only THREE MIAs... we had a few more than that in 'NAM

While I feel the urge to spit as I pass the portraits of Bush and Cheney in the V.A. Hospital, I lower my gaze when the black POW/MIA flag comes into view. It serves as a reminder of the price my comrades paid during that damned old "police action." Many of those who served while I did during the Vietnam "conflict" paid with more than their lives, by spending years in torturous bamboo tiger cages. I bet many welcomed death, when it finally came.

I will not diminish the price our current soldiers are paying in Iraq but I really have a problem with reports that only three are missing in action. With a body of troops that size, more than three are assuredly AWOL (Away Without Leave) and could easily be captives of the insurgents. It dishonors the price they pay during daily torture sessions when our government fails to acknowledge their existence.

Certainly, since we invaded the country for profit, I should have no problems with the current government of Vietnam but I do have an axe to grind. It pissed me off royally when Rumsfeld went to the country last month and didn't even bring up the issue of the remains of our MIAs, which were never returned for proper burial. If he had asked, perhaps they would have literally thrown him a bone or two. Call me an unforgiving asshole if you must but I'm just not quite READY TO MAKE NICE, like Rummy, when it comes to Nam.

There are a lot of MIA flags flying in this rural part of Vermont and lots of reminders on bumperstickers. A lot of us have not forgotten. Hang in there.

http://www.pownetwork.org/remret.htm

That's a big part of reunification was about, getting into Vietnam and beginning to find our MIA's and return them. Happens on a fairly regular basis.

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/releaseview/118DCCDB597C696B85257187004DDEF8?opendocument

Maybe we need to be pushing our own government for more than 7 people to do this work in Vietnam.

three missing now.

And a situation where capturing groups of soldiers isn't feasible. If there were a significant number of MIA's, we'd know that. Family members would start to complain.

my mistake... sorry I forgot how well this war is covered by media and how honest bush and rummy have been.

Don't even pretend. If there were an MIA problem, VVAW, Veterans for Peace, IVAW, Goldstar Families, etc. would let everybody know.

I suspect there's a big problem with UA and AWOL. I know it will only get worse as the administration leaves them in long after their tours of duty are over. It's unfair to leave someone in "harms way" (I hate that stupid expression) so long for political reasons. If Bushypuss, Cheney-gang and cut-and-run Rummy want to have this war-for-profit they should go ahead and re-institute the draft now, not after November elections, as they're probably planning.

Did you miss that little chapter during the Vietnam War? Believe me, if there were any inclination that we had an MIA problem in Iraq, wives and vets would be all over it.

This war is bad enough without concocting hysterical bullshit to push an agenda. In fact, that's how the left tends to hurt themselves the most, making wild claims that can't be substantiated or are so far off base they end up ignored altogether. Kind of like Mr. Stupidity and his Vietnam claims.

Stick to known facts, you'll be glad you did.

This war isn't on TV, like Nam. I DO admit to an agenda... I want this "war" (invasion, illegal occupation, My Lai torture-fest) to be real and vivid to EVERYONE, so it will end.

All I am saying is give peace a chance.

Just like they were then. I didn't need to see it on the television to know my cousin went missing. Believe me, if people are going missing in Iraq, their family members are going to say so.

And don't shove a dove at my face to try to deflect the fact that you were drumming up hysteria over a problem that doesn't exist. Stick to the facts, that's what I said.

admitted to an agenda. As for "shoving a dove in your face," better a dove than a rifle, like in Iraq.

1. No jungles, a lot less confusing.
2. Better communication equipment.
3. Most patrols are carried out at the squad and platoon level, accountability is easier.
4. We control all of Iraq, (mostly). A lot of Vietnam POW's were captured after being shot down in the North.
5. The enemy in Iraq is much, much weaker and poorly trained compared to the VC and NVA. For the most part, they just don't have the ability to capture POW's, even though they want to badly. ($25,000 dollars per soldier or Marine I last heard.)

I was actually pretty suprised that these two guys went missing.

what's this triangle of death in Iraq? How much "control" did we have in Haditha? War is never, pretty, never controlled and never justified, unless you are being invaded.

BTW, thanks for the info, I didn't know they had a bounty on the heads of our troops.

...and I do have some Military training under my belt, so I'm not completely ignorant. From what I have read about Vietnam, you couldn't see more than five feet in front of your face in some parts of the jungle. Just being able to keep a visual on members of your squad or platoon is why it is a lot less likely that there are captured American troops in Iraq.

a brand new kind of hell... With your experience, how many in your company went AWOL? Hell, when my squadron was in Jax we had guys jumping ship and even more ducked out in country... Think about being in action and believing you were about to be discharged then the Decider-in-Thief, decides you need to stay for two more tours. This ain't 'Nam, they rotated troops out in a reasonable time frame back then.

There were indeed POWs held by the vietnamese during the long war in vietnam. However, all POWs were repatriated after the end of hostilities. Tiger cages indeed existed, however they existed at Con Son prison, run by our own US government, and were used for torturing our prisoners. The vietnamese prisons were no piece of cake and they did abuse their prisoners, but if your are going to toss tiger cages around at least know which side they belong to.

For the most part the abuses were from our side, not theirs. Our Operation Phoenix killed something like 60,000 vietnamese through a program of assasination of civilians identified by our intelligence operations as targets. If you would like to believe that these were all 'viet cong', you can do so, but we assasinated anyone we indentified as a potential leader to any opposition to the dictatorships we propped up from 56 on. We killed somewhere on the order of 2,000,000 vietnamese total through combat and collateral damage, mostly though widespread bombardment of the region. Our interrogation techniques included documented incidents of tossing prisoners out of helicopters. How many POWs did the vietnamese execute?

After the fall of Saigon the right in this country immediately started up the POW-MIA bullshit campaign to divert and deflect public attentiona away from the fact that we had just finished wasting 15 years of our nations lives and treasure in a very bad war that we lost. All wars have their share of MIAs. The exploitation of the vietnam war mias for political purposes by the right in this country was shameless. Many good people were duped and deluded. Those stupid flags should come down. They are an insult to those who lost loved ones. There were no POWs kept after the end of the war. Vietnam has done all that it can do to help find the remains of MIAs.

on edit: in your long rambling seemingly expert post you forgot to mention where hopelessly poor Viet Cong kept prisoners. Were the ALL in the Hanoi Hilton? How can anyone speak with such sweeping knowledge. Were you present at every capture? Are you some all-seeing god of knowledge? Don't the rest of us just love expert know-it-alls?

Are you trying to prove that only THREE are currently missing in Iraq? I noticed you forgot to address that issue in your long oratory.

Forget all the rest of my nonsense. Those were our tiger cages and Con Son, not the other sides.

forget my scathing reply to your post. it's kind of personal to me. I knew several ex POWs when I was an inpatient in the VA but I never asked them the grizzly details of their incarceration.

You are wrong too. Jesus fucking christ, POW's were tortured and starved in Vietnam. My cousin was a POW, do not even pretend to go there with your bullshit. We don't KNOW how many POW's the Vietnamese executed because we still have over 1,000 missing and don't know where they went. Does torturing somebody to death count as execution in your book??

Why oh why do people think they have to glorify one side in order to talk about the wrongs of the other.

I gotta go, be back to knock your head around later.

In fact I agreed that the vietnamese also engaged in torture, which fact you have to of course ignore in your counter attack.

There is documented evidence of our torture and execution of our vietnamese prisoners. Tiger cages - documented. Interrogation by freefall - documented. Operation Phoenix documented. In no way am I justifying the abuse of POWs by the vietnamese. However our hands here are covered in blood. And as in this generations bad war, we were the aggressors there, trying to impose our will on the people of the region, and doing so with murderous force.

You too have fallen for the reversal mythology propagated deliberately by the right where our own abuses were simply fictionalized and projected onto the enemy. The OP is a perfect example: tiger cages are used by the vietnamese in his mythology, in reality of course they were infamously our tiger cages in Con Son prison. Famously our saigon chief of police blows the brains out of a suspect on camera and Hollywood reworks that into a viet cong game of russian roulette in The Deer Hunter.

Yes the vietnames inexcusably tortured some POWs. Some POWs died under very questionable circumstances. As far as I know there were no deliberate executions of POWs by the vietnamese. The government of vietnam, for all of its faults, did not nearly approach the level of war crimes perpetrated by our own government on the people of the entire region.

All of the POWs were returned at the end of the war. The POW/MIA bullshit is just that: bullshit. MIAs exist in every war, vietnam was no different in that respect. The right has played the POW/MIA bullshit game for 30 years and have found no lack of naifs to trot along with them.

I wonder how the right will spin the disaster in Iraq after that bullshit finally ends, and how many of us here will internalize their myths again.

came home from Vietnam...what do you call them? Myth? The VC never used tiger cages? Your being absurd.

"Those families were missing soldiers who never came home" and the right exploited their grief to build the myth of the POW/MIA.


Yes it is horrible to have your loved ones go off to war and never come back and have no good accounting for what happened to them. My point is that all wars have MIAs. As a child I don't seem to recall the Black MIA flags from WWII or the Korean war. Why is that? How come after we lose a disastrous conflict of our own choosing in vietnam, suddenly MIAs are a national crisis? Did you ever consider that this was all a propaganda campaign to get us to forget that we went into that war for bad reasons, killed 2,000,000 vietnamese, lost 54,000 of our own troops, and lost the war? To a certain extent the right was successful in making that war about mythical POWs being held for no good reason by the Evil Commies, convincing many that surely many or all the MIAs must actually be alive in those mythical secret camps. How sick was that? How many families had their hopes kept alive for years - decades - by rightwing bastards using them to erase the real memory of that war?

Did it occur to you that one of the reasons why the current crop of bad leaders has been able to take us into another bad war of choice is because the right has so successfully confused us about vietnam, so successfully that essentially no lesson was learned and here we are all over again? Or perhaps history to you is just a bunch of disconnected events.

Tiger Cages existed at Con Son prison. You go find the credible evidence that the viet cong had 'tiger cages' and post it.

http://www.medalofhonor.com/RockyVersace.htm

After some initial successes, a vastly larger Viet Kong force ambushed and overran Rocky's unit. Under siege and suffering from multiple bullet wounds, Rocky kept providing covering fire so that friendly forces could withdraw from the killing zone.

Eventually, he and two other Americans, Lieutenant Nick Rowe and Sergeant Dan Pitzer, were captured, bound and forced to walk barefoot to a prison camp deep within the jungle. For much of the next two years, their home would be bamboo cages, six feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high. They were given little to eat, and little protection against the elements. On nights when their netting was taken away, so many mosquitos would swarm their shackled feet it looked like they were wearing black socks.

The point was not merely to physically torture the prisoners, but also to persuade them to confess to phony crimes and use their confessions for propaganda. But Rocky's captors clearly had no idea who they were dealing with. Four times he tried to escape, the first time crawling on his stomach because his leg injuries prevented him from walking. He insisted on giving no more information than required by the Geneva Convention; and cited the treaty, chapter and verse, over and over again.

as you have trotted out the right wing sergent york of our vietnam blunder, Rocky Versace.

Here is the history you won't read about: http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/luce.doc

Those were the tiger cages. Once again, did the VC abuse prisoners, absolutely. Did we have any business in vietnam killing vietnamese: nope.

cage is in your mind and it obviously only relates to what the Americans did to prisoners in Vietnam. So anything else obviously was of no importance to you. So these men were held in "Bamboo Soldier Transportation Vehicles" instead of tiger cages??

Tiger Cages were large holes in the ground with bars covering them. Their only documented location was Con Son prison. We kept prisoners in tiger cages.

But my point is this, and it has little to do with who tortured who. My point is that the right developed and exploited the myth of POWs being held in vietnam after the end of the war, exploited the grieving families of the MIAs, in order to erase the real memory of the war. Those families had their hopes kept alive for decades so that we could fight another vietnam. There were no POWs held after the war. The MIA families were used and abused by the right and anyone who calls bullshit gets told about tiger cages.

From a contemporary press report:
Sunday, April 23, 1989 McALLEN, Texas - The Viet CONG kept James N. ''Nick'' Rowe in a bamboo cage in Vietnam's Mekong Delta for five years, but they couldn't break his spirit with a constant barrage of propaganda and daily death threats.

on AT LEAST two Americans right now. If only one young person who was thinking of enlisting, reads this thread and discovers war isn't all noble and patriotic, then my work here is done.

Army Special Forces Capt. Floyd "Jim" Thompson was held prisoner of war longer than any other POW in American history, suffering nine years of brutal torture and deprivation in jungle cages and cold prison cells. Yet, he still remains a relatively obscure figure of the Vietnam War. On March 26, 1964, an L-19 observation plane co-piloted by Thompson was shot down by small arms fire 20 kilometers west of his Special Forces camp at Khe Sanh in the Republic of South Vietnam. Thompson, who suffered a broken back, a bullet wound across the cheek and burns, was captured shortly thereafter by the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong strapped Thompson to a bamboo stretcher and quickly moved him away from the crash site through a maze of jungle trails which led to a series of camps, from which they conducted their attacks on the South Vietnamese.

http://www.usvetdsp.com/story14.htm

They were living in the damn jungle in holes and caves and constantly on the run. It is a wonder that they kept any prisoners at all. Yes of course there was abuse. Once again, the Tiger Cages were holes in the ground with bars on the top into which we, not the viet cong, dumped prisoners for prolonged periods of time. Did the VC do things equally bad? No doubt.

I wonder how many prisoners were carried into tunnels, never to see daylight again.

Do you really not know that spin works both ways??? Do you really believe that the left never ever exaggerates what the US does and minimizes what other regimes do? You've got no clue, you really don't. I would tell you to sit down with a vet or two and let them tell you what vietnamese warfare was all about, but you'd sanctimoniously tell them they were full of bullshit.

I know our POW's were returned. I know there are MIA's in every war. Knowing that doesn't mean I don't also know that POW's were tortured hideously and that the Vietnamese are just as capable of truly sadistic shit as any other group of people, including Iraqis.

help for the missing soldiers from "friendlies on the ground." YEAH RIGHT! what a pack of damn lies. In defense of all posters on this thread: When I write with tears in my eyes it evokes strong emotions from a reader.

As for getting rid of flags: LET'S BURN EVERY FUC#ING ONE OF THEM! No piece of cloth is worth even one Iraqi or Vietnamese life. I will add, however, let's burn the POW/MIA flag last.

we had no business being there and they lived there and couldn't leave. We were the aggressors in both cases, in both cases we were and are trying to impose our will on some other society for our own purposes. There simply is no equivalence between 'us' and 'them'. It is like saying 'but the French resistence did bad things too'. So what? They were fighting the goddamn occupying nazi army and their collaborationist french friends. We could have left vietnam any time - we never had to go in. The deaths from 56 on were all our fault. Likewise for Iraq.

I have an old ballad that sums it all up:

Listen children to a story
That was written long ago
'Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folk below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore they'd
Have it for their very own

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill
Asking for the buried treasure
Tons of gold for which they'd kill
Came an answer from the kingdom
With our brothers we will share
All the secrets of our mountain
All the riches buried there

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

Now the valley cried with anger
Mount your horses draw your sword
And they killed the mountain people
So they won their just reward
Now they stood beside the treasure
On the mountain dark and red
Turned the stone and looked beneath it
Peace on earth was all it said

by Coven

sandnsea and warren for the debates that put this OP on greatest page.

And what to do with the fact that POW's were tortured and killed. Zip nada nothing. Troops are at the mercy of the govts deploying them and troops around the world know that. That war is over and any remains need to be returned. I happen to believe they are being returned, but you're the one that jumped down Ghost's throat trying to excuse or even deny Vietnamese bad things by maximizing US bad things. The Geneva Conventions don't apply to the right or wrong side of a war, they apply to both sides equally.

It does not further the cause of peace to ignore the fact that it really isn't only the US engaged in power struggles and coups and military slaughters.

as prisoners. We were in their country killing them. You cannot just blindly apply the GC to all crimes committed in the region without regard to what the situation was. Should Roosevelt and Churchill have been executed for Dresden? Truman for Hiroshima? After all we executed Germans and Japanese for similar crimes. The context of the conflict does matter.

You can't commit war crimes even when you're invaded. Those who are beheading people in Iraq are at least as guilty of war crimes as those at Abu Ghraib or Haditha; legally and morally. Hiroshima and Dresden are tough calls, although they were military targets. Much like Fallujah. Intentionally burning people alive isn't any better a war strategy than mustard gas in WWII, regardless of who started the war.

"You can't commit war crimes even when you're invaded." The sentence seems to contradict the rest of your post.

the french had no business being in Indo China; and the US takeover after france became disgusted with it all had no basis in legality either - that was colonialism, period. Colonialism means a powerful gang from one place takes control of another, painting all resistance by residents as criminal by usurping the crown of legal authority weilded by the 'government' which, of course, has been replaced by its own agents....