Jensen-Stevenson Monika - Kiss the boys goodbye : how the United States betrayed its own POWs in Vietnam

To Mel Holland and those who might have
come home, and for Nick Rowe and the men
of U.S. Special Forces who wanted to
go back and get them

Copyright 2014 by William Stevenson Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by David Sankey

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-449-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-6322-015-0

Printed in the United States of America

It is impossible to thank everyone who helped us. Some requested anonymity but in the end decided they would risk their official positions to be identified, since we were all motivated in part by a deep concern that failures in secret intelligence have been too readily hushed by the simple expedient of concealing details for reasons of security. These brave souls now emerge in the text, as do most of our informants. We can only hope this inadequate acknowledgment of their assistance will be seen as much more than a polite thanks.

Among those many good Canadians and Americans who fought in Vietnam, or lost menfolk in the wars of Southeast Asia, and who went to endless trouble to hunt down information, we owe much to Mike Quinn of the Canadian Vietnam Veterans, to Mark Smith, and to members of The Telephone Tree: to Mike Van Atta, Jim Badey, John Brown, Earl Hopper, Jerry Mooney, and to the wives, mothers, and daughters whose integrity and hard work shame the bureaucrats. Congressman Billy Hendon took us through the labyrinths of Capitol Hill procedure. The BBCs David Taylor shared, in the best of old-fashioned journalistic traditions, his extensive files and tapes. Hugh Taylor, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot who remembered old alliances, gave generously from his own Site 85 research.

General Eugene Tighe, the former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, is the heroic figure who remained loyal to the highest principles. He belongs, along with Ross Perot, General Robbie Risner, and lawyer Mark Waple, in the ranks of men who made America great. Each in his own way had to gamble a great deal upon our own integrity during a three-year period when none of us was quite sure who else to trust.

American politicians gave us encouragement as well as assistance, even if it meant (as it did for Congressman Hendon) considerable political risk. Senator Charles Grassley and Senator Jesse Helms provided pillars of strength and also research staff whose ability and openness came as a relief: notably Kris Kolesnik and Dan Perrin, who went where ordinary mortals could not go.

Elvus Sasseen of Oklahoma proved that the heart of America is still to be found in the heart of America, and not necessarily presiding over the big news organizations. His energy kept the investigations alive among small town newspapers and radio stations, many of whose editors freely gave us their help and advice.

John Kelly, from the BBC office in Washington, D.C., readily forwarded volumes of research, carefully checked and supported by official documents. Nelly Duncan Lide, at the time an associate producer with 60 Minutes , in the Washington office, confirmed conversations and lent moral support of immeasurable value. Our professional colleagues could not have been more ready to assist our inquiries.

Perhaps this book will help repay those who spent so many hours of their own time at computers, running down the irregularities and concealment in official papers. Patty Aloot, daughter of a missing American, symbolizes their incredible devotion.

We are indebted to Pat Kennedy, the Canadian editor who worked so hard to lick our manuscript into shape; and to publisher Avie Bennett for having had faith in us. Eugene Scheiman, the New York lawyer, courageously fought our cause; and John Downing bravely gave editorial support in a time when the media has been under every pressure to ignore this story.

There is no evidence to indicate that any American POWs from the Indochina conflict remain alive....

Quoted from the U.S. Presidential Commission Report, released by the White House on March 23, 1977, and endorsed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in a 1980 study entitled: The Question of Americans Missing in the Vietnam War .

I was pregnant with my first child when this story began with an episode I produced for CBS TV Newss 60 Minutes . Soon my daughter will be six years old. I am aghast at how she has gone through so many stages since I produced that segment about men who might be dead or alive. For Americans who are among the missing, though, whole lifetimes have passed. Their children are fully grown.

My 60 Minutes report, aired during the Christmas season of 1985, looked at the possibility that U.S. government spokesmen were not telling the whole truth about men and women of the armed forces being left behind in Vietnam when they said that there was no credible proof that prisoners had been kept by the enemy. President Richard Nixon had promised, on January 23, 1973, that with a ceasefire imminent all American prisoners-of-war [POWs] throughout Indochina will be released with the fullest possible accounting for all those who are missing-in-action [MIAs]. MIAs are American servicemen who were involved in specific battles with the enemy, but who were not acknowledged officially to have been either killed in action (KIA) or taken prisoner by them. In many cases, I found later, their capture and imprisonment was monitored by U.S. intelligence.

I had stirred up a hornets nest. From all over the United States, and later from abroad, came letters and telephone calls from Vietnam veterans, families of the missing, and serving officers who said they were relieved that finally a powerful news outlet had the courage to deal with a great national scandal.

The last thing I had in mind while preparing the television news-magazine segment was to expose an American scandal. I was so innocent that when I got calls from a National Security Council colonel in the White House to drop the story, weeks before I had completed the necessary interviews, I failed to take his threats seriously. My knowledge of Vietnam was limited to what I had read in the newspapers at the time (much of it forgotten) and to wearing a POW bracelet while I was a student at the University of Wisconsin. The emotional impact went no further than my distress over the disappearance of my friend Lance Sijan, a Phantom pilot who behaved with incredible heroism after he was shot down near Hanoi. For me, the longest war in American history had no clearly defined beginning or end.