Prisoners of War and Missing in Action - Essay Example

MIAs/POWs - Did prisoners of war get left behind in Vietnam, with the knowledge of the US government? If so, why would the government allow this situation to exist? As a child I remember watching most movies that were war related. One perfect example was Rambo: First Blood II in which the starring (Sylvester Stallone) was a war veteran sent to a country called Vietnam and while there he leaves other army officers behind who are then captured and the guilt forces him to go back to rescue the remaining Prisoners of War (POW). Well the movie is quite old as it was made in the 1980s specifically 1985 and this made me think if the events portrayed in the movie ever really happened and if so why would a country leave behind its war officers without even sending a rescue team. The POW are basically tortured with some dying from the aftermath of the torture while others are held up like slaves in the small bamboo cages with nothing to eat or cover themselves (Veith 34). This made me do a research and see whether whatever that was portrayed in Rambo was true or if it ever actually happened and the results and facts I found out were rather astonishing. I actually came to realize that there was a Vietnam War that was fought hard although the US lost and the effect was made worse by the number of prisoners taken during the war. I now believe the war was real and maybe the movie might be exaggerated a little bit but the truth is the POWs were not held in a paradise instead they went through hell. With so many unanswered questions I decided to find for more information about Vietnam War and whether the prisoners were left behind in the war. With all the questions concerning the POWs and MIAs I embarked to ask myself whether the issue on the POWs and MIAs was true. What was the origin of the POWs and MIAs in Vietnam? Why were the POW s and MIAs left behind? What did the government do concerning the POWs and the MIAs in Vietnam? Is there evidence of POWs and MIAs in Vietnam to date? With this in mind, I embarked on doing this research in order to identify the truths and facts concerning the war and especially after the war what really happened to the servicemen in Vietnam. With the help of resources documenting the Vietnam War in the 1970s I was able to see the perspective of the POWs and MIAs and whether there were any of them in the Vietnam War. According to George Veith in his book “Black April-The Fall of South Vietnam 1973-1975” The Vietnam War was one of the longest wars in the US history and since the Civil War, it was the most divisive. He furthermore adds that the defeat of the South Vietnam was one of America’s worst foreign policy disasters of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame from the 27th January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30th April 1975 has also been very elusive. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 approximately 590 American Prisoners of War (POW) were returned home in an operation named Operation Homecoming (Sauter and James 41). Already the US had listed that 1,350 American servicemen were POWs or Missing in Action (MIA) and at the same time a rough number of about 1000American servicemen were reportedly killed in action and their bodies are not yet recovered. According to Birchim, and Sue, most of the servicemen were the airmen shot down around North Vietnam or Laos (32). There are investigations going on to determine whether in all these incidents the airmen survived after their planes were shot down, and also if they did not survive then there should be consideration to recover their bodies. I believe the government should have acted fast to check whether there had been any POWs and MIAs left behind during the Vietnam War but instead the US government had to wait until their relations with Vietnam improved before they cooperated and tried to solve the issue on the missing POWs and MIAs; this was in mid-1980s a few years after the war had ended. This was after so many activists had put a lot of pressure to the U.S government to haste the process of solving the puzzle of the missing servicemen. It gives me a food of thought as to why the U.S government had to wait until later in the following years in order to begin the process of resolving the POW and MIAs issue even after some quarters saying they had sighted evidence on the POWs. In one instance Thailand which is a neighbor to Vietnam and Laos had intercepted information where a signal had talked about POWs being in Laos and the information was forwarded to the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but due to their policy of not relying on a third party information it was discarded (Birchim, and Sue Clark 66). This makes me wonder if in the today’s world NSA and CIA would ignore a terrorist threat if it ever comes from the third party rather than investigating and verifying the information passed to them. In addition the U.S-Vietnam relationship was only returned to normality in the mid 1990s and that’s when the process of confirming the POWs and MIAs began in earnest. Many theories emerge that a number of the POWs were captured by the Communist armed forces and kept alive as POW even after the war ended in 1973 but in the cases I found out that the U.S government has always denied this even after overwhelming evidence against them of a conspiracy to hide the POWs and MIAs. I found out that in the early 1990s there was a congressional investigation and one of them was the United States Select Committee on POW?MIA Affairs of 1991-1993 that had Senators John Kerry, Bob Smith and John McCain come to a conclusion that no compelling evidence could prove that any American was still alive and in captivity in the Southeast Asia. With this the congress dismissed the hopes of many people who still believe that the POWs and MIAs are still in Vietnam, I think it would have been easier for the government to send personnel to verify the information instead of forming a committee that looks over POW and MIA while in the US instead of going to Vietnam. Sauter and James sum up my thought on the POWs and MIAs that the U.S government bureaucracy will never willingly acknowledge a problem it can’t solve (41). In my opinion the Vietnam was a total disaster and the government up to date does not know how to go about it in reference to the Missing in Action and Prisoners of War and therefore will try and hide the naked truth that I also discovered in the course of research. The fate of any missing in action is always one of the most disconcerting and disturbing issues for any war. In this case, the issue has been a highly charged one in terms of sentiments especially for those involved and this has been the last discordant and disheartening aftereffect of the Vietnam War for the United States. I think that by the U.S government making the POW and MIA subject a high precedence; it is conveying the message to the Vietnam that it is not serious in getting and recovering all the Americans that were held in Vietnam in spite of the information that Vietnam has been holding the POW and MIA in the past. Works Cited Birchim, Barbara, and Sue Clark. Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About the Pow/mias in the Vietnam War. Bloomington, Ind: AuthorHouse, 2010. Print. Sauter, Mark A, and James D. Sanders. The Men We Left Behind: Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Deceit, and the Tragic Fate of Pows After the Vietnam War. Washington, D.C: National Press Book, 1993. Print. Veith, George J. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-1975. New York: Encounter Books, 2012. Print. Read More