Project: Memoir

On My Honor: My Quest to Save American POWs Left Behind in SE Asia

 by Jay Sullivan

Introduction

Craig’s voice came from behind me in the tent. “What’s wrong, Jay?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I swallowed hard. The fact was, there was an AK47 pointing right at my face, and the guy behind it looked perfectly willing to pull the trigger.

I backed slowly back into the tent, pulling the zipper closed as I went. I’d go out later, I decided. When the sheriff’s bodyguard wasn’t there with an automatic weapon in his hands.

We’d already endured a lot to get where we were, camping high in the mountains in the remote Dak Cheung district of the Sekong province in southeastern Laos. We’d crossed five rivers and endured all the hardships of hiking through the jungle you can imagine to find ourselves here, and we were close to our goal when we unexpectedly ended up in an encampment with the military sheriff.

Craig and I—accompanied by a local government official and our assistant/interpreter Kayson—were on the trail of an American called John Mann. This was one of many trips we spent years making into the area in an organized attempt to locate (and rescue, if necessary and possible) American prisoners-of-war who had been long ago left behind by the government of the United States. 

Ten minutes later the military sheriff and his entourage were gone, and we were able to break camp.

There are four rules about living and doing business in Southeast Asia, rules I’d learned the hard way through long years in the region spent POW-hunting. The first rule is that nothing—absolutely nothing—is free. Number Two is that nothing is what it seems. Three is that nothing ever goes as planned. And four is that there are no coincidences. We were pretty much living rules three and four: we had hardly planned to come upon the military encampment, and the conversations he’d had with the official—an individual we were paying to show us  the location of the American—didn’t seem all that coincidental when, the next day at lunch, the official suddenly decided that the venture wasn’t such a good idea, after all. 

Kayson was apologetic. “He says the sheriff said he’d kill all of us if we go on,” he translated. “Much better to come back another time.”

Craig and I exchanged glances. We’d come a long way, and at our own expense. Should we go on alone? Was it worth the risk?

For once, we made the right decision and turned our backs—only temporarily, we hoped—on John Mann, heading back to our base in Pak Se, Laos. Later, much later, we found we’d been only a few miles away from where the American had been sighted.

“Never mind,” Kayson said consolingly. “The official told me sheriff said to him, if we go on to see John Mann, he’ll slice the throats of everyone in our families.” 

It was a vivid image and a reminder that this was still a wild, violent area. I stifled my disappointment. At the moment, I was just happy to get back with everyone’s throats intact.

***

Why were we there in the first place? We weren’t the most obvious guys to be venturing into jungles and climbing mountains. Neither of us was in our twenties anymore. Craig was making a good living in real estate in Florida; I owned my own corporate insurance company in Massachusetts. Neither of us knew personally any of the prisoners-of-war we were seeking to find, and when we began, neither of us had any contacts in Southeast Asia nor knowledge of any of the languages spoken in the region. We both had families and good reasons to stay home. What was driving us?

There are two defining memberships in my life: my identity as a Catholic and my identity as an Eagle Scout. Everything I do, and everything I am, are informed by my belonging to those two groups. 

My religion is clear about its expectations. I am to go out into the world and do something for other people. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, bless the dying, give what you have to the poor, follow me. 

My rank of Eagle Scout is equally clear in how it informs my day-to-day life: I am expected to act out the Scout oath and law in my daily life, and be an example of moral courage and behavior that goes above and beyond the ordinary.

There are many ways I could have channeled that moral imperative. I did it in the way I conducted business. I did it in my relationships. I showed grit and determination by running sixteen marathons. I was a leader of men—both in uniform and in civilian life—and not a one of them has ever questioned my orders.

But when I learned about the fact (not the theory, you’ll notice I’m saying, but the fact) of American MIAs still alive in Southeast Asia, I felt that I had found my vocation, my true calling, my life’s work. I couldn’t detach what I was learning from my own life experience: I myself had been in the army during the Vietnam war, stationed in high-risk environments. Any of those guys could have been me.

And so began the long journey that led me to that tent flap and the AK47 in my face.

***

First, a little history.

The Paris accords, negotiated during 1972 and 1973, were what officially brought American military involvement in Vietnam to a close. Throughout the war, North Vietnam had systematically captured U.S. servicemen, most of them pilots and aircrew, to use as a bargaining chip when it came to determining and paying war damages and rebuilding the country. The accords required the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) to release all American prisoners within 60 days, and to account for those missing in action.

The first list of prisoners submitted to the United States was met with astonishment at the highest levels of government, as the numbers were grossly inconsistent with information obtained by the CIA. Henry Kissinger later wrote in his memoir that the United States “knew of at least 80 instances in which an American serviceman had been captured alive and had subsequently disappeared” and that “none of these men were on the list of POWs handed over after the agreement.”

Debriefings of the first American returnees during Operation Homecoming revealed a network of prisons throughout North Vietnam. None of the returnees reported being held as human shields at the various locations where wartime intelligence sources noted American POWs were kept to protect infrastructure from American bombing. It became clear to many that the North Vietnamese were holding back hundreds of prisoners captured in the north and several hundred more captured in the south and later moved to the north for long-term confinement. In addition, wartime intelligence had indicated that the Pathet Lao were holding POWs as well.

In March of 1973 the last American prisoners were released and Richard Nixon informed the nation that “all of our American POWs are on their way home,” an effort to “get Vietnam out of the way” so he could concentrate on Watergate. What he had done, in fact, was knowingly write off unreturned POWs in order to save his presidency. Within weeks, returning South Vietnamese POWs reported American servicemen were still alive and held captive in Southeast Asia, but the Pentagon official in charge of POW recovery operations, Roger Shields, announced on Nixon’s direction that “we have no indication at this time that there are any Americans alive in Indochina.”

President Nixon had pledged 4.75 billion dollars as war reparations to the North Vietnamese through the Paris accords and in a secret letter, a pledge that was extremely unpopular with Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and most Americans. The American delegation added a requirement that the DRV prevail upon the Khmer Rouge for a ceasefire in Cambodia. Again the talks broke down, and the North made the decision to take the South by force, ultimately leading to the fall of Saigon.

The DVR announced that there would be no search for  the 2,500 missing and dead Americans until the United States honored its promise of postwar reconstruction. The White House responded that the Paris accords were now off the table; the DVR in turn responded that it stood ready to search for American servicemen missing in action once the U.S. provided the promised reconstruction aid. 

When in 1975 the Americans withdrew, Cambodia’s government—which had been supported by the U.S.—crumbled and Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge group became the de facto ruler; his attempts to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country’s population from starvation, overwork, and executions. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked; Cambodia was effectively sealed off from the outside world. Americans had been engaged in fighting in Cambodia as recently as 1970, in fancifully named operations such as the Crow’s Nest, the Parrot’s Beak, and the Angel’s wing. 

As Americans withdrew from Vietnam in 1975,  the Pathet Lao took over Laos and in 1977, a communist newspaper promised the party would hunt down the “American collaborators” and their families “to the last root.”

Throughout the early 1070s in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, military governments installed numerous re-education camps. It was a time when anyone considered “intellectual”—even to the mere wearing of glasses—was suspect. Anyone suspected of aiding the United States was taken to the camps. 

By the mid-to-late 1980s, news of the camps began filtering out of Southeast Asia. Some prisoners had escaped; some had been released. The ones in Laos particularly got across the Mekong River and were brought to USAID refugee camps, by and large run my American intelligence services. All of them reported live sightings of American prisoners. “There were,” said one refugee from a camp, “Americans right down the hall.”  

Under pressure from families of missing servicemen, the House of Representatives created a new select committee to look into the POW/MIA problem.

As early as 1976, persons escaping from Vietnam started reporting “live sightings” of American servicemen seen in captivity in two major clusters: in the north around Hanoi and in the south around Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. While these live-sighting reports did not emerge for months or even years, when the observers were able to escape the country, there is substantial evidence that the CIA (under then-director George H.W. Bush) was aware of the existence of live American prisoners in Vietnam through photographic evidence acquired from spy satellites. Despite this, the select committee wrapped up its investigation and declared all MIA/POWs dead.

In 1977 President Carter advocated for normalizing relations with Vietnam but promised to resolve the MIA question first; it was a political promise and not a serious pledge, particularly as Vietnam was again bringing up the quid pro quo of wartime reparations. Carter’s commission declared, again, all MIA/POWs dead.

By 1978 the “socialist transformation” of Vietnam caused first the ethnic Hoa, and then tens of thousands of South Vietnamese, to flee: the exodus of the “boat people” had begun. And they brought with them more live-sighting stories; suddenly a pipeline of information started flowing in to the CIA and the American government. By 1980 the Carter Administration had to change its policy on POWs in Southeast Asia to admit there was the possibility that some Americans were still being held against their will.

In 1980 enough evidence had been gathered to confirm that there was at least one group of Americans being held in Vietnam near the Cambodian border and another group of American prisoners in Laos. Two extractions were planned using Delta Force, but word of the missions leaked to the press and they had to be shut down. By now Ronald Reagan was president and was, initially at least, supporting efforts to find and rescue POWs. In 1982 a diplomatic mission was dispatched to Laos and met with the deputy vice minister of foreign affairs, asking how to improve relations between the two countries. Eventually he requested—and obtained—medical supplies for a hospital in Savannakhet; this blossomed into what came to be known as the Lao Initiative: “we buy them, we steal them, or we forget them.” 

But in 1983 the press got hold of another story: a former Green Beret and highly decorated war hero called James G. “Bo” Gritz (rhymes with spice) had assembled a team of mercenaries in Thailand to go into Laos and rescue 120 POWs. He led four Americans and fifteen Laotian guerrillas into Laos, but the group was ambushed and had to flee back to Thailand. There was a fair amount of fallout from the failed mission. “My critics should either lead, follow or get the hell out of the way,” Gritz responded, always challenging anyone who disagreed with him. “We’re doing it because you don’t leave your comrades behind to die in the hands of the enemy.” Gritz would continue to try and put together forays in Southeast Asia, but was never able to carry them out. (If his name sounds familiar to you, he later became famous as one of the civilian negotiators at the eleven-day Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.)

When Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980, he stated that he was going to make the return of all American POWs and MIAs from Southeast Asia the nation’s “top priority.” As the commander-in-chief of the armed forces he could have chosen to use military force to achieve this goal. However, due to the fragile diplomatic relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the war, any military action toward Southeast Asia would have been politically dangerous and militarily suspect. Therefore, the option that President Reagan chose to utilize, in an attempt to find solid answers to the question, was the use of American covert forces. This was possibly just as dangerous and suspect as using open military action. However, the very nature of covert operations allows them to stay out of public scrutiny, unless the mission fails and/or there is an information leak. No official diplomatic relationship existed between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam between 1975 and 1992, because the “POW/MIA issue still populat[ed] the old battlefield with skeletons.”(20) For this reason, the Reagan administration decided that the use of covert military force was the best option.

The first person to come to the government with a plan to rescue the alleged POWs was retired Army Colonel James “Bo” Gritz. Gritz had spent many years planning a rescue operation into Laos, and when he heard that President-elect Reagan was going to make the return of those men the nations “top priority,” he was elated. Gritz had a contact person in Washington that was keeping him briefed on what was being said about his proposed rescue plan. 

This contact informed him that president-elect Reagan had been briefed on the proposed operation (to be named Operation Velvet Hammer) on January 15, 1980, and was “enthusiastic” about the prospect of a rescue mission. Gritz’s second-in-command, Charles J. Patterson, stated that “while unable to express an open commitment, Reagan promised support and no interference.” 

Although plans were made by the Reagan administration to support the colonel’s operation, the president decided to withdraw them and run an officially sanctioned rescue mission instead. On March 26, 1980, the story of Operation Velvet Hammer appeared on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel Star, ending all hope of using those same plans in the future. Once this occurred, the U.S. government cut all funding to Gritz’s operation. After losing the promise of government funding, Gritz decided that the only way the POWs were ever going to come home was if he rescued them himself.

After cutting funds to Operation Velvet Hammer, President Reagan gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the “go-ahead” to plan its own rescue mission. The CIA had numerous sources in Southeast Asia. One of their most reliable contacts was given the title of W/1. W/1 was an elderly lady with connections to the Communist leadership in the Laotian Capital.

On November 14, 1980, W/1 gave the CIA a report stating that approximately thirty U.S. pilots were working on a road gang near a town located in central Laos. Due to the reliability of the source, the CIA decided to devise a plan to investigate the information they had received. National Security Advisor Richard Allen took the news to President Reagan, and the president was again “eager to try” a rescue attempt. Two months after receiving W/1’s report official planning began for a covert operation into Laos. The operation was to be named Operation Pocket Change.

In January 1981, the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to devise the specifics for a rescue operation. Prior to any action being taken, the head of the JSOC wanted to run a reconnaissance mission in order to insure the safety and success of the mission. The CIA decided to use a team of Asians and a few Americans to run this mission in order to keep from being noticed. They returned to the U.S. with information that there were no Americans being held as prisoners in the camp they observed. Therefore, they assumed there were no Americans being held anywhere in Southeast Asia.

When the mission was later investigated by POW/MIA researchers, it was found that the reconnaissance team had performed very poorly. The team said that they had observed a prison camp for two days, when in reality they had only observed it for a total of two hours. They also said that they had not seen any Caucasians in the prison, but they had only seen the outer portion and not the inner sections of the camp. Lastly, the pictures they took turned out blurry because of the distance they were from the camp, so they were also inconclusive.

Eventually, the Laotian government allowed a few American diplomats to walk through the suspected camp. When they reached the camp, they were rushed through and shown only selected areas. However, no matter how little they were allowed to see, the only honest report they could give was that there were no signs of American prisoners. Operation Pocket Change was the only post-war rescue the U.S. government admits to ever considering in Southeast Asia.

It was, in any case, the only one about which it ever spoke publicly.

Embroiled by now in Central America, the Reagan administration shifted its focus to repatriating remains of American servicemen rather than negotiating the release of any live ones. In 1984 the remains of an identified soldier, Lieutenant Michael Blassie, were interred in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington and in so doing, the administration formally put the issue of live soldiers in the past—this despite the fact that an American deserter, Robert Garwood, had returned from Vietnam with a tale filled with live sightings. While some congressmen continued to put pressure on the government to negotiate with Hanoi for American prisoners, and over time various task forces were assembled to look into the question, the administration discredited human intelligence reports and refused to reopen the issue—the Iran-Contra affair was coming to light and it had to take a new stance on not negotiating for hostages.

In the mid-1980s, the U.S. and Vietnam increased the frequency of high-level policy and technical meetings to help resolve the POW/MIA issue. The Vietnamese slowly began to return American remains they had previously collected and stored; eventually they permitted the U.S. to excavate a few crash sites. The Laotian government, with which the U.S. government maintained diplomatic relations, also agreed to several crash-site excavations in the mid-1980s. This resulted in the return and identification of the remains of a few dozen Americans. 

In Cambodia, however, political turmoil prevented such efforts.

For Vietnam veteran Bob Smith, representative and later senator from New Hampshire, the fate of possible missing or captured Americans in Vietnam had been a major issue since his arrival in Congress in 1985. 

North Carolina Congressman Bill Hendon, who served two terms in the early-to-mid-1980s, was also active on the issue. He and Smith met with President Ronald Reagan in January 1986 to discuss their contention that Vietnam was still holding U.S. prisoners, and that U.S. intelligence agencies knew this—but that the bureaucracy within the agencies was covering it up.

They weren’t the only ones interested. In 1987, acting as a private citizen, businessman and later presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who had visited Vietnam several times and was extremely interested in the issue, traveled to Hanoi to meet with Nguyen Co Thach, with Thach expressing fear of what it would look like for Vietnam if any POWs were released. While Hanoi had originally held the POWs back to insist on the payment of war reparations (upon which the United States had agreed at the Paris accords), now it seemed there was additional motivation in needing to save face. In the meantime, however, the CIA had declared there was no plausible motive for Vietnam to retain any American prisoners. The following year President Reagan informed the families of missing servicemen that the United States would not pay for live prisoners but would instead accelerate the search for servicemen’s remains. When Ronald Reagan left office, his final report on the POW/MIA issue in Southeast Asia was that no-one had been left behind after Operation Homecoming.

The incoming Bush administration was no more friendly to the cause, and in fact sabotaged the Helms/Grassley investigations that began in 1990.

The issue heated up in the early 1990s. Serious charges were leveled at the Bush administration (1989 to 1993) regarding the POW/MIA issue. The United States Department of Defense, headed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, was accused of covering up information and failing to properly pursue intelligence about US POW/MIAs.

Ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, became interested in the matter. In October 1990 his chief staff aide, James P. Lucier, prepared a report stating that it was probable there were live POWs still being held and that the Bush administration was complicit in hiding the facts.

The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was a special committee convened by the United States Senate during the George H.W. Bush administration to investigate the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue—that is, the fate of United States service personnel listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War. The idea for the committee was introduced by senator and Vietnam veteran Bob Smith and served from August 2, 1991 to January 2, 1993.

The fate of possible missing or captured Americans in Vietnam had been Smith’s major issue since coming to Congress in 1985, partly spurred on by his growing up without knowing how his own father had died in World War II. This was the third congressional investigation into the POW/MIA issue, but one with a mandate to be more skeptical and ask harder questions of government officials than before. Formation of the committee was passed unanimously by the Senate.

Senator—and also Vietnam veteran—John Kerry was eventually named chair of the committee by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole chose Smith as vice-chair, after senator and former Vietnam POW John McCain initially declined the position.

The full committee consisted of twelve senators, likewise selected by the majority and minority leaders: John Kerry, chair and Vietnam veteran; Bob Smith, vice-chair and Vietnam veteran; John McCain, wounded Vietnam veteran and POW in North Vietnam;

Bob Kerrey, wounded Vietnam veteran and Medal of Honor recipient; Chuck Robb, Vietnam veteran; Hank Brown, Vietnam veteran; Chuck Grassley; Nancy Landon Kassebaum; Herb Kohl; Tom Daschle; Harry Reid; and Jesse Helms.

Kohl replaced Dennis DeConcini, who was initially selected but then asked to be removed over the Keating Five scandal. Al Gore was the only Vietnam-era veteran who declined to participate.

The hearings before the Kerry committee clouded an already turbid picture still more. Some stunning testimony was placed in the record to indicate that back in 1973 American officials suspected that some prisoners might be missing, but did not want to talk about it. John McCain and John Kerry, both perceived by the American public as war heroes, ultimately did not allow that conclusion to be reached by the committee.

Going into the hearings, Smith remained convinced that prisoners had been left behind after the war. Kerry suspected that some prisoners had been left behind by the Nixon and Ford administrations in their eagerness to disengage from the war, but he doubted the existence of secret camps in operation, which had been indicated by POW/MIA activists and media reports. McCain was skeptical that any prisoners had been left behind, partly because he and the other POWs had gone to great lengths at the time to keep track of everyone who was a prisoner in North Vietnam, and partly because he could see no motivation with evidence behind it for the Hanoi government to have kept any. It’s worth noting here that participation in the committee was one of a string of dubious actions by McCain, who refused to co-sponsor the Agent Orange Bill (1984), the very existence of the Senate Select Committee (1992), the Missing Persons Personnel Act (1995), the Persian Gulf Health Care Act (1998), and the Bring Them Home Alive Act (1999). The McCain Bill—which was enacted into law—included a clause stating that the Pentagon was not obligated to inform the public when it received intelligence that Americans were alive in captivity.

The committee was responsible for getting the Department of Defense to declassify over one million pages of documents; in addition, he Vietnamese government gave the committee full access to their records. Unfortunately, testimony by DIA analyst John F. McCreary and others points to the majority of these records being lost or shredded on Kerry’s orders. The committee had full-time investigators or delegations stationed in Moscow and other parts of Russia, North Korea, and Southeast Asia, and in all held 200 hours of public hearings.

(The senators’ work was often hands-on. Smith would get leads about possible whereabouts of a POW, and then Kerry would follow up on them. Because of Kerry’s activities with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the North Vietnamese deemed him honorable and opened their facilities to him. There had been persistent reports of U.S. prisoners held under the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi or in nearby tunnels; Smith had stated in hearings that the Vietnamese Defense Ministry had an underground prison in its compound near the mausoleum, which a Vietnamese official called “a myth and an affront to the people of Vietnam.” The number of live-sighting searches, including those on short notice, sometimes led to Vietnamese officials accusing the whole process of being a cloak for espionage.)

Kerry led the hearings, which became bitter and divisive, and it was he who declared that while the committee had “uncovered evidence that a small number of Americans may have survived in captivity after Operation Homecoming, there is, in my view, no reason to believe that any Americans remain alive today. Yes, the possibility exists that a prisoner or prisoners could be held deep within a jungle or behind a locked door under conditions of greatest security. But there was no evidence of that, and it is hard to conceive of a reason for it.”

The question of testimony by businessman and POW/MIA advocate Ross Perot before the committee in June 1992 also led to conflict, with Perot fearing a “circus”-like atmosphere due to his candidacy in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. Perot believed hundreds of U.S. servicemen were left behind in Southeast Asia at the end of the U.S. involvement in the war, and that government officials were covering up POW/MIA investigations in order to not reveal a drug smuggling operation used to finance a secret war in Laos.

The hearings ended in 1993.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton normalized diplomatic relations with the country of Vietnam, with John McCain and John Kerry’s visible support. Even after normalization, Vietnam continued to raise the issue of postwar reconstruction, including into the 2000s.

The United States waged a long, secret war in Laos that it has generally refused to acknowledge. Though American prisoners in Laos were supposed to be turned over in the wake of the 1973 accords, both the U.S. and the Vietnamese pretended that the Pathet Lao were not party to the accord (formally, they were not). Though U.S. pilots who came down in Laos were rescued at higher rates than those shot down over North Vietnam, the question of prisoners taken in that pre-1973 secret war on the ground is murky.

Judging from a much-quoted but cryptic remark by General Vernon Walters, some American covert forces may also have been captured in Cambodia. A wide variety of missions, including some formally sponsored by the U.S. government, and others funded by various private American groups, have operated on the ground since.

Adding to the turmoil, Chinese intelligence is widely believed to have promoted reports of prisoner sightings to prevent rapprochement between the United States and Vietnam, with which China has been intermittently at war.

Although the Reagan administration was thought to have made significant progress on the MIA issue, it was dogged by what some officials see as the harmful activities of private Americans inspired at least partly by the movie “Rambo.”

Northeastern Thailand along the Laotian border has become known among U.S. officials as “Rambo country.” One of them lamented “this rip-off Rambo business” that has drawn adventurers who dream of pulling off a POW rescue. Although many of them had been in business long before the Sylvester Stallone character popularized the idea, the movie has helped them raise money, the officials said.

The issue of live POWs appeared to be an awkward one for the Reagan administration. Unlike the previous Carter administration, Reagan’s bases its policy on “the assumption that at least some Americans are still held captive” in Indochina. But it is an assumption, in the administration’s view, that some right-wing critics of Reagan may have taken too far.

We’ll have occasion to revisit some of these events in chapters to come, but for now, this history should put readers into the picture of where things stood after the end of official American involvement in Southeast Asia.

***

Are there still American servicemen alive and living in the region? I am convinced there are. There have been too many live sightings, too much satellite surveillance, too much of my own personal experience in the region, and—as we will see—too many smoking guns from the United States government and other entities to believe otherwise.

I believe our government deliberately left Americans behind, in all probability hidden away in the large limestone cave systems in Laos. This is the position of the League of POW/MIA Families. If you just do the ratio analysis based on how many American aircraft were shot down over both Laos and North Vietnam, and how many POWs those shoot-downs produced, then the numbers appear pretty valid based on losing around 350 aircraft over Laos and 1,000 in North Vietnam. Plus there were POWs captured in South Vietnam, and brought back over the border, MACVSOG operators captured on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (primarily in Laos, but also in Vietnam), and CIA air and ground operations guys captured in Laos. Early in the war most POWs were taken back to North Vietnam, but later this didn’t happen.

The overwhelming American political imperative was, to just get to hell out of Vietnam as quickly as possible. I imagine that at some point Nixon optimistically thought he could get them out later, but Watergate made sure “later” never came for Nixon or the POWs.

The North Vietnamese probably looked on them as an insurance policy, and when the need for insurance (for whatever purpose) ran out, these POWs then became a potential embarrassment and liability. They were either kept or disposed of out in the vast jungle of eastern Laos.

Your mileage may vary. All I ask is that you listen to my story, read the documents I’m offering as proof, think about the history you’ve been taught, and then make up your own mind.

As for me, I know there are American servicemen remaining in Southeast Asia who are after all these years still waiting for the people who betrayed them and left them behind to come and rescue them.

This is the story of how I came to get involved in the attempt to bring some of them home.