The recent diplomatic recognition of Vietnam, along with the lifting of the economic embargo, offers an opportunity to re-examine one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam War, the POW/MIA dilemma. Two decades after the war ended, the POW/MIA issue continues to divide Americans in a manner reminiscent of the war itself. Recently, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) office responsible for POW/MIAs, called the Defense Prisoner/Missing in Action Office (DPMO), undertook a year long review of all the remaining MIA cases to establish a base line for future efforts. Their summary states “we have found it exceedingly difficult to predict the extent to which evidence of accountability by Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia about some aspect of a U.S. loss could lead to an accounting of the individual.”
Contrary to the government’s current position, MIA family members and activist groups continue to maintain that Vietnamese wartime policy mandated keeping highly detailed records of incidents involving captured American personnel. Many families believe that the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP)(formerly the Lao Dong Party) controlling the POW/MIA issue in Indochina could rapidly account for many more U.S. POW/MIAs. Obviously, that postwar accounting has not taken place, resulting in a twenty year climate of political controversy and suspicion of the motives of both governments involved. This suspicion among the POW/MIA families over Vietnamese actions was directly created from prior Vietnamese intransigence on accounting for American servicemen, a suspicion further aroused when U.S. government spokespersons label current Vietnamese POW/MIA cooperation as “superb” and “outstanding.”
This paper seeks to outline the roles of the various Vietnamese organizations responsible for handling American POWs, and examines the impact of VCP policy on this issue. In doing so, the authors will attempt to determine whether the U.S. government’s characterization of Vietnamese cooperation as “superb” is warranted. The paper does not discuss the possibility of Americans remaining in captivity after the completion of “Operation Homecoming.”
To accomplish our goal, the paper is divided into two basic sections. The first part discusses the Vietnamese organs which processed POWs and outlines the known wartime Vietnamese communist POW policies. We will scrutinize these communist policies and organs through a wealth of declassified interrogation reports, numerous captured enemy documents, and several CIA studies on the Vietnamese intelligence services. In reviewing this material, a consistent theme emerges of VCP policies that placed a heavy emphasis on the use of remains for economic concessions, and prisoners and their documentation for use in propaganda, intelligence gathering, and political negotiations. Additionally, using recent Oral History interviews of Vietnamese cadre involved in the processing of American POWs and remains conducted by one of the authors and other members of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA), we will sketch out what we believe is a disregarded and ignored aspect of the Vietnamese POW system.
