Vietnam (32 page)

Seemingly, American audiences could not get enough of this macho myth. In fact, Sylvester Stallone was working at a girls' finishing school in Switzerland during the Vietnam War. When he filmed
Rambo
, he went no closer to Vietnam than the Philippines. Muscle-bound he may be, brave less so. But there are some real-life Rambos, men who have dedicated themselves to getting any POWs left behind out – by any means necessary. Some of them were backed by real-life movie stars, such as Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood, William Shatner, and even Ronald Reagan – though notably not Mr Stallone.

The fate of those listed 'missing in action' (the MIAs) became a focus for the American people's feelings about the Vietnam debacle after the end of the war. In the 1980s, it was not uncommon to see the black MIA/POW flag – showing a bowed head in silhouette under a watchtower and bearing the legend 'You will not be forgotten' – fluttering alongside the Stars and Stripes and people wearing MIA/POW bracelets bearing the names of men still unaccounted for.

Although the fate of those listed MIA did not become an issue until after America's withdrawal from Vietnam, there were grave concerns throughout the war over what the Vietnamese planned to do with the Americans they had captured. As the North Vietnamese claimed that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, they did not return lists of the American prisoners they held. Representatives of the International Red Cross or neutral nations were not allowed access to the prisoners of war in North Vietnamese hands, so men who were actually POWs had to be listed simply 'missing', along with those who had been blown to bits, got lost in jungle, deserted or crashed into the sea.

Fearing that the fate of the POWs might be overlooked by Washington, the National League of Families of the Prisoners and Missing in South-East Asia was set up in San Diego in 1966 by Sybil Stockdale, wife of the ranking POW, Commander James B. Stockdale. After the war, the National League of Families fought to keep the fate of the MIAs in front of the American public.

Throughout the war, American intelligence combed Communist newspapers and propaganda films, and the work of foreign journalists and TV crews who visited North Vietnam in an effort to compile a list of Americans the Vietnamese Communists held. The National Security Agency attempted to follow the fate of downed American pilots by eavesdropping on Vietnamese military communications. They believed that pilots who had special skills – back-seat electronic warfare officers, the crews of the brand new F-111, those who had been on the space programme, or men with other special qualifications – were flown into the Soviet Union. No airman shot down over Southeast Asia was ever returned from the USSR though, in 1992, President Boris Yeltsin admitted that Americans had been taken there.

The NSA believed that some badly injured pilots were sent to the medical facilities at Shanghai in China. They did not return, but may have died. Others were thought to have been used as slave labour on installations of strategic importance along the Ho Chi Minh trail. As the war between North and South Vietnam continued after America withdrew, these men could not be handed back.

The US Government also knew that after the French had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 they had spent many years negotiating for the return of their prisoners in return for aid and reparations. Indeed, there was evidence that the trade was still going on. The last French POW was returned in the mid-1970s. Throughout the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese people were told that prisoners of war were valuable. Leaflets explained that downed American pilots could be exchanged for factories, hospitals, schools, and money. When the Paris Peace Talks began in 1968, the first thing the North Vietnamese delegation asked for was reparations.

Even when the Peace Accords were concluded in 1973, the US delegation had little idea of how many Americans the North Vietnamese held. When the North Vietnamese produced a list, it contained less than half the number the US had been expecting. Indeed, men whose names and pictures had appeared in Communist newspapers and propaganda films were not on the list. Little could be done. The war was deeply unpopular at home, so the American delegation in Paris had no leverage.

None of more than 600 men the US thought had been captured in Laos appeared on the lists. When the US delegation complained the North Vietnamese told them to speak to the Pathet Lao. In protest America even halted troop withdrawals from Vietnam. The North Vietnamese quickly found nine men who had been captured in Laos by the North Vietnamese Army, not the Pathet Lao, the guerrilla army there. No US prisoners of war held by the Pathet Lao were ever returned. Nor did any who had fallen into the murderous hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Some men held by the Vietcong were handed over. Others were moved to forward ready to be handed over, only to be returned to their jungle compounds when the VC discovered that the US had handed its prisoners over to the South Vietnamese, and they were not about to hand them back in exchange.

Among the men returned in Operation Homecoming there were none of the burn cases or amputees that might be expected among downed airmen. Hanoi feared that disfigured men shown on TV might stiffen US resolve to back their South Vietnamese allies. An analysis also showed that highly trained back-seaters were also missing.

The Nixon administration promised the North Vietnamese $3.25 billion in reparations. But immediately after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, President Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal and could not get Congressional approval for the funds. When President Carter came to power he wanted to heal the wounds left by the divisive Vietnam War and had all the remaining MIAs declared dead.

In 1979, six years after America had withdrawn from Vietnam, a US Marine named Bobby Garwood returned. He had been taken prisoner in 1965 and declared missing. Although he had been held in a number of POW camps in North Vietnam, the Communists repeatedly denied all knowledge of him. Garwood claimed that he was an uncooperative prisoner until 1968. Then he was being moved between camps when the truck carrying him stopped so the driver could have a rest. Garwood saw tall white men working in a field and approached them. They spoke French. Garwood knew that the French war in Indochina had ended in 1954. The Vietnamese had told him, 'We can keep you forever'. He now realised that they were very serious.

Garwood then began to cooperate. He fixed jeeps and did other odd jobs, and in 1973 he was not returned. Between 1973 and 1979, he said he often saw other American still being held prisoner. In 1979, Garwood persuaded his jailers to take him to Hanoi where, as a foreigner, he would be able to buy cigarettes that they would sell on the black market. On one of these trips he managed to slip a note to a Finnish official of the World Bank named Ossi Rakkonen. Rakkonen passed the note to the State Department. But, despite this evidence to the contrary, Garwood was declared dead.

However, Rakkonen also informed the BBC who broadcast the story. The US government then asked for Garwood back. The Vietnamese denied having him, then handed him over. He was immediately arrested for desertion and collaboration. He was found guilty of collaborating with the enemy, fined the exact amount of his back pay, and dishonourably discharged from the service.

When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he received a telegram from the Hanoi government via Canadian Intelligence asking for $4 billion for the return of an unspecified number of American prisoners of war from Southeast Asia. He had just ridden into office on the back of one hostage crisis – the 52 Americans detained in the US Embassy in Tehran – and was not eager to plunge himself into another. After discussions with his vice-president George Bush and others, he decided to authorise a clandestine Rambo-style rescue mission. When this failed, he had to back away from the issue. But a number of unofficial rescue missions were mounted by the real-life Rambo, former Green Beret Lieutenant-Colonel James 'Bo' Gritz. He also came up empty-handed and it was generally assumed among the MIA/POW lobby that he had been thwarted by the elements within the government responsible for leaving the men behind in the first place.

Throughout the 1980s, the Vietnamese played a diplomatic game over the fate of the MIAs, periodically allowing in family members and US missions to excavate crash sites and dig up bones. When the diplomatic chill thawed, the Vietnamese would return coffins containing remains they claimed to have just found, though Garwood maintained that the Vietnamese kept pre-packed remains in a charnel house in Hanoi.

The matter was finally laid to rest by a Senate Select Committee in 1992. In its thousand-page report, it found that American prisoners of war had indeed been left behind in Communist hands. However, it concluded that they had all perished since, though it does not specify where or when they died. This left the way open for the Clinton administration to drop the trade embargo in 1994 and formally recognise the Hanoi government in 1995. A US Embassy was opened in Hanoi that year and President Clinton, chided as a draft dodger during the 1992 election campaign, finally visited Vietnam in November 2000. This finally healed the rift that the Vietnam War had caused in the US.

In the meantime, the Berlin Wall had been torn down. The Soviet Union had imploded and Communism was in full retreat. The policy of containment had worked. The dominos that had fallen after World War II and the Vietnam War had been stood up again. True, North Korea maintains a hard-line Stalinist stance, while its people starve. But the People's Republic of China has liberalised its markets and opened its ports, and Fidel Castro's Cuba runs a dollar economy and panders to tourists. Vietnam itself is home to a Coca-Cola plant and there is a theme park in Ho Chi Minh City. Nike have a factory there, as do many other Western corporations, including McDonald's and Disney; many of these factories pay less than the minimum wage and have appalling working conditions. The country that so stoutly opposed America for eight long years is now practically a colony, enslaved by the US dollar. It can be argued that the war in the Vietnam prolonged the Cold War. While the US was pouring billions of dollars into its war effort, for a relatively small commitment to Hanoi, the Soviet Union was able to maintain parity in investment in its strategic systems. But, in the end, the West did win the Cold War – without it ever turning hot or the nuclear weapons developed for its prosecution being used. America might have lost on the ground in one small corner of Southeast Asia, but in global and in historical terms, it won.

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