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One columnist of a major news periodical thinks so.
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You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
--
You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
Racism
POW/MIA
Politics
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 801
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The old saying is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, it's racism is in the heart of the accuser. It's like these people have some neurotic delusion that they have the impression of racism, bigotry, & other forms of hate in everyday objects. There is a personality disorder called borderline personality disorder. These people are the ones who drive everybody else nuts. We don't need to cater to them. They need therapy & anti-psychotics.
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When Hell was in Session by Jeremiah Denton has been in print for a long time. Perhaps the author could look it up!
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Since I can't record a "thumbs down" because I don't have enough "influence points" (what the crap is that?!), let me record my displeasure this way: rewriting history does not make it so. There were legitimate reasons to go into Vietnam but Democrat Presidents rarely fight wars well so it quickly devolved into chaos. Ending a war without a victory is always a mistake. It could have been done in Vietnam and it could have been done in Iraq but politics drives politicians who are more interested in appeasing people like the author. He's wrong about many things and VERY wrong about the flag!
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WTH? I’m so sick of people saying oh “this racist or that is racist “ it’s CALLED HISTORY! Fucking get over it! Ain’t my problem that your own countrymen sold your relatives into slavery. There are more whites & Asians right now in slavery and I don’t hear them whining like a bitch.
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I wouldn't give this a shred more attention than any that I give to RT, Infowars, or any other spurious purveyor of propaganda.
Have a good one, brothers and sisters, and save your powder for shots within range.
Have a good one, brothers and sisters, and save your powder for shots within range.
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Yes, we were used as pawns by those we swore to defend. The day that flag comes down, there will be a lot of veterans in line to put it back... oh, that line will be the same one that will rearrange the physical features that those who insulted the men and women who went, and will throw a punch for those who this flag represents.
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I call BS on a lot of things in your post, which seems to say something over and over. you did not mention McCain that I could find. that traitor was a POW that made his millions stealing OUR money and waving that flag!
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This is a simple fix. Stop giving an audience to nonsense like this. Articles these days seem to be written to get a reaction instead of information. Let ignorance make itself stupid. Don’t entertain it.
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UPDATED:
A Writer’s Apology
I sincerely regret the use of the word “racist” to describe how the POW/MIA flag distorts the history of the Vietnam War. The word was over the top and not called for.
I’m deeply sorry it hurt people—especially people who’ve selflessly served their country. Most of all, I’m sorry because many of the people offended by the word “racist” are the same people who were hurt when the experiences and feelings of common soldiers and veterans were manipulated to serve the powerful interests and individuals who blithely and perennially send men and women to war, then don’t take care of them when they return home. And, of course, I regret the pain caused to the families of those who gave the last full measure of devotion to their country in Southeast Asia.
I would ask the people I angered to consider carefully reading the article, which explains, for example, that the Chinese Communists cynically leaked lies about the existence of live POWs in the years after the war in order to harm their rival Vietnam.
Most of all, I wish to express my regrets. Other than that, I stand by my article. —Rick Perlstein
The Editor’s Response
We published Rick Perlstein’s article on the POW/MIA flag, because it insightfully examines the cynical manipulation of public opinion at the expense of the downed pilots and foot soldiers the creators of the MIA movement claimed to represent. Perlstein is an accomplished historian who has spent years researching the Nixon and Reagan years. He knows this material. Our prolonged national discussion of the tragic Southeast Asian war that extended beyond Vietnam is often framed in what can be reasonably described as racist terms. The defenders of an Asian country that was invaded, bombed, defoliated and savaged (see: Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse) are vilified, while the invaders are beatified. Neither position is correct or fair. It was a persistent yet perhaps understandable disregard for the “other” victims of a war, beyond our own nation’s tragic losses, that informed the piece.
Nowhere is it suggested, nor do we imply, that individuals who remain devoted to the POW/MIA flag are racist. And it was neither Mr. Perlstein’s intent, nor ours, to dishonor those who served in Vietnam, although based on comments of readers, many were offended. A more careful editor would have moved the term “racist” lower in the body of the story and kept it out of the headline, where it was an unintended red flag that provoked the understandable ire of many readers. —Lou Dubose
A Writer’s Apology
I sincerely regret the use of the word “racist” to describe how the POW/MIA flag distorts the history of the Vietnam War. The word was over the top and not called for.
I’m deeply sorry it hurt people—especially people who’ve selflessly served their country. Most of all, I’m sorry because many of the people offended by the word “racist” are the same people who were hurt when the experiences and feelings of common soldiers and veterans were manipulated to serve the powerful interests and individuals who blithely and perennially send men and women to war, then don’t take care of them when they return home. And, of course, I regret the pain caused to the families of those who gave the last full measure of devotion to their country in Southeast Asia.
I would ask the people I angered to consider carefully reading the article, which explains, for example, that the Chinese Communists cynically leaked lies about the existence of live POWs in the years after the war in order to harm their rival Vietnam.
Most of all, I wish to express my regrets. Other than that, I stand by my article. —Rick Perlstein
The Editor’s Response
We published Rick Perlstein’s article on the POW/MIA flag, because it insightfully examines the cynical manipulation of public opinion at the expense of the downed pilots and foot soldiers the creators of the MIA movement claimed to represent. Perlstein is an accomplished historian who has spent years researching the Nixon and Reagan years. He knows this material. Our prolonged national discussion of the tragic Southeast Asian war that extended beyond Vietnam is often framed in what can be reasonably described as racist terms. The defenders of an Asian country that was invaded, bombed, defoliated and savaged (see: Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse) are vilified, while the invaders are beatified. Neither position is correct or fair. It was a persistent yet perhaps understandable disregard for the “other” victims of a war, beyond our own nation’s tragic losses, that informed the piece.
Nowhere is it suggested, nor do we imply, that individuals who remain devoted to the POW/MIA flag are racist. And it was neither Mr. Perlstein’s intent, nor ours, to dishonor those who served in Vietnam, although based on comments of readers, many were offended. A more careful editor would have moved the term “racist” lower in the body of the story and kept it out of the headline, where it was an unintended red flag that provoked the understandable ire of many readers. —Lou Dubose
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SSgt (Join to see)
In addition to an apology, Newsweek also posted a counter point in defense of the flag.
https://www.newsweek.com/pow-mia-flag-veterans-racist-362508
iving the benefit of doubt as to the origin of the headline for Mr. Pearlstein’s article in the Washington Spectator, picked up by Newsweek, the best one can say is that the assertion our POW/MIA flag reflects “racist hate” is unsupported and unsupportable. The purpose appears to be a blatant attempt to generate interest in Mr. Perlstein’s latest book focused on trite, outdated political theories, overcome by events that have transpired over the past four decades.
Setting aside the race-baiting headline and its purpose, the “opinions” written to dismiss the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) accounting mission as “mythology” seem intended to build on similar unsubstantiated assertions by another political author from the past, peddling similar political opinions, H. Bruce Franklin in his 1992 book, M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America. Clearly, neither author sought to understand the solid foundation upon which the League’s expectations were established.
Those who took the time and made the effort, both in Washington, DC, and in Hanoi, knew the importance. Following relatively feeble US attention post-war, the National League of POW/MIA Families, supported by our Nation’s major national Veteran organizations, worked to sustain public interest in and support for the principles most Americans hold dear—standing behind those who serve our country—including making every reasonable effort to return them to their families and our country—alive or dead.
As a result, and after several extremely difficult years, the U.S. set about developing the ability to account for America’s POW/MIAs in 1981 by working directly to establish meaningful dialogue with Vietnam. Most importantly the Vietnamese leadership, having long known the value of American POWs, had retrieved and centralized recovered remains and archival documents that could shed light on those not returned in 1973.
Assertions that significant bilateral efforts were based on mythology are rendered moot when you recognize how far Vietnam and the U.S. have come together since the actual end of the war in 1975. From a personal perspective, the 1,019 families of U.S. personnel previously missing are returned for burial with full military honors, meant an end to their many years of uncertainty.
Recognized first by Vietnam as their “bridge to normalization of relations” with the U.S., the humanitarian nature of accounting for former combatants is both honorable and served as a sustainable and defensible path for policy level dialogue between former enemies. Representing the National League of POW/MIA Families, I participated in that interagency process from 1978 until 1992; theories are unnecessary in today’s environment.
This past July, the U.S. and Vietnam celebrated the 20th anniversary of normalization of bilateral relations. This year also saw the 30th anniversary of the first joint field recovery attempt in northern Vietnam, and the 40th anniversary of the official end of the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, it was little short of astonishing to participate in activities related to the visit to Washington, DC, of His Excellency Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, a visit that included meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office.
For both countries, the visit was highly symbolic, even unprecedented, though Vietnam’s President visited in 2013 and their Prime Minister a few years earlier, and countless visits back and forth by senior U.S. officials. Most importantly, there were pioneers on both sides who had the courage and vision to move forward. For many, the pace seemed far too slow, but restoring relations between former enemies is no simple task.
There are some Americans and Vietnamese who will never understand the importance of what has occurred, much less forgive all that took place in the past. Having dedicated roughly 40 years to ensure that America, as a nation, stands behind those who serve, the League knows there is much more that can and will be done to account for our unreturned Veterans. Very importantly, we are proud to be part of ensuring that those serving today know that should they be captured or listed as missing, our nation will be there for them, to bring them home—alive or dead—persistence and dedication will make it happen.
Mr. Pearlstein appears to have no knowledge of the bipartisan support through successive administrations that now has brought formation of the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, thanks to former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s unwavering support. The League and our legions of supporters, including our Nation’s major national veteran organizations, know the POW/MIA flag symbolizes the principles intended when it first appeared in 1970.
Ann Mills-Griffiths is the Chairman of the Board, National League of POW/MIA Families and MIA sister of CDR James B. Mills, USNR, MIA 9-21-66, North Vietnam.
https://www.newsweek.com/pow-mia-flag-veterans-racist-362508
iving the benefit of doubt as to the origin of the headline for Mr. Pearlstein’s article in the Washington Spectator, picked up by Newsweek, the best one can say is that the assertion our POW/MIA flag reflects “racist hate” is unsupported and unsupportable. The purpose appears to be a blatant attempt to generate interest in Mr. Perlstein’s latest book focused on trite, outdated political theories, overcome by events that have transpired over the past four decades.
Setting aside the race-baiting headline and its purpose, the “opinions” written to dismiss the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) accounting mission as “mythology” seem intended to build on similar unsubstantiated assertions by another political author from the past, peddling similar political opinions, H. Bruce Franklin in his 1992 book, M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America. Clearly, neither author sought to understand the solid foundation upon which the League’s expectations were established.
Those who took the time and made the effort, both in Washington, DC, and in Hanoi, knew the importance. Following relatively feeble US attention post-war, the National League of POW/MIA Families, supported by our Nation’s major national Veteran organizations, worked to sustain public interest in and support for the principles most Americans hold dear—standing behind those who serve our country—including making every reasonable effort to return them to their families and our country—alive or dead.
As a result, and after several extremely difficult years, the U.S. set about developing the ability to account for America’s POW/MIAs in 1981 by working directly to establish meaningful dialogue with Vietnam. Most importantly the Vietnamese leadership, having long known the value of American POWs, had retrieved and centralized recovered remains and archival documents that could shed light on those not returned in 1973.
Assertions that significant bilateral efforts were based on mythology are rendered moot when you recognize how far Vietnam and the U.S. have come together since the actual end of the war in 1975. From a personal perspective, the 1,019 families of U.S. personnel previously missing are returned for burial with full military honors, meant an end to their many years of uncertainty.
Recognized first by Vietnam as their “bridge to normalization of relations” with the U.S., the humanitarian nature of accounting for former combatants is both honorable and served as a sustainable and defensible path for policy level dialogue between former enemies. Representing the National League of POW/MIA Families, I participated in that interagency process from 1978 until 1992; theories are unnecessary in today’s environment.
This past July, the U.S. and Vietnam celebrated the 20th anniversary of normalization of bilateral relations. This year also saw the 30th anniversary of the first joint field recovery attempt in northern Vietnam, and the 40th anniversary of the official end of the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, it was little short of astonishing to participate in activities related to the visit to Washington, DC, of His Excellency Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, a visit that included meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office.
For both countries, the visit was highly symbolic, even unprecedented, though Vietnam’s President visited in 2013 and their Prime Minister a few years earlier, and countless visits back and forth by senior U.S. officials. Most importantly, there were pioneers on both sides who had the courage and vision to move forward. For many, the pace seemed far too slow, but restoring relations between former enemies is no simple task.
There are some Americans and Vietnamese who will never understand the importance of what has occurred, much less forgive all that took place in the past. Having dedicated roughly 40 years to ensure that America, as a nation, stands behind those who serve, the League knows there is much more that can and will be done to account for our unreturned Veterans. Very importantly, we are proud to be part of ensuring that those serving today know that should they be captured or listed as missing, our nation will be there for them, to bring them home—alive or dead—persistence and dedication will make it happen.
Mr. Pearlstein appears to have no knowledge of the bipartisan support through successive administrations that now has brought formation of the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, thanks to former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s unwavering support. The League and our legions of supporters, including our Nation’s major national veteran organizations, know the POW/MIA flag symbolizes the principles intended when it first appeared in 1970.
Ann Mills-Griffiths is the Chairman of the Board, National League of POW/MIA Families and MIA sister of CDR James B. Mills, USNR, MIA 9-21-66, North Vietnam.
The POW/MIA Flag Isn't 'Racist Hate,' It's Support for Veterans and Their Families
The National League of POW/MIA Families has worked to support standing behind those who serve our country.
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This Newsweek article is pure political crap, dishonors all POWs, and further soils the reputation of a publication I once respected, but which I despise today!
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SSgt (Join to see)
After clarification his message through an updated writers note and editor note at the bottom, and Newsweek publishing a counter point by an author supporting the flag (https://www.newsweek.com/pow-mia-flag-veterans-racist-362508), is there anything specific you disagree with?
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