Book: We Left POWs Behind in Vietnam

NewsMax.com ^ | May 29, 2007 | Phil Brennan,

[kellynla]

Unless you are prepared to learn how your government callously abandoned hundreds of your fellow Americans to decades of continued imprisonment at the hands of their brutal captors and jailers in Vietnam and Laos, you may prefer to ignore America's shame and avoid reading this shocking book.

Read it you must, however.

America needs to know about one of the sorriest chapters in our history, and what has to be done to make amends.

"An Enormous Crime — The Definitive Account of American POWS Abandoned in Southeast Asia" is a bone-chilling account of one of those crimes that call to heaven for vengeance. It is an incredibly well-researched documentary that spells out in frightening detail how a nation that prides itself on its compassion for others turned its back on hundreds of its own. [Editor's Note: to get your copy of "An Enormous Crime — The Definitive Account of American POWS Abandoned in Southeast Asia, Click Here Now.]

For the past 25 years, authors Bill Hendon and Elizabeth Stewart doggedly pursued the mystery of what happened to hundreds of American POWs missing in Vietnam and Laos in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Shockingly, their research has revealed that they were simply abandoned by the United States government. Then, the government devoted 30 years to keeping the fate of these men secret, according to Hendon and Stewart.

Captives Held for Ransom

In a forward to the book, the authors explain that while hundreds of Americans were captured, imprisoned and released at war's end at the so-called " ‘Operation Homecoming,' hundreds more were similarly captured and imprisoned but were held back by the communists at Homecoming to ensure payment of billions of dollars in postwar reconstruction aid promised them by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Watergate intervened, the aid was not paid, and these prisoners have never — never — been released."

While the federal government continued to deny that any POWs have been unaccounted for, Hendon and Stewart provide convincing evidence that hundreds of them have remained captive long after the end of the war. They provide evidence of hundreds of post war sightings and intelligence reports revealing that Americans were being held throughout Vietnam and Laos, yet Washington did nothing about their plight.

There were numerous secret military signals and codes which were sent by the desperate POWs themselves, yet the Pentagon still did not act. As late as 1988 a U.S. spy satellite passing over Sam Neua Province in Laos, spotted the 12-foot-tall letters "U.S.A." and immediately beneath them a huge highly classified Vietnam war-era I SAF/USN "escape and invasion" code in a rice paddy in a narrow mountain Valley.

As the authors say, tragically, the brave men who constructed these codes have yet to come home.

Among the horrifying revelations in this book:

Acting on advice of the Fidel Castro, the North Vietnamese from the very beginning of the war set out to capture American servicemen with the intent of ransoming them for postwar reconstruction aid, just as Castro had ransomed the Bay of Pigs prisoners. According to the authors, classified evidence shows that just as Castro did with the Bay of Pigs prisoners, the Vietnamese by late 1972 held more than 1,200 American Prisoners.

The U.S. pledged in accords and a secret presidential letter at the January 1973 Paris peace negotiations to pay the North Vietnamese a staggering $4.5 billion dollars to rebuild their war-damaged country. In return, the North Vietnamese promised to free all the American POWs they held. It was only after those accords were signed later that month that the North Vietnamese stated they only intended to set 577 Americans free during Operation Homecoming. Say the authors, U.S. officials privately agreed that the enemy had only released about half of all the prisoners they were holding.

One of the most shocking disclosures was that Nixon and Kissinger set out to make the promised multibillion dollar payments and obtain the release of the remaining POWs but in March of 1973 the Watergate scandal broke, rocked the Nixon White House, and the deal to get the remaining prisoners released collapsed, and Richard Nixon swept the whole thing under the rug when he blithely pronounced that the remaining POWs were dead.

For the next 15 years, the question of the fate of the remaining POWs sparked continued debate, fueled, as the authors say, by government intelligence reports about hundreds of U.S. prisoners remaining in captivity. In early 1991, the chief of the Pentagon POW-MIA office charged that the first Bush administration was covering up the whole matter. On the heels of that development, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed the former chief's charges. Then in August of 1991, the Senate created a select committee to investigate the matter of the missing POWs.

At the time, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., told reporters: "I think we are going to see a lot more prisoners were left in Laos. I simply think that — it has been true in administrations in both parties — when the peace agreements were made I think there were people involved that didn't want all the questions raised at that time . . . once they decided not to disclose that at the time of the agreement the next year they decided it was too embarrassing.

"The longer it went, the more embarrassing it got to be . . . piecemeal decisions came over a 10-year period of time. They always thought ‘well I [will] hand this on to the next guy to admit we really made a big mess.' Those who knew the truth kept handing it on. There are people, obviously in the military and otherwise, in the foreign policy establishment who are going to be embarrassed if this comes out and so they keep it secret. It has to come out, and it will."

Truth Not Be Told

Tragically, the truth did not come out, thanks, the authors charge, to two of the Committee's most powerful members, Chairman John Kerry and ex-POW Sen. John McCain. Both, the authors explain, were intent on "ending the war" and normalizing relations with Vietnam. They chose to perpetuate the cover-up rather than expose it.

Say the authors "in the end they crafted a final committee report that declared (1) the postwar intelligence on live POWs was meaningless and that (2) no POWs remained alive and (3) that there had been no government cover-up. In a lengthy chapter entitled "The Fragging" the authors examine some of that intelligence and explain in detail extraordinary measures taken by Kerry and McCain to discredit it.

Former President Clinton gets his lumps at book's end when, ignoring what the authors call "the most compelling evidence ever received by the U.S. government that hundred of POWs were never released, he went ahead and normalized relations with their jailers in North Vietnam.

Disturbing Accounts

None of this is pleasant reading, but no history of the war in Vietnam is complete without including what the authors have revealed about this sorry chapter in America's history.

That war, the authors write, will never end until all the remaining POWs are returned safely to their homeland, or all possible avenues for their release have been explored — forthrightly, honestly, and thoroughly — by what would be by any measure, the most powerful and knowledgeable U.S. negotiating team ever assembled.

That, they say is when the Vietnam War will end for many Americans and not a minute sooner.

President George W. Bush alone can make it happen they conclude. But he must act now before, God forbid, the tapping from deep inside the wreckage of Indochina finally stops.

We must act so America once again can hold its head up.

[Freee-dame]

One would think that the ones who did return could have given us names of others that they saw in prison that did not return.

I doubt that they kept any prisoners known by other prisoners to have been alive at the time of their release. It is more likely that they some kept some in isolation or in small groups in remote locations.

[Calpernia]

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