Vietnam - 1,518
(North 547, South 971)
Laos - 428
Cambodia - 74
Peoples Republic of China Territorial Waters - 8
U.S. troops - 540,000
South Korean troops - 50,000
Vietnamesee Troops - 400,000
By the end of the war over 2, 200,000 US troops had served in Vietnam.
58,178 died there.
YOU BE THE JUDGE
1970-1976: After the French pay an unspecified sum of money to the Vietnamese, they communists release POWs captured in 1954! The North Vietnamese had claimed all of them had died.
June 25, 1981: Defense Intelligence Agency director Eugene Tighe testifies before the House Subcommittie on Asian/Pacific Affairs that live American POWs remain in Southeast Asia.
June 28, 1985: The Washington Times reports DIA Director Lieutenant General Eugene Tighe testified Hanoi is still holding at least 50-60 live American POWs.
August 19, 1986: The Wall Street Journal reports the White House knew in 1981 Vietnam wanted to sell an unspecified number of POWs for $4 billion. The White House decided the offer was genuine--and ignored it!
September 30, 1986: The New York Times reports a Pentagon panel estimates up to 100 live American POWs are held in Vietnam alone.
October 7, 1986: CIA Director William Casey says, "Look, the nation knows they (thePOWs) are there, everybody know they are there, but there's no grounds well of support for getting them out. Certainly, you are not suggesting we pay for them, surely we are not saying we could do anythign like that with no public support."
June 10, 1989: The Washington Post reports a Japanese monk released after 13 years in a Vietnamese prison had American POW cellmates who nursed him to health.
October 1990: Vietnamese Foreighn Minister Nguyen Co Thatch admits Vietnam still holds American POWs but is will to release "as many as 10 live American POWs". His offer, like others before it, is ignored by Secretary of State James Baker III.
February 1991: Colonel Millard Peck, Cheif of the Pentagon's Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, resigns in protest of being ordered by policy makers in the POW/MIA Inter-Agency Group not to investigate live-sightings reports of American POWs!
April 25, 1991: Senator Bob Smith addresses the Senate and reveals that, of more than 1,400 eyewitness sightings of live POWs, NONE has ever received an on-site investigation!
May 23, 1991: The Senate Foreign Relatoins Committee's Examination of U.S. Policy Toward POW/MIAs concludes that the U.S. has ignored thousands of AMerican POWs, and left them to rot in Soviet slave labor camps and North korean and Vietnamese prisons. "Any evidence that suggested an MIA might be alive was uniformly and arbitrarily rejected."
Summer 1991: A flood of new evidence of live POWs pours from Southeast Asia: pictures, handwriting samples, hair samples, blood samples, fingerprints, foot-prints, maps, and other physical proof. the Bush administration disregards the evidence and attepts to discredit it by rumor and innuendo. Some of the photos are scientifically validated--and have never been scientifically disproven!
January 12, 1999: The Washington Times reports State Department accused of stiffinly POW/MIA probe. Weldon says Russian lawmaker told him of the U.S. effort.
Novemeber 4, 1999: Michael D. Benge, ex-POW, testifies about the "Cuban Project" before the House International Relations Committe Chaired by the Honorable Benjamin A. Gilman. The "Cuban Project" was a program that had been sanctioned by the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. According to POW debriefings, supported by CIA and other reports, The "Cuba Program" was part of a Hanoi medical university's "psychological study." It was conducted to obtain full compliance from teh American POWs and to force them to make propaganda statements against the American Goverment and the war in Vietnam. In his testimony, Michael Benge stated that only through full disclosure by the US Goverment agencies, which wer gathering information of the depth of Cuban involvement in the Vietnam War and with American POWs, will we know the truth.
