Kiss the Boys Goodbye: Summary

Kiss the Boys Goodbye by Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson presents a deeply documented case that the U.S. government knowingly left American POWs behind in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War and then orchestrated a decades-long cover-up to conceal the betrayal.

Terse Summary of Documentation:

Whistleblower testimonies from military intelligence, DIA officials, and former POWs confirm that live-sighting reports were credible and suppressed.
Intercepted communications and declassified documents reveal U.S. awareness of American captives held post-1973, especially in Laos.
Congressional inquiries were repeatedly stonewalled by the Pentagon and CIA; critical files were destroyed or classified beyond oversight.
Families of POWs were intimidated, discredited, or denied information; public officials lied to maintain the official narrative of “no man left behind.”
Henry Kissinger’s negotiations are shown to have deliberately excluded accounting for missing men in the Paris Peace Accords to expedite withdrawal.

Conclusion: The Stevensons document a cold, bureaucratic betrayal—a national scandal buried under layers of disinformation, with American lives sacrificed for political convenience.

Sidney Schanberg: Vietnam POWs and The Killing Fields

1. The Killing Fields

Sidney Schanberg won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the fall of Cambodia and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. His work chronicled the atrocities committed during the Cambodian genocide and the fate of his colleague, Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist who survived the regime's brutality.

This reporting was later adapted into the acclaimed 1984 film The Killing Fields, which dramatized the personal and political consequences of U.S. intervention and abandonment in Southeast Asia.

2. Vietnam POWs and Government Cover-Up

In his later years, Schanberg turned to investigating one of the Vietnam War’s darkest secrets: the fate of American POWs left behind in Southeast Asia.

Summary of Schanberg’s Findings:

Hundreds of American POWs were knowingly left behind after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords.
Declassified intelligence reports and eyewitness accounts confirmed the ongoing captivity of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
President Nixon and Henry Kissinger prioritized political face-saving and withdrew without accounting for all prisoners.
The U.S. government then engaged in a systematic cover-up, destroying evidence and silencing whistleblowers.
John McCain, a former POW, helped pass legislation that sealed POW/MIA files and blocked further investigation.

Schanberg’s most notable exposé, “McCain and the POW Cover-Up”, was published in 2008. It was a thoroughly documented indictment of bipartisan complicity in the betrayal of captured Americans. Schanberg called it one of the greatest moral and political scandals in modern U.S. history.

Conclusion

Sidney Schanberg’s career spanned two of the most damning case studies in U.S. foreign policy: the Cambodian genocide and the . In both, he exposed a pattern of imperial overreach, betrayal, and official deception, backed by rigorous documentation and moral clarity.