Prisoners of War : Ignored and Abandoned

    During the Vietnam War there were thousands of prisoners of war captured. Some were returned but some weren't so lucky. After the war-ending treaty was signed in January of 1973 the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs started their job on finding and returning the lost soldiers. Former Massachusetts Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry was appointed as chairman of the committee. It has now come to light that Kerry  may not have been as honest as we thought.

    Though North Vietnam returned 591 of the captured prisoners, evidence shows that there are many still held back as a bargaining chip for the $4 billion in repairs promised by the U.S. It was the Committee's job to investigate the integrity of the evidence. Sidney Schanberg argues in her article "When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A." that Kerry had other plans. Schanberg argues that instead of focusing on the lost soldiers, his main objective was normalization of relations with Hanoi. Though that goal was not a bad one, it largely interfered with the retrieval of those men.

   There has been evidence of more than 1,600 firsthand sightings, almost 14,000 secondhand reports, intercepted radio messages about prisoners being moved by captors,reports from informants, and clear satellite photos of rescue signals. All of this evidence was labeled "inconclusive" and ignored. There were many complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials that live-prisoner evidence was being covered-up and that the Pentagon was destroying files to keep the families and public from finding out. Kerry has consistently denied all of the allegations of his cover-up. 

    Colonel Millard Peck, former head of the Pentagon's P.O.W/M.I.A office, resigned in disgust in the first year of Kerry's leadership of the committee. In his last address he said, "The mind-set to 'debunk' is alive and well. . . Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow-through on any of the sightings . . . The sad fact is that. . .From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was in fact abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural death."

    How many prisoners of war were left behind? The evidence claims that hundreds were never returned home. Those who were abandoned by the country they fought so bravely for. The country they risked their lives for. What happened to those who never came home?