POW/MIA Corner
September 17, 2006

19 New POW Cases

There has been a recent discovery in the archives of The Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University that brings a new light to the POW/MIA Issue as it pertains directly to Vietnam.  Since our legislators are in the process of voting on allowing Vietnam into the World Trade Organization, it seemed relevant to share this information with the readers of the Leatherneck Ezine.

As most of you may know, many government officials and Congressmen have, over the years, attempted to convince the American people that the Communist Vietnamese have cooperated fully with US investigative teams who have returned to Southeast Asia in search of remains of US Servicemen who are still unaccounted for.   Those of you who have seen the Vietnamese Propaganda Machine at work know that those in power in that nation are shrewd and have learned to take advantage of every opportunity that the international press gives them to cloud the POW/MIA issue.

Case in point.  In November 1992 while serving as the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, while visiting Vietnam with the other members of the Select Committee, came in contact with a former Communist officer.    With cameras rolling, this former officer told Chairman Kerry that he witnessed the ambush and killing of four American Servicemen and that he would be happy to show the site to the US investigators.  Kerry took this situation as an opportunity to give a glowing example of the level of cooperation on the side of our former enemy.  As one would imagine, the American press couldn't run fast enough to submit their stories to their editors.

Six months or so later, based on that "fabulous" level of cooperation, the American investigative team looked into the former Vietnamese officer's claim regarding the group of MIAs known as the Mangino Four (Paul Hasenbeck, Tom Mangino, Daniel Nidds and David Winters, who went missing together on April 21, 1967).  In April 1993 the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting (JTF-FA) confirmed that the Vietnamese officer was not in the area at the time of the incident.  He had not witnessed the ambush, death or burial of the four servicemen. Guess how many major news sources reported that story?  Guess how many major networks ran that story on the evening news?  Let's just say that those who ran the original story didn't run the follow up story.

Fast forward to late March of 2006.  We received a phone call from Lynn O'Shea, the Director of Research for the National Alliance of POW/MIA Families in which she shared with us the discovery of documents from the 1992 Senate Select Committee that collectively stated that in the early 1990's the Vietnamese had acknowledged capturing a total of 19 US Servicemen, one of them being our family's missing Marine, and also including the Mangino Four mentioned above.  For the specific details of these 19 new POW cases please follow this link to the National Alliance of POW/MIA Families website http://www.nationalalliance.org/vietnam/19cases.htm.

You may well wonder why the families of these 19 men were never made aware of this discovery by the US government agencies responsible for POW/MIA Affairs.    You may also be wondering what happened to these men after the Vietnamese admitted having held them all into captivity.    First, it is important to clarify that the conclusions made by this SSC investigator were based on already existing US government records from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Casualty Resolution Center/Joint Task Force Full Accounting, the agency in charge of the USG's POW/MIA investigations.  Secondly, by design the SSC was not legislatively bound to share the results of their investigations with the POW/MIA families.  After the SSC closed its investigation and submitted its final report, all of their documents were simply submitted to the National Archives, boxed up and put on a shelf.  Obviously, this series of documents related to the 19 new POW cases were never made part of the final report nor were they ever part of the SSC public hearings.  

Regarding the fate of these 19 men, the SSC documents give a brief synopsis for each of the 19 men and at the end of each synopsis it reads that the Vietnamese stated they had no information on the ultimate fate of these men.   To recapitulate, the Vietnamese admit to having captured and held each of these 19 men but have no idea what happened to them.  This claim is rather hard to accept considering the reputation the Vietnamese had for strict and detailed record keeping during their war with the US.  Additionally, there is more than a substantial amount of what are referred to as "Captured Documents" that strongly contradict this declaration by the Vietnamese that they have no records or information on what happened to these American servicemen. 

Since the discovery of these documents many of the family members of these men have confronted the POW/MIA agencies with this new information and, to my knowledge, they have received either blank stares, promises to look into it or the claim that the declarations in these documents are only one investigators interpretation of the information in the case files of these men.  Moreover, the most intriguing portion of this story is that the documents that specifically state that the Vietnamese admitted to having held these men into captivity are not in the case files that family members have available to them through the POW/MIA agencies.  This supports a suspicion on the part of many POW/MIA families that there may well be two case files on each of these missing men; one that has been sanitized and is shared with the families and then another that has some of the more damaging intelligence information on the probable fate of these men. 

In closing, to quote the well-known journalist, Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story.  The now infamous Vietnamese officer who during John Kerry's 1992 visit to Vietnam claimed to have known where four US servicemen were?  He also submitted three dog tags to a communist military museum in 1970 stating that these three US Servicemen were KIA in a specific area of I Corps sometime in 1966.   Two of the three names are men whose names never appear in any casualty report or on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.  The third dog tag?  It belongs to one of these 19 men the Vietnamese admitted to having captured and held into captivity ….. And now you know, the rest of the story.