Challenge: Vietnam Keeps American POWs After the War

Yeah, it is fairly long. Here's a few hints. You can pretty much eliminate any US Army people and US Marines, and concentrate on US Navy or Air Force. Any info that the Army or Marines had would have been time sensitive, and dealt with immediate issues, such as troop movements, asset movements, local patrol information, logistics, etc. Those with a 'bb' designation were people who went down in crashes, were observed crashing and burning, and it is highly unlikely that they survived those crashes. Hell, when Lt. Col. Crandall went back to LZ X-ray with General Moore he spent some time looking for the remains of one of his choppers that went down. Those men were carried as MIA.

Still it's kinda funny that the activists who supposedly have access to all this classified data can't really come up with the names of suspected abductees or what they might have known.

It also makes no sense that people taken and subjected to the conditions that existed with horrific wounds and poor medical services would stay alive for (in some cases) almost 50 years.

Many of the names involved in the POW/MIA issue are repeated over and over again, and have been repeatedly discredited by factual information. They're demonstrated con men.
I don't think any POW/MIAs from Vietnam are still alive. I think at most they made to the 1980 before being capped in the Soviet Union.
 
You'd have to look at the MIA list circa 1974-5 to see the likely candidates. But one category stands out: Wild Weasel back-seaters. There were several F-105G crews shot down during the 1972 LINEBACKER campaign (May to October, 1972), where both crewmen ejected. These were shootdowns within a 50 mile radius of Hanoi, mind you, where rescue was not likely, at best. (though there were the occasional rescues-including an F-4 backseater rescued after 23 days on the ground) Of those crews, only the pilots were repatriated during Operation Homecoming in 1973. The back-seaters, who were not just navigators, but specialists in Electronic Warfare, were never accounted for. At least one Weasel pilot was told by a guard that his back-seater was alive, uninjured, and well. That back-seater never returned in 1973. The guy's body was returned in 1988, and according to the EWO's family, his body had been autopsied in a manner not normally used by the Vietnamese, and his body had also borne evidence that he'd been in captivity for several years.

Also: a number of AC-130 gunships were downed in Laos while working the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and though a few crewmen survived to be picked up by SAR forces, most remained missing. The navigators, fire-control officers, and Electronic Warfare officers would be prize catches. These birds were lost over portions of Laos not controlled by the Pathet Lao, but by the NVA. One final category: F-111 crews. Several F-111s were shot down (3 in 1968, and several more in 1972), and only one crew, from the last shootdown on 22 December 1972, came home. The rest? One crewman is known to have died-his body was returned in the 1990s. But the others?

I wouldn't call a retired Navy Admiral or USAF General a "con man". Nor would I apply that dubious name to anyone who's a professional intelligence officer. Top Secret clearances aren't handed out to just anyone. And when these men made their comments about people being left behind, they were believed. Why? They saw the intelligence, and to them it strongly indicated that it had happened. And what are the chances that some Vietnamese or Laotian, scratching in a paddy or on a hillside, is going to correctly guess a number and letter combination that matches a known USAF or USN escape and evasion code that was given to someone who's still missing-and that code shows up on a satellite picture?

Again, do I think people were left behind? Probably. How many? I don't know. The Senate Committee said a "small number", maybe less than a hundred. General Tighe, before he passed away, said in the late 1980s and again for the Senate Committee, that four or five hundred had been left behind.
 

pnyckqx

Banned
I don't think any POW/MIAs from Vietnam are still alive. I think at most they made to the 1980 before being capped in the Soviet Union.
i don't think any of them made it to the Soviet Union, unless they wanted to go there. All available evidence indicates that we got as accurate as possible an accounting from the government of Vietnam.

The government of Vietnam has a vested interest in being honest about what happened to our men. They WANT normal relations with the US, and particularly US investment in their country. Well over 60% of their population was born after the war was over (and i just quoted an old figure, it's probably much higher now), and have no memories of a conflict with the US.

Admittedly they're a bit jaded when they consider the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of their people who are unaccounted for (both from the north and south) as a result of their war with the Americans.

That chopper that Lt. Col. Crandall was looking for went down almost 50 years ago. Even if those people had lived, they'd certainly be dead of natural causes by now.
 
IMHO my PERSONAL opinion is that if any POWs were witheld by Hanoi it was not long before they were disposed of once it was clear they could not be traded for, and also that even in the 70's irrefutable evidence of this sort of double dealing would have had bad consequences for Vietnam. Much easier to make them disappear. Those held in Laos or Cambodia by locals came to a bad end (hopefully quickly).

One interesting point is that, as far as I know, NO POWS were ever acknowledged for the B-52's downed over the north in the latter stages of the war. While possible, it is unlikely that nobody ever made it out of those planes when they were shot down. It was speculated that B-52 crew were highly valuable intelligence resources as their primary job was delivering instant sunshine to the USSR & therefore they were traded to the USSR for goodies/support. If that happened you can be sure after they were squeezed dry that they ended up in unmarked graves someplace...the USSR is very big and there are lots of unmarked graves in Siberia. Did that happen? If it did you can believe the Russian records of this are either ashes or buried deep in some archive never to see the light of day.
 

pnyckqx

Banned
Nor do they have any problems CARRYING that infinite supply of ammo.:)
i can tell you from personal experience that the ammo you DO carry gains weight by the minute. It is especially true when somebody is the age i was when i retired. It's not something i'd want to think about doing now.
 
Actually, 33 B-52 crewmen were returned from Hanoi in 1973. Nine were among those classified as sick or wounded, and were released with the first group on 12 Feb 1973. Four B-52 crewmen were known killed, and 27 others remained unaccounted for in 1973.

Incidentally, one former POW, CWO-4 Frank Anton (U.S. Army-a five year POW, held for three years in VC jungle camps, a three month trek up the Trail to Hanoi, and two more years in Hanoi) said in his book that he'd seen photos of several B-52 crewmen in captivity were in a Hanoi newspaper shown to him by an interrogator. At least one was missing a leg. No amputees were among those returned at Homecoming, btw. And none of the B-52 crewers he'd seen in that photo came home, either. He also reported in his book that as he went up the Trail-and LAM SON 719 was being mounted at the same time, he saw a perfectly healthy American helicopter pilot who'd apparently just been captured. That pilot never joined the other "Laotians" (as the POWs referred to those captured in Laos) in Hanoi. Only those captured in Laos and taken to Hanoi came home in '73.
 
"AMerican can't lose a war, so if we lost the war then we must have been STABBED in the BACK!!!!!! OH NOEZ ZOMG!"

This has it's direct corrolary, "America never leaves a man behind, so if we left a man behind, it was because we were STABBED IN THE BACK OH NOEZ ZOMG!!!!!!!"
I'm trying to understand the argument, but how does any of that follow? Even granting the premise (difficult to do), the conclusion just comes out of left field.

You'd have to additionally posit magic being real and some sort of chronomancy for where prisoners are to have any bearing on how a war that led to their capture progressed and ended.
 
I'm trying to understand the argument, but how does any of that follow? Even granting the premise (difficult to do), the conclusion just comes out of left field.

You'd have to additionally posit magic being real and some sort of chronomancy for where prisoners are to have any bearing on how a war that led to their capture progressed and ended.
I was not disscussing that, I was identifying the POW-MIA myth as being a corrolary of the AMerican "Doltchstosslegende".

Try and keep up would you?
 
Some POWs captured during the Korean War chose to stay behind after having been heavily indoctrinated during their captivity. A few of them returned to the US in the 60s and 70s. None who were transferred to Chinese control ever returned.

True? I guess they could have never been transferred until after the
war end, but living in the PRC has definite control issues. All were
POW defectors, of course. But if you mean those who did not defect,
very plausible. The same was said of in the USSR. Some were taken
to see what made them tick by the KGB (GRU?), and killed soon after.
A few were heard of by gulag internees who have repeated it later for
the record. Can't remember if John H. Noble was one of them, though
certainly for Korean War era USAF personnel shot down on USSR
regions, who similarly disappeared after being said to arrive in Vorkuta.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_and_British_defectors_in_the_Korean_War

AFAIK, there were stong attempts to maximize the supposed realized
accomplishments, sort of a reverse take on the American land of
opportunity. One hayseed guy was made a fake lawyer for
instance, and was a showcase in many a court case with strings
attached in PRC near the capital area. Great show. I guess that
the regular POW's sent to deep China was what was meant. At
first, all POW's may well have been sent to PRC, as the UN forces
approached the Yalu border. All NK jet fighters were based in PRC,
as recalled.

WND.com had a somewhat well sourced article on how the POW
returnee rate was about a third too low from known examples in
camps. Intelligence (Army) later came out that that week or two
put it at about 1,600 soldiers were judged too sickly for propaganda
purposes and killed just before the hand over. If so, we will most
certainly look for the graves, and do our inevitable forensic detective
work as is now the case in the former Indochina. The article was
about 10 years ago, UPI or AP I think.

In Vietnam, think of Dien Bien Phu survivors being used as a bargaining
chip. Many of them died, but they were let out after negotiation. The
Laotian situation, as mentioned by others, was distinctly worse, and
in Cambodia, at least one defector (GI not allowed to bring back his
Vietnamese family to the US, as happened more often with merely
years long AWOL guys) quickly disappeared by going there to escape the
invasion of Cambodia campaign 1970. Those extreme movements
did not trust their own top generals, much less these expensive
bargaining chips.
 
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