Books about Vietnam POW/MIAs

Abandoned in Place:

The Men we Left Behind and the Untold Story of Operation Pocket Change

Lynn O’Shea, with forward by Col. Don Gordon (Ret.)

Amazon 2014: Kindle and Paperback

(July 2014) Lynn O’Shea should never have written this book.

Not because there’s anything wrong with this exhaustively researched tome – indeed, it’s the best and most readable expose yet on American POWs held after the Vietnam War. The regret is that if America’s political, journalistic and academic establishments worked as promised , O’Shea’s findings would have been revealed years if not decades ago, when they could still have impacted American foreign policy.

At the end of America’s Vietnam War in 1973, there should have been no surprise that Vietnam might violate the Paris Peace Accords and hold back US POWs. A then secret study for the government had predicted just that; Hanoi had done it before after its conflict with the French; and, as O’Shea points out in persuasive detail, North Vietnam possessed a clear motive to retain American hostages.

What is surprising is the failure of America’s elites to follow up when evidence emerged of Hanoi’s deceit and its “motive, means and opportunity” to keep American prisoners. Congress fumbled an early investigation, then dropped the topic as a consequential policy issue after a celebrated 1990s Senate Select Committee investigation. That report – architected in large part by now Secretary of State John Kerry --claimed there was no evidence any US prisoners remained alive in Southeast Asia, but was forced to concede the evidence “indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number, after (the war).” Not surprisingly, loved ones of missing Americans pressed the Senate to determine the fate of that “small number” of survivors, but after the Committee’s findings helped clear the way for greater US diplomatic and trade recognition of Vietnam, the appetite of Senate leaders for the truth disappeared.

Neither was there any pressure from think thanks and lobbyists, which generally ignored the issue expect when supporting efforts to tamp it down as an impediment to increased trade with Vietnam. Most disturbing has been the failure of the media to pursue the story. Renowned reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg has pilloried the journalistic establishment for this failure -- including the New York Times, where he won fame for his work in Southeast Asia and “The Killing Fields.” Schanberg recalls unsuccessfully urging one journalist to look at the evidence. “He said, ‘Well look, all I know is that if it had happened we would have known about it by now.’ And I said how would we have known about it if there were only reporters running around like you? I decided that the fact was that he wasn't committed to journalism, he was committed to ideology and to being angry at the war.” [O’Shea’s book includes the nearby document showing how US officials in June 1973 persuaded the media to downplay the recent sighting of unreturned POWs by a North Vietnamese defector – explosive intelligence of “urgent political sensitivity” according to an internal State Department document. NBC even dropped the story entirely, despite its evidence Hanoi was cheating on the POW agreement.]

All of which brings us back to Lynn O’Shea. Instead of a highly-paid celebrity reporter with an influential publisher behind her, the writing of this book fell to O’Shea, a commanding presence to be sure, but a woman yoked to a “day job” in business with no book advance for research assistants or high-level connections in government, politics or the media. What O’Shea does have is a smoldering sense of indignation about the fate of these lost American heroes and the investigative skills to uncover the truth, which she has also employed for many years as the research director for the National Alliance of Families (NAF), a group for the family and friends of POW/MIAs [Full disclosure: I have cooperated with NAF on research for many years and am a friend of O’Shea and other NAF members.]

O’Shea pursues the sighting spiked by NBC with the sort of tenacity it should have received from the media and government back in 1973. Defector Lt. Nguyen Thanh Son described seeing six American POWs alive in a camp, men who had not been repatriated as promised. The defector rendered an especially detailed description of one of them, named John, with whom he spoke four times. O’Shea’s detective work – with a wonderful “aha moment” -- uncovers a solid case this man was Army Capt. John McDonnell, known to have survived his shoot down before disappearing. She also exposes the contradictions and downright misinformation provided on the case by the Pentagon and Vietnam over the years.

The defector not only identified McDonnell by first name, appearance and background, but also explained why he and his fellow GIs were being kept. The motive: They were to provide bargaining leverage because “there are many problems to be settled with the United States Government…”

New historical details revealed by O’Shea add weight to this motive for Hanoi’s retention of US prisoners, a motive echoed by a number of communist defectors and American intelligence reports. In 1973, President Nixon, desperate to end the conflict, had secretly offered Hanoi up to $4.75 billion in aid to be paid after the war. Hanoi knew its leverage would decline dramatically after America pulled out; US prisoners would be one of its few bargaining chips to get that aid.

Lest there be any doubt about the link between US aid and POWs, Nixon’s letter promising the aid was handed over to the Vietnamese in direct exchange for a list of US POWs in Laos (which North Vietnam in effect controlled).

O’Shea quotes the now declassified US document about the exchange. The US Air Force colonel sent to swap the 1973 aid letter for the POW list in Paris reported his North Vietnamese counterpart “made a grab for the envelope containing the message and without breaking his fingers I told him that my instructions were to exchange the memorandum for his list.” When the colonel saw the list of POWs was obviously incomplete, “I felt like returning the list and taking back the memorandum until they displayed a more serious attitude.”

That “more serious attitude” from Hanoi about returning POWs, O’Shea concludes, depended on the promised US payments. Those payments were never made and Vietnam never returned all the US POWs.

Abandoned in Place provides a detailed history of the POW issue after 1973. The high point came in 198X when US intelligence identified a possible US POW camp in Nhom Marrot, Laos. After the war, refugees, including one who passed two lie detector tests, reported surviving Americans in Nhom Marrot (and in a number of other camps in Laos in Vietnam, as the book details). In late 1979, the NSA obtained signal intelligence on the movement of US POWs in Laos. The came satellite images and confirmation from a CIA asset with access to the Laotian government. The general in charge of US military intelligence later stated under oath the combined intelligence was “outstanding” and he was “thoroughly convinced” convinced the Nhom Marrot prison held US prisoners.

In 1980, the Joint Special Operations Command (decades later to launch the mission to kill Osama bin Laden) was ordered to prepare a POW rescue mission using the Army’s Delta Force. O’Shea breaks new ground in her reporting of the intelligence and operational preparation for that mission, ultimately code-named POCKET CHANGE. The story is a sad and often infuriating one of bureaucratic infighting and incompetence. Ultimately the mission was done in by that most under-handed of Washington bureaucratic tricks – the leak. When details of the operation appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, the cover was blown and the effect was essentially over. Here too O’Shea uncovers disturbing details around the leak and the political decision at the highest levels to allow the story to run, thereby dooming POCKET CHANGE and any hope to recover any Americans at Nhom Marrot.

The cynicism behind the infighting over POCKET CHANGE continued to permeate the effort to recover US POW/MIAs and their remains. It was revealed that Hanoi actually had a warehouse of US remains that it was doling out to America over time as part of (successful) scheme to generate cash and eventual diplomatic recognition. Hanoi was also caught “salting” the locations of crash sites, staging burials and providing local officials and local residents with canned cover stories about the fate of specific missing Americans to share with US investigators. When Vietnam returned Navy officer Clemie McKinney’s remains, they claimed he died in 1972, but a US examination of his returned remains revealed forensic evidence that he had died well after all US prisoners were supposed to be returned in 1973.

Rather than expose Hanoi’s ruses, the US government often kept them quiet or even went along with them. The US accepted the identification and death of one well-known missing aviator, seen landing alive, based on the discovery of three of his teeth. His family rejected the finding after learning the teeth bore marks of extraction and periodontal disease, indicating he had been held in captivity and his teeth extracted. (Many first-hand details of Hanoi’s deceptions are included in Bill Bell’s book, discussed below.)

Despite all this, the US government eventually certified that Vietnam was providing “full cooperation” in resolving the fate of US POW/MIAs.

In the end, O’Shea concludes, the otherwise canny North Vietnamese made a basic mistake – they overestimated the value of their human bargaining chips to the United States. As a former intelligence officer once told me: American POWs eventually became Vietnam’s “White Elephants.”

Other Books and Resources:

2008’s An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia was written by former congressman Bill “Billy” Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart. This voluminous and well-documented book – one of the few on this topic that major publishers have designed to release --calls upon decades of work and professional battles by Hendon as both a congressman and congressional POW/MIA investigator. The book details not just the intelligence on the POWs but the bureaucratic knife fighting that has surrounded the POW/MIA issues in the halls of the Pentagon and Congress.

This is worth reading just for Hendon’s analysis – and on-the-ground investigations in Vietnam -- of American intelligence reporting and satellite images regarding POWs after the war and how it dovetails with other events, such as the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

Like O’Shea’s book, it makes a convincing case that Hanoi managed a secret “tier two” prison system for captives it intended to keep after the war.

The “best read” among POW/MIA books is also one of the most detailed, not surprising given its author, Bill Bell, perhaps the most expert and experienced of all American POW/MIA investigators. Leave No Man Behind, by Garnett “Bill” Bell and George Veith, covers Bell’s decades of service in Southeast Asia. Born to a family of cotton growers in Texas, Bell learned Vietnamese while serving as an infantryman during the war and leveraged his deep understanding of Vietnamese culture and communist tradecraft to serve America on battlefields from the jungle to the POW/MIA negotiating table.

Bell later earned fame, and enmity from the Pentagon, for breaking ranks and telling the 1990s Senate Select Committee investigating POWs that he believed some men had indeed been kept behind. He named them and provided information on their locations and specific communist cadre and agents involved with them. His testimony is part of the public record.

His book includes many insights on the cases of missing men and is just as illuminating on Hanoi’s use of deception against US POW/MIA investigators and communist intelligence objectives associated with the issue. The sophistication of Vietnamese intelligence efforts against America during and after the war are detailed, from wartime penetration of Army intelligence to Vietnamese “Mata-Haris” and the kidnapping of US GIs – all the way through to the manipulation of the POW issue after the conflict.

The case of Army PFC Donald Sparks proves a microcosm of the broader issue. The Iowa native was declared dead by the Pentagon after his unit reported him killed and his body destroyed by American bombs in 1969. Then, in 1970, two letters from Sparks were discovered on the body of an enemy officer; the letters were dated in April of that year, showing Sparks had actually survived the 1969 battle. Bell traces intelligence on the case from Sparks’ movements after his initial capture to communist refusals to answer US queries on Sparks’ fate decades later. The GI – whose blood type was the universal “O” --had reportedly been used as a source of blood transfusions for wounded enemy soldiers and then kept separately from other US prisoners. Bell makes a persuasive case that Sparks was alive but never returned at the end of the war; there are reports he was alive as late as 1991. When Bell asked some communist officials if Sparks could still be alive and living in the area, he received only “a smile” in response. “To this date (2004), I’m told that JTFFA (US pow investigators) still receive the same enigmatic smile when they inquire if Sparks survived the war.”

One cannot read this book without concluding the US government failed to provide the POW/MIA accounting mission with the priority and resources it deserves. Worse, in a number of cases -- through incompetence, indifference or policy – the government repeatedly allowed Hanoi to mislead on the fates of specific Americans and Vietnam’s general level of knowledge and cooperation on POW/MIA issues.

For example, Bell mentions the return of a missing American’s remains that showed “signs of ‘malnutrition deprivation’ due to a prolonged period of incarceration,” even though the man had officially never been captured. Bell learned those same remains had been “wired together,” apparently for display in Vietnamese medical schools. Based on these and other facts, Bell concluded this American POW was held for some time in a separate facility from those returned, supporting the claims in O’Shea’s book. However, despite Bell’s analysis, the US government simply closed the case after getting the body, declining to follow up on its obvious intelligence implications.

In addition to its revelations on the POW issue, Leave No Man Behind is a page turner when it describes Bell’s exploits in the field and the personal tragedy, and then redemption, with which the Vietnam conflict confronted him.

Unlike too many high-level bureaucrats in the Pentagon, State Department and CIA, Bill Bell kept faith with his lost comrades.

BTW, his co-author, George Veith, has written two other excellent books on the conflict, Code-Name Bright Light: The Untold Story of U.S. POW Rescue Efforts During the Vietnam War and Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75.

[If you’re interested in buying Bell’s book, considering getting it directly from him, as he will donate half the profits to POW/MIA Radio or the National Alliance of Families.  Contact him at: billbell@pinncom.com]