dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Thanks for remembering, PatriotAnon.

I will repost here some notes I made at the end of the last bread about the sad saga of our POWs left behind in Vietnam (and also Laos, where the North Vietnamese kept many of the POWs through their sister organization, the Pathet Lao).

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Anon here who has known a lot of the guys on the Joint MIA/POW Accounting Task Force in Vietnam…

according to those guys, when they would get really liquored up in the bars of Hanoi or Danang or wherever you would sometimes run into them, they have found A COUPLE of living, surviving POWs. These were men who had integrated into local villages up in the mountains (Annamite Cordillera on a map), had largely discontinued use of the English language, and were rather, uh, "shellshocked" or "fucked up" by their whole life experience. They asked that their families back home not be notified, that it was better for them to remain 'dead' in their eyes and in the eyes of the law.

By this time they had wives and family up in the Vietnamese mountains and felt that returning home would be too much a disruption to their lives.

The vast majority of the 700+ POWs were executed by 1986, when the Soviet Union declared the glasnost policy and drastically cut back its financial assistance to the Hanoi regime.

At that point, Hanoi needed IMF funds and they considered that if the POWs were ever found alive, it would raise the spectre of condemnations and sanctions from the UN, which might endanger Vietnam's ability to get loans from IMF, World Bank, Asia Development Bank, etc.

What MIGHT occur at the parade is that the bodies of the executed men finally return home.

But getting the Vietnamese commies to admit to wrongdoing will be VERY hard because the story of the war that they tell to their own people is that they are morally pure while the wicked American imperialists, and they alone, behaved like swine in the war. Obviously that's a tad biased, but they feel that their legitimacy in the eyes of their own people rests on the idea that the communists never committed any war crimes.

Other communist atrocities in the war, such as when they buried alive over 5000 citizens of city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, have been scrubbed from Vietnamese media and history books. They can't let their people know that they murdered in one fell swoop seven times the number that U.S. forces killed at My Lai.

The POW issue has faced the same fate.