Vietnam POWs
The war in Vietnam was one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history. Many soldiers who weren’t killed were taken as prisoners of war, or POW’s. Often, these prisoners were tortured and not given the bare necessities of life by their captors. After the Vietnam War ended, many of these soldiers were released and were able to tell their story. However, many Americans who fought in the war are still unaccounted for, and some people believe that their still are POW’s in captivity today.
I can assume that these soldiers were profoundly affected, both physically and psychologically. Even the men who weren’t taken prisoner were never quite the same when they came back to America. For the POW’s, the problem is much worse. They must never have been sure of when, or even if, they were going to be released. They didn’t even know if the war was over.
With this I-Search paper I will convince you that the US should risk damaging diplomatic relationships in order to rescue Vietnam POW’s.
After the Vietnam War, the United States government turned its back on POW’s. There are several reasons why they did this, but none of them are valid. Now it is time to risk damaging diplomatic relationships in order to rescue them. We owe it to our soldiers, who have been put through non-stop physical and psychological tortures. We negotiated for their release, yet we failed to recover them. Our government has mountains of data supporting the survival to this day of those captured in war, but no action has been taken. Diplomatic relations today are at a point where a peaceful POW recovery can occur. The time is now to recover our POW’s who we lost three decades ago.
One of the biggest reasons we owe a rescue to our POW’s is the physical and psychological tortures they went through. The Vietnamese used a combination of sleepless nights, excruciating conditions, mental warfare, and isolation to beat their prisoners into submission. An article by Thomas Moe states that torture was “methodically applied pain to produce a wearing effect”. I can’t imagine what these soldiers must have felt, and are still feeling to this day. They do not know whether they are the last Americans, or if there still hundreds more. They do not know whether their families are still alive, or even if their families care about them anymore. A representative for a POW/MIA association says soldiers are “left to his own devices”, with no one to turn to (Andi). When people are in their own little world, their mind can begin to do amazing things to them. They can begin to go insane. When you factor in the physical torture, things become much worse. Soldiers were left sitting on a freezing stool in winter for 10 straight days, forced to wear long pajamas in the Vietnam summer, and exposed to mosquitoes (Moe). When you combine the two, the pressure becomes too much. Soldiers go into a state of breakdown. We owe it to our POW’s to rescue them from this torture, even if it means damaging diplomatic relations.
To understand why POW’s must be rescued at any cost, we must first understand which POW’s have already been released. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were the representatives for their respective countries at the peace negotiations at the end of the Vietnam War (Andi). The Vietnamese arranged for certain POW releases, in an effort to win the favor of the Americans (Benton). According to George Herring, a 1973 peace agreement permitted the US to leave the war and called for the return of 250 POW’s (250). However, the US “lost control” of the list of POW’s who were to be released (Andi). As you can imagine, this was a tremendous blow to our country. We were being offered our POW’s back and we couldn’t even manage the recovery of them. We I can think of no greater reason to rescue those who are remaining than to make up for the 30 years of their lives they lost as the result of some bureaucratic mishaps. Despite our mismanagement, some POW’s were still returned. The first planeload arrived in the US on February 12, 1973, at Travis Air Force Base (AII POW). Even so, many American POW families are outraged with the recovery (Waller 50). The CIA began to feel the pressure, too, and informed Hanoi that they were unhappy with the methods and speed of POW releases. These releases, to the Vietnamese at least, were almost entirely political moves. President Nixon, on the other hand, wanted to sign a treaty containing “peace with honor” for the US (Herring 250). North Vietnam released POW’s while President Nixon was seeking re-election, perhaps only to prove that his war policy was doing nothing (Benton). While manipulating the lives of soldiers may have been easy for the Vietnamese, the Americans were put in a much more difficult situation. According to Cora Weiss (INTRO), Co-Chair Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (INTER), “no American can negotiate for the release of prisoners.” (Benton) She is referring to the difficulty that an American citizen can have with trying to negotiate the release of one of his fellow citizens. He feels the need to end the war (IND), and yet he sees the need to rescue the POW. The United States decided that ending the war was more important (IND), and that is why we are still debating the POW issue thirty years later.
We have an obligation to rescue POW’s today because we have reliable intelligence which tells us almost definitely that they are still alive. According to the AII POW website (INTRO), the Senate Select committee on POW’s found that soldiers have been held continuously and remain in captivity in Vietnam and Laos. Our government knows there are POW’s out there. Furthermore (INTRO), the government has had over 20,000 reports of POW sightings in Southeast Asia (Statistics). This is an extraordinary number. Can you imagine KNOWING that your own people are being held in captivity (IND), and then not even taking action? The US does just that. Inaction is bad enough (IND), but the government goes one step further. The Pentagon says the Defense Department has never had reliable intelligence on whether Americans are still alive (Waller). This is ludicrous. We then must begin to wonder why the US would want to cover up living POW’s in Vietnam. There are several reasons why it would do this. One of the greatest reasons may be the fact that POW’s have been transferred to other countries such as China and the former Soviet Union (Andi). This would make a recovery mission difficult if not impossible. Also, according to Andi, a website administrator, by admitting today the existence of these POW’s (which sound strangely similar to UFO’s), the government would be admitting that it had lied, and would then be constantly under suspicion (which sounds strangely similar to Bill Clinton). The most heinous reason to ignore our government intelligence would be that the government simply doesn’t care. GI, what soldiers are called, stands for Government Issue. This places them in the same category as “boots [and] bullets” (Andi). The government is willing to accept the loss of soldiers as an excuse to end the war. Now we must disabuse these beliefs and rescue our POW’s.
One half of my main thesis of this paper was to describe the diplomatic relationship between the United States and other Southeast Asian countries. There are two divergent schools of thought on this subject. One, such as the AII POW website, says relations with Vietnam have been “a dismal failure…on every level” (All POW). Others, such as President Bill Clinton, believe relations have improved tremendously, to the point where he will be making a visit to Vietnam sometime in 2000, the first US President to visit the land in decades (AII POW). Which thought process you subscribe to greatly modifies the way you see the POW debate. If you see relations as a failure, then you see the need to take physical action and make a rescue attempt, since there is nothing to lose. If you see relations as successful, then you might think that a recovery would only weaken those relationships, and that the successes of such a mission would be minimal. You also might think that these relationships would make any POW recovery far easier. The latter seems to be the most prevalent view. Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand want to help the United States in recovery of POW’s in Vietnam, and Laos, thought not through violence (AII POW). These efforts could be helped by the August 1999 trade agreement between the US and Hanoi (AII POW). Hopefully this will bring about cooperation on accounting for missing soldiers. Another act of government, the “Bring Them Home” Act of 1999, allows nationals of POW-holding countries to receive refugee status if the nations return POW’s (AII POW). Although it is unlikely that this will ever happen, it shows that the government is, at the very least, thinking about POW’s. Of course the ultimate expression of the United States viewpoint would come from a high-ranking official. Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State, says the recovery of POW’s are more important than trade or economic issues, adding “the [POW’s] remain paramount to the United States” (AII POW).
Recovering POW’s is something that we must do not because it is vital to the interests of our country. After all, we are talking of perhaps of only 100 or 200 men. Instead, it is something we must do because we are morally obligated. The men were put in torturous conditions, where they were battered into submission. Then, at the end of the war when we negotiated for their release, we failed to recover them. We can recover them now, however, because of the reliable information we have gathered. Instead, though, our government has once again denied any intelligence on this subject. This very same government has improved diplomatic relationships, making now the perfect time to recover our lost soldiers.
The number one thing that I learned from this project was time management. To wit, there was none. To be honest, I wrote this paper on a time crunch. I had ample time to write it, but fell into a trap of complacency. Hopefully I won’t have to go through that again.
As for the topic of POW’s, I didn’t learn that much. I was fairly well familiar with all of the subject matter, although I had never studied it extensively. It was interesting, though, to present the information in an argument as opposed to a “report”.
Another good part of this project was the interview. I made it a little bit easier on myself, or so I thought, by conducting it through e-mail. I learned, unfortunately, that many people will not reply, or will reply at the last possible moment. They must have the same time management skills that I do.
Works Cited
“All POW/MIA” Online. Internet. 27 December 1999. Available http://www.aiipowmia.net.
Andi. Personal interview, website administrator. 4 January 2000.
Benton, Nelson. “Hanoi’s Release of Three POW’s.” Audiocassette. Columbia Broadcasting System, 1972.
Herring, George. America’s longest war: the United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: Wiley, 1979.
Moe, Thomas. “Pure Torture.” Online. Internet. 15 January 2000. Available http://nd.edu/~ndmag/moew95.html
“Statistics.” Online. Internet. 23 December 1999. Available http://www.asde.com/~pownet/statistics.htm
Waller, Douglas. “The Americans Left Behind.” Time. 17 October 1994: 50.
Winston, Lord. “U.S.-Vietnam POW/MIA Progress : Lifting the Embargo.” U.S. Department of State Dispatch. 28 February 1994: 105.