Web Letters: McCain and the POW Cover-up

There is more information regarding POW/MIAs on www.greasyonline.com.

Rosa Sykes

New York, NY

Schanberg on MIAs, or Rambo: More Blood Part 5, 6, 7? The oldest narrative in American culture is the captive narrative myth. These stories emanating from the deepest fears of the earliest proto-Americans, the first British colonists, of being captured by the savages. From Mary Rowlandson's 1682 published story of captivity and restoration to James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales of the late 1700s and early 1800s, the captivity narrative provided fertile ground for denigrating the Native American population. The story continues, through the Iran hostage crisis, the Beirut hostages that kept presidents Carter and then Reagan so enthralled, to Jessica Lynch in Iraq. One of the saddest episodes in the self-aggrandizing assertions of American cultural superiority, of US versus the savages, is the MIA myth of Vietnam.

There was a time before the current cap- gun candidacy of John McCain's POW POW POW, wherein he seeks to transform himself from Prisoner of War to President of War, when the general consensus was that the Vietnam War was a huge mistake with moral implications that should lead Americans to some serious self-examination.

The disproportionate obsession with a mythical American POW population supposedly left behind compared with the devastation visited on Vietnam and the more than a million MIAs, both military and civilian, they have endured is very revealing of the persistent American chauvinism that has led to Iraq, and who knows where next.

There is something not very impressive about a culture that seeks to hide the hideous in various "collateralizations," "collateral damage," "collateralized debt obligations," as if we could just bundle up all that we do not want to look at and deal with and move on.

I sympathize with The Nation's desire to prevent a McCain presidency, but this is not the way. As a subscriber and regular reader, I am disappointed.

vance geiger

Orlando, FL

The DIA's "Hotel California" for secret documents is a play on the lyrics in the Eagles song of the same name, "You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave."

The confluence of Intel, National Security, POW-MIAs and SE Asian drug smuggling is well known and has been for many years. The Ross Perot vs. Richard Armitage feud was another tip of an iceberg in murky waters.

Folks like John Kerry might have seen glimpses of the truth behind closed doors in subcommittee sessions, but little can be done after the fact. If our guys were there, held hostage and some knew too much to ever come back, how can we convince others to go "over there" to do our "dirty work" and expect we will really try to get them back if we don't want to hear what they have to say?

James L. Cypher

Beacon, NY

Kudos to Sydney Schanberg and The Nation for bringing back to public awareness John McCain's role in consistently blocking Congressional efforts to learn more about the fate of the POWs in Vietnam never accounted for--left behind?--unlike McCain and his 590 fellows who were released in 1973.

It seems inexplicable behavior on the part of a man who puts such stock in honor and promises, in his first debate with Barack Obama, to take care of veterans.

Every veteran--every potential voter on November 4--should ponder this history before making hii/her choice for president.

Christopher May

Deale, MD

I started reading thinking this would be an overdue debunking of ultra-right attacks on John McCain as the “Manchurian Candidate,” brainwashed by the North Vietnamese during his imprisonment in Hanoi and returned to us as their secret agent. Schanberg, though, seemed be taking seriously elements of that story line. Maybe he’s writing a clever send-up of right-wing conspiracy fantasies, I thought; or maybe this is somebody posing as Schanberg in order to discredit his illustrious career by associating him with this over-the-top post Vietnam-war legend; maybe, even, this isn’t really from The Nation. In an era of facsimile mastheads and hi-tech cut-and-paste jobs this could be dirty-tricks on The Nation. But it wasn’t.

The belief in missing POWs was put to rest--or should have been--by Bruce Franklin in his 1992 book. Yet, when CNN broadcast a report in 1998 claiming that POWs may have been assassinated by US Special Forces in Laos in 1970, The Nation moved to defend the story. Ultimately, that effort was dropped but it's clear now that somebody at the magazine is in the thrall of that myth, wooed, as Chip Berlet might put it, by the right.

There is a campaign issue here insofar as an attempt to smear McCain in this way could well backfire and diminish the credibility of legitimate criticism of his positions. The bigger picture painted in my book CNN’s Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam’s Last Great Myth is that fantasies like these germinate in the fearful minds of religious apocalyptics, and they’re nurtured and spread by the political right--upon whose webpages one can find even more virulent versions of Schanberg’s story.

Jerry Lembcke

Worcester, MA

Mr. Schanberg has no clue, nor does The Nation, what it is to be an ex-prisoner of war. The Nation has for years supported those cheating survivors of the holocaust, like Burt Neuborne, the NYU professor. Now here you go and let a blind article on the effects of trauma appear in your journal. It is not about the Holocaust, but deals with past trauma, and your writer , obviously a greenhorn, just fulminates and misleads the public.

McCain is not presidential material, so why not attack him on policy instead of this painful traumatic experience of his?

Paul Frenkel

Washington, CT

Schanberg is dishonest and wrong in this article. His study adds nothing to the rational study of the Vietnam War and actually sets it back. My reasons for saying so are as follows:

#1. During the Vietnam war, the governments of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and of Laos had every reason in the world to capture as many prisoners as possible and to keep them alive. They wanted evidence of the air war being delivered against their country. It was not in Vietnam's interest to kill, torture or abuse prisoners. A pilot without an aircraft is no longer a threat to anybody. They wanted to show the world that they were the victims of American bombardment. Given their undeveloped-nation status in terms of medical facilities, the DRV could not deliver "state of the art" medical services to wounded airmen. They did assist wounded personnel to the best of their ability. Some individuals may have violated this policy, but the official policy was to preserve and protect wounded. See H. Bruce Franklin's study, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America.

#2. The ability of an individual to survive the destruction of his aircraft was minimal. Consider these facts: a pilot moving in on a target was carrying at least half a load of fuel and a rack of bombs and other ordnance under his wings. His aircraft was moving at 400 to 500 knots per hour. If anti-aircraft fire (which was intense) hit the aircraft, sympathetic explosions alone would have destroyed and broken up the aircraft. It is highly improbable that a pilot could eject safely under such conditions. Very few did, and of those few, even fewer survived the ejection operation and the parachute deployment and the impact of the fall. Pilots are not trained paratroopers. (Admiral James Stockdale, a former POW and the former running mate of H. Ross Perot discussed his own difficulty bailing out of a damaged aircraft in his book, In Love and War.)

#3. The number of pilots reported as "missing" was larger than the facts and probabilities warranted. Many pilots reported their friends as "missing" because they saw nothing left of them, after the fireball enveloped their friend's aircraft. By reporting the pilot and aircraft as "missing," instead of confirmed "destroyed," the surviving pilots were able to make sure that the surviving family continued to receive his full pay and entitlements. In the infantry a "killed in action" army soldier's family got six months pay and whatever benefits existed from the deceased's insurance policies. A "missing in action" air force or navy pilot's family got a continuation of the pay and entitlements for the deceased for the duration. This essentially humanitarian gesture helped inflate the number of personnel listed as "missing in action" (MIA). It also helped disguise the number of US pilots killed in the air war.

#4. President Richard M. Nixon used the POW/MIA issue as a method of defending his four-year continuation of the war. Nixon created and fostered the notion that somehow the war in Vietnam was actually being waged in order to get the prisoners held by Hanoi returned to the USA. The diplomatic/political issue of the preservation of the Republic of Vietnam (the original issue) took second place to the emotional issue of, "getting our boys back home." It needs to be pointed out that the war that Nixon ended in 1973 could have been and was ended on the same grounds that were available in 1969.

#5. The largest number of POW/MIAs was created by the United States of America among the Vietnamese people. Our war in and against Vietnam, North and South, created: more prisoners captured, more missing in action, more killed, more wounded, more children killed, more villages destroyed, etc., than any reciprocal or comparable number of American casualties. The USA was the major military aggressor in Vietnam, and we should acknowledge that basic fact. I hope that these brief comments will encourage people to move past mythology to begin to think about the future. The alternative is that we will all remain prisoners of a war and of a past that has no justifiable meaning.

I served in the U.S. Army infantry with the 25th Infantry Division as a platoon leader in The Republic of Vietnam in 1966. I was wounded in action on 26 June 1966.

John J. Fitzgerald

Longmeadow, MA

All documents having to do with the POW/MIA issue have been declassified and are now available at the Library of Congress. Go to: http://memory.loc.gov/pow/powhome.html.

If you are interested in reading a more sane approach to this issue, one backed up by facts and logic, you may wish to visit http://www.miafacts.org/, a website created by Col. Joe Schlatter, former head of the Special Office for POW/MIA at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Richard Conoboy

Bellingham, WA

Why doesn't The Nation demand Bush's impeachment in order to spare the lives of today's soldiers, and so that this story isn't about The Nation's writers tomorrow?

Campbell Jones

Indiana, PA

These families only want answers, so why does McCain get so angry when they ask him about their loved ones and why does the government want to put so many blocks in their way? Is he afraid the Vietnamese may finally release a prisoner who would call him McTraitor? I understand McCain had to be removed from one ship because some of the crew had threatened to kill him.

Anchors aweigh!

Vietnam era Veteran, USN / USNR,

Dave Kisor

Riverside, CA

If Mr. Schanberg's assertions are without merit, as some suggest in their responses, then what's the problem with some sunshine on the documents in question? Why were these records buried, and why did McCain get so angry at the family members of an MIA soldier? Why did he physically assault people in the hallway? Why was he not reprimanded or prosecuted? Vietnam Veterans Against McCain has some eye-opening info and statements from other Vietnam POWs.

Carol Burns

Pensacola, FL

Like Mr. Destatte, I worked as an analyst on the POW/MIA issue from 1984 to 1998, with a short break as the senior analyst on the counter-terrorism desk of the National Military Intelligence Center at the Pentagon. Shame on The Nation for having published such absolute rubbish on an issue that continues to be a source of pain and suffering for those families who lost loved ones during the war in Vietnam. Do you not have any fact-checkers? Is there not one of you on the staff of this publication who possesses a modicum of critical thinking?

There were no massive intelligence failures. One need only look at the actual numbers of missing personnel at the end of the war and the circumstances of their deaths to understand that there was no way that North Vietnam could have had or kept secret hundreds of prisoners. The logic and the facts speak for themselves. Statements of sheer numbers of first-hand (1,600) or second-hand reports (14,000) is virtually meaningless. One has to look at each report separately and then, if appropriate, as an aggregate for reports that may be related. Not only that, the North Vietnamese would have had to have a totally separate and secret prison system, for which there is absolutely no evidence. As for Mr. Schanberg it is: find sand, dig hole, insert head.

Richard Conoboy

Bellingham, WA

For more than twenty-three years I served as a senior analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency's Special Office for POW/MIA Matters and its successor, the Defense Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Office.

For years Mr. Shanberg has shown himself to be a consistent and prolific liar regarding the POW and MIA issue.

This, his most recent article, is simply more of the same shopworn lies, out of context half-truths and dissemblances that he published in the past.

The Nation's editors embarrass themselves by publishing Mr. Shanberg's drivel.

Robert J. Destatte

Temecula, CA

After all these years--some truth about Vietnam POWs. I remember this vividly as a child, when the war was ending and then the years of speculation. I remember fictional movies on the subject. It would be a great healing to our nation and to the families who deserve the truth and closure, for the president to come clean on the subject. That is a positive legacy Bush could leave.

This article should be picked up by major media. The truth about McCain on this subject is vital information, given that he is running for the office of president.

Rosemary Brooks

Sunnyvale, CA

Thank you, Nation and Sydney Schanberg, for reminding people of what I believe is the true disturbed psychological personality of McCain. It's been hidden from the public for too long or spoken of in "hush hush" terms and if ever there is a time to bring it up it's now before someone of that caliber might become president, not afterwards.

Watch the actual video of him (and Kerry) in Congress from C-span as they are so furious about the questions they both walk out. Why? What does he not want the nation to know? Why are his own records sealed forever? Why do many of his own POWs who were with him refute him? I've certainly heard about it for a long time, it's time the public is made aware of it and I for one appreciate it. I say, Thank you.

Dee Troll

Youngstown, OH

Sydney H. Schanberg is obviously a follower of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals, for he is cruelly rehashing a story presented by charlatans and frauds to ridicule John McCain. Several times over the years groups have researched the MIAs and have come to the same conclusion: that all but a handful of the MIAs were dead; those who could not be accounted for are probably dead. The reason is that if there is no body, a soldier is reported as MIA. So if a plane exploded and vaporizes the pilot, he is listed as MIA. This is nothing but yellow journalism an a lie to attack a real Vietnam war hero, John McCain.

In Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America, by Susan Katz Keating, it states: "Susan Katz Keating was a reporter for the Washington Times newspaper. She was a believer in the cover-up theory. She started collecting information for articles--interviewing families, interviewing the people who spread the claims, and interviewing government officials. She came to realize that those spreading these stories, claiming to be working for the families, were charlatans and frauds. In this book, Ms. Keating details the antics and the phony stories that continue to haunt the MIA issue."

Robert Exton

San Fransisco , CA

I don't know what to believe regarding the Vietnam MIA issue, but if there really is strong evidence that we left hundreds of people behind, John McCain isn't the only one who ought to be embarrassed. This subject has been around for decades and mainstream journalists, leftist journalists and everyone in government seems to have united in debunking it and I would be ashamed to say I believed them. If it is true after all, McCain's dishonesty is a very small part of the story--there has been a vast bipartisan and journalistic conspiracy, or at the very least, criminally careless negligence involved on the part of very large numbers of people.

And why is The Nation only now publishing this? Is it only important to you now because it might embarrass McCain? If the story is true, then The Nation has done a disgraceful job with its lack of coverage, and your interest now looks like the interest of opportunistic partisan hacks.

Donald Johnson

Yonkers, NY