to make a big honkin’ announcement so the whole world knows how “whatever” you are. Sigh…
Thanks for the info, Duck.
As you well know, there isn’t a hell of a lot there to refute:
I’m not trying to demonize it; I have no idea whether it means anything besides ‘this is how they were once characterized.’
Multiple U.S. government commissions, beginning with the Montgomery Commission, have examined the MIA records, one by one, for plausible evidence that the North Vietnamese held U.S. prisoners after the POWs were freed in 1973. The notation of ‘PP’ on a Library of Congress database doesn’t change the reality that they found nothing particularly persuasive.
You are right that it’s probably how he qualified.
And you guys think I’m incapable of learning new things!
I hadn’t read that article since it was published. It doesn’t go into the sides as I remember, but it does talk about the effort.
The story is that a pilot goes down over Laos in 1968. We know approximately where. He says he is going to bail out and then - MIA. Don’t know what happens. His name appears on a POW list in 1972, but when the other POWs on that list were released, Masterson wasn’t - his name appears to have been there in error.
In 1993 the US was admitted into Laos to look for this guy. And they looked in again twice in 2004 and once in 2005. They find coins, they find shards of human bone, too damaged and/or small for DNA testing. They find pieces of plane (most of it has been scavenged by natives). They find parts of the parachute assembly. This work takes a large team, including someone qualified to disarm the bombs that they find - the ones that had been attached to the plane. Its archeology. They find both sets of dogtags and parts of the service pistol and the steel instep from his boot. It looks to everyone that he never bailed out.
They turn over this information to his wife whose says “he’s still out there alive in a POW camp in Laos.”
I think she is the kind of nutbar RT is talking about.
Even had the family gotten closure - which this family didn’t, that’s a lot of resources to throw at retrieving remains and finding out what happened 40 years ago.
Wtf? How does anything in this thread have anything to do with lefties and/or anything else at all that you seem to be talking about?
I’m sorry the alternate universe isn’t working out for you, but you’ll need to be clear when you post here on Earth. What was the sheetrock comment pertaining to? Did you post in the wrong thread??
Maybe you should read post #3 to this thread. According to Sampiro, you have a MIA/POW flag because you “had to cover that hole in their sheetrock somehow and the Confederate battle flag was too controversial.” It’s certainly not about honoring the service of brave Americans, it’s because you’re an inbread hillbilly yutz.
See Sampiro’s very offensive comment above. RTFirefly classifying anyone who displays this flag a a “wingnut”, cheerfully admitting that he is doing so with intent to insult. See an American serviceman who proudly wears an MIA/POW patch on his flight suit in recognition of the sacrifices made my his predecessors being ridiculed as having been “duped by wingnuts” and “ignorant”.