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From:
T1:
Date: 10/6/97
Time: 3:29:42 PM
Remote Name: 130.68.21.187
Jennifer Zimmerman I found the two final paragraphs on page thirteen to be very disturbing. It illustrates a lack of concern on the part of the government for those soldiers that were fighting for them and for the soldiers’ families. The government was aware that many of the people they grouped under POW/MIA were actually dead- their bodies just could not be found. They were “listed in the total of ‘unaccounted for.’ This KIA/BNR category was never included with the missing in action during the Vietnam War; it was lumped together with the POW/MIA category only after the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement was signed.” (p.13). If all that Franklin states is true, this is another way in which the United States hid the truth from the American public in the Vietnam War. It is terrible that the families of the dead soldiers could not even be told the truth because the “Pentagon listed as a POW anyone reported as a possible prisoner...whether or not there was credible evidence of capture and even if there was evidence of subsequent death.” (p.13). The paragraph beginning on page 39 and continuing on page 40 also deals with this. Even before we were officially fighting in Indochina we had many people already missing. It was only in 1969 that the United States government finally decided that this was a serious problem. “Then year after year the number of both missing and prisoners kept mounting, matching the rate of escalation as the United States climbed ever more overtly and ruinously into the longest war in its history. Yet the fate of American prisoners did not become a major public issue until the spring of 1969, at which time the missing also became thoroughly jumbled with the prisoners.” (p.40). This is absolutely ridiculous and it makes me even more aggravated at the government for its actions during the war.