Take down the flag. No, not that flag. The other one.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Take down the flag. No, not that flag. The other one.

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WhiskeyJuvenile: Feb 15, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/racist-history-of-pow-mia-flag

quote:

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 this.

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; and 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 expos�.

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-MS), 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. Even today, the flag still flies over every U.S. Post Office.

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 antiwar 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. Stockade 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.

Are we still gonna be flying this flag in 30 years when all the veterans will have died?

# ? Aug 11, 2015 13:47

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# ? May 5, 2024 19:27

Starshark: Dec 22, 2005; Doctor Rope

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/racist-history-of-pow-mia-flag

Are we still gonna be flying this flag in 30 years when all the veterans will have died?

The Vietnam War was the biggest bloody nose America ever had, so I imagine the answer is 'yes'.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 18:40

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/racist-history-of-pow-mia-flag

Are we still gonna be flying this flag in 30 years when all the veterans will have died?

This is a subject I've done considerable research on as it formed well over half of my PhD dissertation and I suspect we'll be putting up with this poo poo until at least the Vietnam generation has passed (and likely for a while after that as well). A large part of why that flag got to be so iconic has to do with how the family members of missing men, particularly the photogenic women who made up the early League of Wives of American Prisoners in Vietnam (precursor to the modern League of Families), were co-opted by the Nixon administration to prevent such a potentially-potent constituency from falling into the hands of the anti-war movement during the war, and by so doing unreasonably raised their expectations of a massive return of missing American, rather than the bare 591 who actually did come back during Operation Homecoming in 1973. That the movement didn't die out after the war owes much to that, as well as the support of other right-wing culture warriors during the early 1980s (Reagan being only the most prominent thereof).

# ? Aug 11, 2015 18:52

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

There were only 500 POWs in Vietnam? Holy poo poo.

No wonder my grandpa complained about McCain so much. I still have pictures of him and my grandma on their Ford White House visit.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 18:52

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

It was a guerrilla war with elements of a highly decentralized enemy. Does anybody think that in such a chaotic environment the north Vietnamese kept studious records of every single prisoner they encountered?

# ? Aug 11, 2015 18:57

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Aliquid posted:

There were only 500 POWs in Vietnam? Holy poo poo.

The number of actual live prisoners was, during the war and afterward, intentionally inflated and included men known to be killed but who's bodies were not recovered (KIA-BNR) alongside genuine POWs and MIAs in the murky "unaccounted-for" category. It's not helped by the fact that the lion's share of POWs/MIAs were aviators, and several of the US's largest air campaigns were covert/illegal ones staged over Laos and Cambodia, with their books similarly cooked to keep Congress from discovering just what was going on, with predictable results for casualty reporting. Finally, sometimes well-meaning comrades of the missing would spin their loss reports:

Lieutenant Commander George Coker to the Board of Directors of the National League of Families, 27 October 1973 posted:

A guy is flying, he does see his wingman shot down. Two guys go in, and they�re deader than a doornail. He�s thinking to himself, �If I report that they�re dead, the wife�s going to be brokenhearted, she�ll get death gratuities, and that�s it.� If I report him MIA, his pay keeps going, and it will cushion the blow for a little while.

Now put me in that position, and I come back and tell you I just saw your son flew into the ground. Do you think I�m going to tell you that? Hell no, because the way I think, if I tell you your son got target fixation and flew into the ground, to my way of thinking, what I would be telling you is, �You know, what you had for a son is a real idiot.� That�s not true, so what am I going to say?

So what are we going to do? We twist the report. But now I�ve given you a shred of hope. It�s not an out-and-out false report. I told you he flew into the ground, but I just twisted �why.� So now he has the option of ejecting

# ? Aug 11, 2015 18:57

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Vladimir Putin posted:

It was a guerrilla war with elements of a highly decentralized enemy. Does anybody think that in such a chaotic environment the north Vietnamese kept studious records of every single prisoner they encountered?

They didn't, which is another contributory factor as through the 60s and 70s a big part of the League's rhetoric (and others' as well), was that North Vietnam was expected to provide a full accounting of American POWs and MIAs, much as the US claimed* to be doing for NVA/VC prisoners, an utterly unreasonable expectation at best.

*We weren't, really, as we dodged our Geneva Convention responsibilities by turning over most prisoner to South Vietnamese-run facilities (who weren't Geneva signatories), which were just about as awful places as you'd be likely to find anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Con Son prison, one of the worst the South Vietnamese ran, had the former LAPD Watts district commander as its American adviser, if you can believe that.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:00

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

American deserters were also included in POW/MIA tallies at times.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:05

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Effectronica posted:

American deserters were also included in POW/MIA tallies at times.

And Soviet civilian advisers were mistaken for POWs/MIAs after the war, as well.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:07

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

In any event I take issue with the article. I don't see a racist component and its good to remember which party is widely acknowledged to have lost the war. Given that it's not really that surprising that America looks at itself in the lens of a victim. Not a totally accurate viewpoint, but not devoid of perspective either.

And the continued moral equivalency arguments in the article are just exhausting to read, although I agree with the conclusion. By this time whatever hypothetical MIA is still alive in Vietnam is probably not still in captivity. If there is a desire to search for remains I think that deserves support as well.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:15

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Vladimir Putin posted:

And the continued moral equivalency arguments in the article are just exhausting to read, although I agree with the conclusion. By this time whatever hypothetical MIA is still alive in Vietnam is probably not still in captivity. If there is a desire to search for remains I think that deserves support as well.

There's nothing to suggest there ever were any live MIAs in Vietnam, as both the Montgomery Committee in 1976 and the Senate Select Committee in 1993 both concluded. Remains recovery is really all there is left.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:31

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Is there anything that's not about race these days? What a stretched comparison with the rebel flag, makes the author look real dumb.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:37

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Is there anything that's not about race these days? What a stretched comparison with the rebel flag, makes the author look real dumb.

What do you mean "these days"?

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:38

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Is there anything that's not about race these days? What a stretched comparison with the rebel flag, makes the author look real dumb.

Are they an SJW?

# ? Aug 11, 2015 21:29

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Vladimir Putin posted:

I don't see a racist component

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Is there anything that's not about race these days? What a stretched comparison with the rebel flag, makes the author look real dumb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Gritz

quote:

James Gordon "Bo" Gritz (/ˈɡraɪts/;[1] born January 18, 1939) is a former United States Army Special Forces officer who served in the Vietnam War. His post-war activities � notably attempted POW rescues in conjunction with the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue � have proven controversial.

Gritz may be most notable for his two United States presidential campaigns in association with the white nationalist America First party in 1988 and 1992. In 1988, Gritz ran as vice president with former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke. A vocal advocate for the re-institution of racial segregation in states that pass laws to allow it, Gritz ran in 1992 under the slogan: "God, Guns and Gritz," and published an isolationist political manifesto entitled "The Bill of Gritz". Among other things, the "Bill of Gritz" called for the complete closing of the border with Mexico, and the dissolution of the Federal Reserve.

I mean other than the fact that the most prominent public figure associated with the flag was a literal open white supremacist, what's racial about it?

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Aug 12, 2015

# ? Aug 12, 2015 07:40

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

This isn't going to go well for a number of reasons. The first is that relations with Vietnam cooled off decades ago, which begs the question of what problem this is supposed to solve. The second is that, partly because of that cooling, and partly because of the deliberate vagueness, its centrism on that specific conflict has waned. Third is that being a pro-war propaganda device isn't the same as being racist, and especially not in the same way as a flag created for a government that was founded for an explicitly racist purpose.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 08:12

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

icantfindaname posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Gritz

I mean other than the fact that the most prominent public figure associated with the flag was a literal open white supremacist, what's racial about it?

Best Friends posted:

That flag is doomed long term since to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, being a POW or MIA indicates deep cowardice, or at the very least incompetence.

I think modern day attitudes about POWs and MIA are due to the Vietnam experience such as they are. I don't think that modern day soldiers view POWs or MIAs as cowards or incompetent. I think more effort is put into preventing these situations as a direct consequence of Vietnam.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 16:41

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Strudel Man posted:

See also, planned parenthood.

Margaret Sanger died 50 years ago and Planned Parenthood has been quite active since then and without her as public face. The POW/MIA flag is remembered in very large part because of the far-right nuts who were behind it

# ? Aug 12, 2015 16:43

3 Action Economist: May 22, 2002; Educate. Agitate. Liberate.

Did we not fight alongside Vietnamese people? Are "commie VC" a different race than their southern brethren?

This article seems like it was written so the author could guarantee publication. Why tie it to the Confederate flag which was, after all, rooted in hate and racism? The POW/MIA flag never was, even if some dude who was a racist liked it a whole lot.

Plus his argument about every war having POWs so this isn't special is stupid. That we didn't recognize the hardships of POWs prior to Vietnam does not mean we should just never recognize them ever. We should, in fact, recognize them throughout history.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 16:58

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Colonial Air Force posted:

Did we not fight alongside Vietnamese people? Are "commie VC" a different race than their southern brethren?

This article seems like it was written so the author could guarantee publication. Why tie it to the Confederate flag which was, after all, rooted in hate and racism? The POW/MIA flag never was, even if some dude who was a racist liked it a whole lot.

Plus his argument about every war having POWs so this isn't special is stupid. That we didn't recognize the hardships of POWs prior to Vietnam does not mean we should just never recognize them ever. We should, in fact, recognize them throughout history.

I agree that it's sort of a dumb thing to get mad about in TYOOL 2015, 40 years after the fact, and an insignificant complaint compared to the confederate flag, but the fact is the POW/MIA movement was closely associated with far-right extremists and open white supremacists in the US when it was a thing. Not all pro-veteran or pro-POW groups were, but that pro-POW group in particular was. IMO it was as much an artifact of the general political environment of the time, in that these people have since learned that they can't openly advocate for segregation in public anymore, but still.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Aug 12, 2015

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:05

Who Is Paul Blart: Oct 22, 2010

No veterans should be honored imho. Instead of doing the honorable thing and either refusing to serve and face jail time or fleeing the country, they all basically volunteered to commit murder.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:06

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Colonial Air Force posted:

Did we not fight alongside Vietnamese people? Are "commie VC" a different race than their southern brethren?

This article seems like it was written so the author could guarantee publication. Why tie it to the Confederate flag which was, after all, rooted in hate and racism? The POW/MIA flag never was, even if some dude who was a racist liked it a whole lot.

Plus his argument about every war having POWs so this isn't special is stupid. That we didn't recognize the hardships of POWs prior to Vietnam does not mean we should just never recognize them ever. We should, in fact, recognize them throughout history.

Whether or not you actually agree with the author you should at least be able to grasp his argument, which is that the POW / MIA flag was a byproduct of propaganda efforts to recast America as the real victim of the Vietnam War. According to Perlstein the government and other groups purposefully inflated the number of missing servicemen and portrayed the North Vietnamese as wantonly cruel and vicious while downplaying or hiding the atrocities committed by American soldiers and allies. This was in turn used to justify continued aggression against North Vietnam, a country that the US was in the midst of aggressively bombing.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:18

3 Action Economist: May 22, 2002; Educate. Agitate. Liberate.

Professor Tomtom posted:

No veterans should be honored imho. Instead of doing the honorable thing and either refusing to serve and face jail time or fleeing the country, they all basically volunteered to commit murder.

That works if people are fully informed and not constantly led to believe military life is heroic and the only way to get out of their poor lifestyle. That's not any more true today than it was in the 70s, though.

Helsing posted:

Whether or not you actually agree with the author you should at least be able to grasp his argument, which is that the POW / MIA flag was a byproduct of propaganda efforts to recast America as the real victim of the Vietnam War. According to Perlstein the government and other groups purposefully inflated the number of missing servicemen and portrayed the North Vietnamese as wantonly cruel and vicious while downplaying or hiding the atrocities committed by American soldiers and allies. This was in turn used to justify continued aggression against North Vietnam, a country that the US was in the midst of aggressively bombing.

In this case, though, does the POW/MIA flag still represent that? I mean I don't really care if we take the flag down or put it up or anything else, but this is a weak argument to taking it down. A better argument is that it's been a long drat time and there aren't any POWs left.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:23

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Vladimir Putin posted:

It was a guerrilla war with elements of a highly decentralized enemy. Does anybody think that in such a chaotic environment the north Vietnamese kept studious records of every single prisoner they encountered?

yes, because american prisoners were rare and excellent bargaining chips

why do you think the only military to ever beat america in a war was too incompetent to keep track of prisoners?

Colonial Air Force posted:

Did we not fight alongside Vietnamese people? Are "commie VC" a different race than their southern brethren?

This article seems like it was written so the author could guarantee publication. Why tie it to the Confederate flag which was, after all, rooted in hate and racism? The POW/MIA flag never was, even if some dude who was a racist liked it a whole lot.

Plus his argument about every war having POWs so this isn't special is stupid. That we didn't recognize the hardships of POWs prior to Vietnam does not mean we should just never recognize them ever. We should, in fact, recognize them throughout history.

the pow/mia flag was born out of national mythmaking meant to soothe the embarassing and morally damaging loss of a war and the subsequent lost cause analysis that sprang up to find alternate explanations for that loss

i agree, this is in no way similar to the confederate flag

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:23

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Vladimir Putin posted:

Except that the confederate flag was reappropriated to be a racist symbol of intimidation and implicit domination of whites over blacks while the MIA/POW flag/movement has no such connotations.

ok. i didn't say anything about racism but thanks for bringing that up for some reason i guess

Vladimir Putin posted:

Finally the things that make you good at guerrilla warfare are not necessarily the things that make you good at centralized record keeping. See: soviet/American experience in Afghanistan.

so we can just assume there were a large number of american pows because the vietnamese might have been bad at record keeping and were not a conventional army and the afghanis were also not a conventional army

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:44

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Because Hanoi admitted it only had a very limited knowledge of POWs held outside of the Hanoi region? Post-Son Tay the policy was to consolidate all POWs in the Hilton, but even then the North Vietnamese generally only had sketchy ideas of who had been captured prior to their arriving in the capital, and many didn't make it that far for various reasons. It's not a question of competence, it's one of capacity, particularly as what passed for communication and logistical networks were being bombed to absolute hell by the US, making it hard to quickly centralize information about POWs until they physically were on hand.

people who were imprisoned at some point and then i guess got bombed or exected or whatever is a bit different than asserting the vietnamese government just didn't know it had pows, like one day it's cleaning out the broom shed and there's a tiger cage full of dudes in there *slaps head* oh that's where i put those LTGs!

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:47

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

You also have to think that after fighting the Japanese, French, and now the Americans the general condition of the infrastructure was not very good. If you're shot down in a remote location in the jungle or get captured in a remote region, how long is it going to take for someone to contact up the chain of command/transfer your POW to some centralized location if at all? Keep in mind that at the same time your being attacked and a concerted effort to disrupt the communication/command/control network.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:48

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Vladimir Putin posted:

You also have to think that after fighting the Japanese, French, and now the Americans the general condition of the infrastructure was not very good. If you're shot down in a remote location in the jungle or get captured in a remote region, how long is it going to take for someone to contact up the chain of command/transfer your POW to some centralized location if at all? Keep in mind that at the same time your being attacked and a concerted effort to disrupt the communication/command/control network.

i dont know, but i'm assuming it's less time than 'thirty years'

Captain_Maclaine posted:

No, but we can assume that Hanoi didn't always have the firmest idea of just how many POWs they or the NLF actually had, because they literally admitted that to be the case.

ok but what does this have to do with american claims that they were knowingly holding 'missing' pows after the war was over

are we seriously getting derailed over the NVPA's record keeping protocols

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:48

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

quote:

why do you think the only military to ever beat america in a war was too incompetent to keep track of prisoners?

By pointing out that despite being military quite competent, to the point of beating (or at least exhausting) the American military juggernaut, it was plausible to assume that there were, at times, Americans in captivity that the government in Hanoi didn't then know about (though they generally found out later once they got delivered to the Hilton, or when reports of their death in captivity arrived). And that that plausibility would feed into rumors post-war of MIA survival (despite there being little if any concrete evidence to suggest such), and in turn be manipulated by charlatans and con-men in the 80s to give POW/MIA activism artificial reason to continue far beyond any point of reasonableness.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:54

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Vladimir Putin posted:

I don't think there is any sane person that thinks that there are still POWs in Vietnam. But I can understand why the NVA had no list and why that caused severe panic on the Ameican side during and immediately after the war.

It's not that they had no list, just that the North Vietnamese side was not particularly complete and they updated it several times (to the consternation of paranoid US negotiators, who took it for craven manipulation rather than a result of conditions on the ground), which the Nixon administration played for all it was worth to claim much higher numbers of likely surviving POWs than that which they knew was actually the case.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:56

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Vladimir Putin posted:

I don't think there is any sane person that thinks that there are still POWs in Vietnam.

that is what the flag in the op is specifically about

On August 10, 1990, the 101st Congress passed U.S. Public Law 101-355, recognizing the National League of Families POW/MIA Flag and designating it "as a symbol of our Nation's concern and commitment to 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." Beyond Southeast Asia, it has been a symbol for POW/MIAs from all U.S. wars.

like it's not just body reclamation, this is why rambo was such a big hit. people did and still do think that there are american pows being held and tortured in vietnam

# ? Aug 12, 2015 17:57

ugh its Troika: May 2, 2009; by FactsAreUseless

This article is a prime example of someone struggling for that last gasp of relevancy before they die.

# ? Aug 12, 2015 18:10

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# ? May 5, 2024 19:27

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

-Troika- posted:

This article is a prime example of someone struggling for that last gasp of relevancy before they die.

this, but about the POW/MIA movement instead of the article

# ? Aug 12, 2015 18:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Take down the flag. No, not that flag. The other one.

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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

Aliquid posted:

Lieutenant Commander George Coker to the Board of Directors of the National League of Families, 27 October 1973 posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Effectronica posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

quote:

icantfindaname posted:

Best Friends posted:

Strudel Man posted:

Colonial Air Force posted:

Colonial Air Force posted:

Professor Tomtom posted:

Helsing posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Colonial Air Force posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

quote:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

Vladimir Putin posted:

-Troika- posted: