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Frank Anton was a typical American youth, inflated with patriotism. His military father, a full US Air Force Colonel, devoted twenty-nine years to serving America, with Frank's mother firmly standing beside the Colonel. When duty, legal or moral, called Frank, he proudly entered the US Army.
Frank trained as a helicopter pilot at Fort Wolters, Texas. He soon found himself placed into heavy combat in Vietnam. After several critical, successful missions, Frank was faced with an experience for which the US Army failed to prepare him.
On January 4, 1968, during the night, Frank's crew received orders to head into the Que Son Valley, where U.S. Gound troups were in dire trouble. Frank's "slick" (the UH-1C Huey Gun Helicopter) was gunned down by the North Vietnamese.
"As I lay in the muck of a rice paddy covered by a shroud of thick fog, a ghostly white helicopter appeared mysteriously from nowhere in the predawn darkness of the day I was captured. That chopper, I knew, possessed capabilities that were beyond my imagination. I was bewildered at its presence, aware that no normal helicopter could fly in those conditions . . . ." (Unknown at the time to Frank, U.S. CIA aircraft had the same appearance as the ghostly white helicopter.)
Without intervention of US rescue, Frank was captured and held hostage by the enemy for five years.
Frank felt imposed humiliation. He learned the North Vietnamese held a great deal of information relating to the U.S. Military, i.e., knew to which unit a prisoner belonged; positions of units; and location of fire bases.
Frank and other prisoners of war, endured endless hardships, including malnutitrion (at times starvation); bed sores; multiple infections; absecesses; loss of teeth and hair; loss of body weight, loss of muscle strength; welts; bruises; filth; skin disease (which produced bloody, pus-running wounds and unmercifully intense itching); malaria; dysnentery (often involuntarily urging bowel release from 50-60 times a day); and the methodical and ritualistic brute torture of the body and mind.
One POW was a U.S. physician. He was forced to stand helplessly by while observing crude medical treatment by the Vietnamese performed on U.S. Soldiers. One typical episode occurred when a POW, who had suffered severe injury, through ragged filthy bandages, saw his hand blacken. The Vietnamese resolved, without anesthesia, the POW's arm would be amputed. The U.S. physcian POW was able to intervene, and influence use of penicillin. Maggots invaded the prisoners wound and removed infected flesh. The soldier kept his arm and hand.
During Frank's five year confinement, he saw other US prisoner's of war. Some had amputated arms and legs. Frank was forced to march laborious miles between five different camps in South Vietnam, which in part, included the Ho Chi Ming Trail. Prior to his release, Frank was relocated into the Hanoi Hilton. He was released in 1973 as part of Operation Homecoming.
After release, Frank was extensively interviewed by U.S. Officials. He was somewhat taken back by the specific information which the U.S. Government had prior to his release. The U.S. Debriefers presented a 5"x7" photograph depicting Frank during his march up the Ho Chi Minh trail. They showed him aerial photographs of every camp "and remarked how accurately I had recalled the details of each one, including a tree in Camp One with initials carved in it." ". . . my crude pencil drawings, their high-definition photos -- were shocking to me because the military date and time that the photographs were taken by the reconnaissance planes were printed in the margin and each corresponded to the time I was in each camp."
What does Frank Anton say about whether the U.S. left any POWs behind during and after the 1973 Operation Homecoming? |
Yes, absolutely. "I had seen the warrant officer on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos during my march to North Vietnam, and the debriefers satisfied me that they had no information on him. We had scoured hundreds of photographs in books that represented the government's store of known missing men. The man's picture was not there. He was just as alive as I was, standing not more than ten feet away from me, and he was alive when his guards hastily moved him away from me when they were aware I had seen him."
"I knew of the conversations between cell walls in the Hanoi prison, where the B-52 pilots were nursing men who had suffered lost arms and legs. I had seen the photograph in the Hanoi newspaper showing other men with missing limbs. Apparently, the military doctors at the hospital in Manila expected many such wounded men to need special care at their first stop druing Operation Homecoming. A large number of hospital rooms had been set aside at Clark Air Force Base to receive patients with massive injuries, but all 591 men released in early 1973 -- all that both the United States and Vietnam officially reported as having been in POW status -- were in relatively decent health. There were no amputees or servicemen with massive injuries normally associated with ejecting from a jet aircraft, nor were there any cases of serious burns also common with pilots of planes shot down by missiles or antiaircraft fire. So yes, I said, I believed that men were still being held in prison by the Vietnamese."
"No one who was missing in Laos was ever returned, and the government knew of more than three hundred servicemen last known to be held in Laos when the war ended. I personally saw one of them."
"Henry Kissinger, who led the U.S. delegation at the Paris peace talks to negotiate an end to the war, knew as soon as the North Vietnamese handed over the list of the men it reported to have in captivity that the list was incomplete. Not only did the list fail to include men the United States knew from photographic proof to have been in custody of the Vietnamese, but many prisoners known by U.S. officials to have been captured and held in Laos failed to appear on the list as well."
What does Frank Anton say about whether any POWs are alive today? |
"American POWs from the Korean War were also unaccounted for after the 1953 armistice, and an unknown number, according to U.S. intelligence analysts, were shipped to China and the Soviet Union. By 1955, we have only recently learned, President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew that some prisoners had been kept in North Korea and in some Chinese camps, and he was presented intelligence reports indicating that eight hundred had been sent by train to Siberia. Knowing that the Soviets never would acknowledge holding the prisoners, much less release them, Eisenhower out of concern for their families, chose not to make the report public. For nearly forty years that ugly secret was withheld from the public, and the fate of some eight thousand Korean War POWs is still unknown."
"After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, some five thousand French soldiers and foreign legionnaires were held for years in captivity, according to a 1965 report by the Rand Corporation. A subsequent CIA report told of Moroccans still returning home in the early 1970's, and some partially declassified 1983 State Department telegrams indicated that some French POWs were being secretly returned during the 1980's."
". . . U.S. intelligence agents knew from their sources as early as 1971 that hundreds more prisoners were under Hanoi's control than the Vietnamese were admitting in the Paris negotiations. The CIA that year had interviewed a highly credible defector, Vietnamese mortician Dr. Dang Tan, who said that five hundred or more American prisoners not named in Paris were being held secretly. He also told U.S. agents that ‘some may never be released.'"
In a briefing Sept. 15, 1972 to the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party, NVA Lt. Gen. Tran Van Quang "told the Soviets that 1,205 Americans had been captured in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos--more than double the number identified and released at Operation Homecoming."
The result of the Paris negotiations regarding the unaccounted for Laos and Cambodia prisoners, was that accountability "would have to be achieved separately ‘in accordance with the sovereignty' of those governments." ". . . clearly an evasive tactic because Hanoi dictated virtually every aspect of political and military action among the three countries, especially control of American prisoners."
". . . Nixon and his advisers in Washington, feeling the first waves of heat from a developing Watergate scandal and unwilling to prolong the withdrawal from Southeast Asia, summarily declared that all the prisoners had been returned, and anyone who was still missing was dead. That became the official U.S. policy, and the Pentagon followed the policy from that point on with unyielding obedience."
"The flood of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon in April 1975 poured countless reports into the hands of U.S. intelligence analysts of living American prisoners still being held in Vietnam."
"U.S. officials charged with accounting for missing servicemen after the war kept meticulous files on the live-sighting reports, some of them even noted as being "highly credible," but they devoted far more time and resources attempting to discredit them than in following up on the leads."
". . . evidence of living prisoners continued for years to seep quietly out of Southeast Asia, some from refugeees and some from official intelligence sources, including communications intercepts and satellite imagery."
". . . a crypto-linguist with the National Security Agency, sought for years to convince congressional committees that he had listened to conversations of Vietnamese guards supervising the movement of American prisoners during the war and after the U.S. withdrawal, tracking the exact locations of their progress within Vietnam and also monitoring the movements of some who boarded aircraft apparently destined . . . for China and the Soviet Union."
Frank Anton was contacted by the 1991 Senate Select Committee, investigating alleged MIA/POW's for whom Vietnam had not accounted. The committee refused to utilize its subpoena power to obtain information from "secret" Pentagon files and intelligence agencies and failed to call key witnesses with firsthand knowledge of POWs to testify. Rather, the committee appeared to have prepared to present, and did present, a case to support the Pentagon Policy of "dead if not returned during Operation Homecoming." Frank Anton states, "I was contacted by the committee staff during the early phases of the inquiry and replied that I would eagerly accept the opportunity to reveal my experiences, especially regarding those men I knew had not returned. I never heard from the committee again." (Emphasis added.)
"I am heart sick that so many others of us were consigned to a pit of hell that we need not have had to inhabit for as long as we did because someone knew where we were. I am no less heartsick now to ponder the fate of men who may still be far from home, withering away and wondering why their country had forsaken them." (Emphasis added.)
| The factual information above is derived from Frank Anton, a former MIA-POW (5 Years) and is discussed in WHY DIDN'T YOU GET ME OUT?, authored by Anton,Frank with Denton, Tommy (The Summit Publishing Group, Arlington, Texas)(copyright 1997) |
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| The WebMADam extends a warm thank you to Frank for providing this valuable insight |
May they all be returned to U.S. Soil! |
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