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I found the following article on this page and on the next while reading the P.O.W. NET biography for Richard Allan Fitts in the process of doing research about Michigan POW/MIAs and thought they should be displayed on their own to help explain why it can be so hard to identify remains when they are found and how mistakes are made (or covered up in some cases).
Please do whatever you can to help bring all of our POW/MIAs back home!!!!
[nwk0729a.txt 07/29/91]
This is a story about anguish, hope and longing--and what may be an unspeakably cruel hoax. It began in 1966 and led, last week, to the public release of a blurry photograph of three middle-aged men standing in a wooded setting. One of them, the man in the middle, holds a cryptic sign marked with what may be a date: May 25, 1990. The man on the left seems to be U.S. Air Force Col. John Leighton Robertson, missing over North Vietnam since Sept. 16, 1966. The man in the middle looks like air Force Maj. Albro Lynn Lundy Jr., missing over Laos since Dec. 24, 1970. The man on the right resembles U.S. Navy Lt. Larry James Stevens, missing over Laos since Feb. 14, 1969. Because of the photograph, the families of the three men are utterly convinced that Robertson, Lundy and Stevens are alive and in captivity somewhere in Southeast Asia.
This photograph has reopened the last and most painful chapter of the war in Vietnam--the hoped-for final accounting of 2,273 missing Americans whose fates have never been established beyond reasonable doubt. Many in the nationwide POW/MIA movement do not believe the U.S. government has done all it can to settle those sad accounts, and some accept elaborate conspiracy theories purporting to explain why five different American presidents and their administrations have allowed the mournful uncertainties to persist. The mere fact that every war produces large numbers of missing men--there are still almost 79,000 MIAs from World War II and just over 8,000 from Korea--is no consolation, and there are those who firmly believe that hundreds of American POWs are still being held by the Laotians or the Vietnamese.
The 20-year history of doubt, grief and hoping against hope has left hundreds of MIA families with their lives on hold. Some, like Colonel Robertson's wife, Barbara, and his daughter, Shelby Robertson Quast, have never accepted that their missing men may be dead. "We are always aware of his birthday, anniversary and shoot-down date," says Shelby. "He never died in this household." Barbara Robertson still keeps fresh-made chocolate-chip cookies--her husbands's favorite--in the fridge. The linen sheets the Robertsons received as a wedding present are ironed and waiting to be put back on the bed. Shelby, equally convinced that her father is coming home, has worn her father's wedding ring for the past 19 years; last week she gave it back to her mother, and Barbara Robertson put it on. "When I saw that photo," said Shelby, "I felt like I had my father's life in my hands."
Johanna Lundy (cover photo) got the word from her 31-year-old son Albro, a Los Angeles trial attorney. "Mother," he said, "how are you feeling? Are you sitting down? Because I have evidence that my father is alive in Southeast Asia." Mrs. Lundy told him to stop: she wanted to see the photograph herself. At first, she said, she was not sure it was really her husband, but the eyes, the mouth and the hairline "absolutely" meant it had to be Al Lundy. Johanna Lundy is not one of those who has left her life on hold. When her husband was reported missing, she says, she took stock of herself and realized that "all I knew how to do was read, argue and have babies." She went to law school, during the summers and at night, and today has her own law practice. Deeply religious, she says she has come to accept her grief; she is now trying to throttle back her soaring hopes. "I'm not making a decision," she says. "I would have to touch him to know that he's alive for sure."
The Robertson-Stevens-Lundy photo, and others like it, have electrified MIA families from coast to coast. It has also set off a macabre political controversy in Washington. This controversy essentially pits the Defense Department and the State Department against the true believers of the POW/MIA movement and their supporters on Capitol Hill. It hinges on thousands of case files, "sighting reports" from Vietnamese and Laotian refugees, and grisly bits of 20-year-old human remains. It feeds on the hopes and bitterness of MIA families, many of whom think the U.S. government has been incompetent, callous and deceitful in its long years of dealing with them. It will soon lead to Senate hearings on the POW/MI issue, and it has now forced administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, to stop basking in the glow of Operation Desert Storm and turn their attention to the unhealed wounds from Vietnam. "The suggestion that somehow we're not aggressively working these cases simply isn't a valid one," Cheney said last week. "I can absolutely guarantee that if we had any evidence that there was an American POW still alive in Southeast Asia, and we knew where he was, I'd have thousands of volunteers lined up outside my office door to go get him."
MORE PHOTOS: The problem is that no one can absolutely guarantee there are no Americans being held in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese government, which is eager to improve relations with the United States and which is now cooperating with the 14th in a long series of joint efforts to find and identify the remains of missing U.S. servicemen, insists that it released all 591 surviving U.S. POWs in 1973. But that still leaves Laos and Cambodia. Speculation within the POW/MIA movement has long tended to focus on Laos, and some zealots, like former POW Eugene (Red) McDaniel, maintain that hundreds of Americans are being held in five separate POW camps by the Pathet Lao. It was McDaniel who gave the photograph of the three men to the press last week; among many others, he is trying to force the POW/MIA cause back onto the national agenda. "We are going to keep going until we get this issue out in the open," he said. "There are more [photographs] coming."
Sure enough, more photos surfaced in St. Louis--and on NBC's "Today" show--last Friday. These photos depict a balding Caucasian man with a strong resemblance to Navy Lt. Daniel Vernor Borah Jr., who was shot down near the city of Quang Tri, Vietnam, in 1972. Like the families of Robertson, Stevens and Lundy, Borah's parents, Betty and Dan Borah of Olney, Ill., now believe their son is alive. The Borahs had long since given their son up for dead and were immensely skeptical of the many stories about POW survivors. Then, late last year, they were contacted by a circuit judge in Nashville, Tenn., named Hamilton Gayden. Gayden showed them 17 different photographs of the Caucasian man, whom he said was being held as a slave worker somewhere in Laos. "Is this your son?" he asked the Borahs. They studied the photos closely and answered yes.
Gayden has his own pipeline to the shadow world of Asian political intrigue--a Laotian refugee named Khambang Sibounheuang, who works in Gayden's office as a court officer. Khambang says he has close ties to the Laotian Resistance movement operating out of Thailand. Last July, Khambang says, the Resistance sent a team into Laos to check out rumors that Americans were being held in a Pathet Lao prison camp. They found the camp and bribed the guards to allow them to shoot a roll of photographs of Borah.
There is, unfortunately, an element of deja vu in all of this. Khambang Sibounheuang has been involved with other mysterious photographs of missing Americans in the past. In 1987 he was featured in a Life magazine article about a photo of a skinny Caucasian man who might have been Air Force Lt. Col. Charles Stoddard Rowley Sr. Rowley, who was shot down over Laos in 1970, has never been found. Rowley's son Chuck, who dealt with Khambang, says he no longer believes "100 percent" that the photograph is authentic and no longer knows whom to trust. But, Rowley also said, Khambang seemed sincerely interested in helping to find his father, and that "the Laotians" got angry when he offered $50.00 to help defray their expenses.
Gayden says he has dramatic new proof of the existence of U.S. POWs inside Laos--including further evidence on John Leighton Robertson and Larry James Stevens. The material allegedly includes hair samples, a handprint and a thumbprint, as well as crude maps showing the locations of the Laotian POW camps and a mysterious coded document that appears to list 20 or more POWs. He says Larry James Stevens recently sent a message through Laotian intermediaries warning that he feared for his life. The POWs, Gayden also says, are fearful that the CIA will try to kill them if they emerge from Laos, and he says one of them has asked the U.S. government for assurance that they will be protected if they do.
NO PROOF: Much of this, of course, is the stuff of conspiracy theories. What is lacking is hard proof that even a single MIA is still being held alive in Southeast Asia. A skilled technician can doctor or fake still photographs with ease (page 22), which means that none of the current photographic "evidence" can yet be taken as proof. Although there are some believers, most government experts are bone-weary and deeply skeptical of uncorroborated photos from unknown sources in Asia, like the one that seems to show Robertson, Stevens, and Lundy. "I'm looking at a picture of three fat, happy campers with trimmed mustaches and nice haircuts," says Sedgwick Tourison, a former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. "I've seen hundreds and hundreds of POWs, and I'm not looing at a picture of three 'prisoners' here. I don't know what I'm looking at."
The Dia has copies of the Robertson-Stevens-Lundy picture and is trying to evaluate its authenticity. Is it a fake, or not? We may never know, says Pentagon spokesman Edward Lundquest, because the copies in question are third- or fourth-generation prints from a missing negative. DIA meanwhile will send 100 copies of the photo to U.S. officials in Hanoi to see if any Vietnamese can be found who recognize the men, a process that may take many months. The photos of Lieutenant Borah, meanwhile, are now the subject of a public dispute between DIA and Republican Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire. Smith has accused DIA of suppressing news of the Borah picture; DIA says Smith has repeatedly refused to let DIA officials see it. "The acceptance of any one piece of evidence as gospel is fanaticism," Lundquest says, summing up the endless MIA disputes. "Some of the people who do that are fanatical."
DOG TAGS: Worse yet, MIA families and government sources alike say there have been many attempts over the years to bilk hopeful relatives with tantalizing bits of evidence and Rambo-style expeditions to Southeast Asia. Government experts are positive that Vietnamese con men have become expert at manufacturing dog tags with the names of MIAs on them. They also say that fully 372 of the 1,483 MIA-sighting reports since 1975 were outright fabrications. "Over the years we've found that when people come up with what they claim is information, they're either looking for money or they're Asians trying to get refugee status or get members of their families out of Indochina," says Tony Shine, a New York insurance executive whose father, Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony Shine, was lost over the Laotian border in 1972.
Another MIA relative, George Brooks of Newburgh, N.Y. is still bitter at being "scammed" for $28,000 by a swashbuckling former Green Beret who promised to go to Laos and Vietnam to search for MIAs. "We had this secret operation going and we were going to bring men back. Then at 2:30 a.m. a radio station called and said, did I know....the operation has failed? My heart went right down to my shoes," Brooks said. "I got [expense records] from one of his people, and the math didn't add up," Brooks, who is a director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, also said a Laotian he met in Asia wanted $20,000 to find his son Nick, a Navy aviator who was shot down over Laos in 1972. That time, at least, Brooks didn't bite.
Susan Scott of Troy, Mich., is chairman of the board of the Nation League of Families and a POW/MIA activist almost from the time her brother, Air Force Capt. Douglas D. Ferguson, was lost in 1969. "My kids don't ever remember a time when I wasn't involved in this, and they're grown now," Scott says. "My brother-in-law was killed in Vietnam. My brother is missing...It had a major impact on my mother, [and] my sister-in-law paid a very heavy price. She has some real feelings about remarrying, some guilt feelings about that. We all pay a different price." Scott says MIA families never really give up hope. "That flame," she says, "never, ever really goes out."
Other families, like Maureen Dunn of Randolph, Mass., and her son Joseph Dunn Jr. are still trying to bury the dead. Mrs. Dunn's husband, a Navy pilot, was shot down by Chinese fighters over the South China Sea in 1968; his body was never recovered. Last week Joseph Dunn Jr. flew to Shanghai for a face-to-face meeting with the two Chinese pilots who shot his father down. He may get leads to help determine if his father's body ever washed ashore, or he may not. But if nothing else, his mother says, Joe Jr. can look out at the sea where his father went down and say, "I came to get you."
The eerie part is that a least a few MIA families have been lucky enough to get irrefutable evidence of their missing relatives many years after the end of the war. Take Nell Gantt, of Huntsville, Texas. Mrs Gantt, whose son Curtis was lost in a C-130 gunship over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1972, still hears him "screaming to me in my dreams." In 1985, 13 years after his plane went down, Gantt's wedding ring--inscribed "Forever Love, Sue" by his wife--was returned by two reporters who had purchased it from a Thai citizen. The Thai said he, in turn, had bought it from a Laotian refugee who found it in the cockpit of the C-130 wreckage--but when the crash site was excavated in 1986, there was no trace of Gantt. "One thing has kept me alive--my son," Mrs. Gantt says. "Even though it's been 19 years, I know he could still be alive over there."
Or take the Fitts family of Boston. S/Sgt. Richard Fitts was a Green Beret who disappeared in Laos in 1968--a soldier in the secret war for Indochina. Walter Fitts and his wife, Rosella, fought the U.S. government for years, trying to get information about their son; because the mission was classified, Walter Fitts says, "we were stonewalled wherever we turned." In March 1989, a search team excavated the site of the helicopter crash in which Richard Fitts was killed--and found him. On Jan. 12, 1990, Richard Fitts was brought home to Boston for a hero's funeral attended by Gov. Michael Dukakis and more than 5,000 ordinary citizens. Afterward, some of Fitts's remains--along with those of six of his comrades--were buried in Arlington National Cemetery; the rest of his remains are in a local cemetery and his father visits the grave every Sunday to talk to his son. "After 23 years," Walter Fitts says, "I have a lot of talking to do."
THIS IS MY LIFE: What infuriates Walter Fitts and many other MIA activists in the fact that their own government has often concealed or botched the known facts about the missing. Kathryn Fanning of Oklahoma City has been fighting the government since 1985 over a set of human remains that Defense Department investigators say are her husband's. Because the identification is largely circumstantial, she doesn't believe them, and she has refused to consent to a burial. She has spent six years, and at times gone deeply into debt, trying to drum up support for her case. "People ask me why don't I get on with my life," she says. "This is my life." Dorothy Marian Shelton's husband, Air Force Col. Charles E. Shelton, is the last American who is officially listed as a POW in Southeast Asia. Mrs. Shelton, a longtime leader in POW/MIA groups, took her own life in October 1990, after years of battling the government on POW/MIA issues. She was buried in Arlington cemetery as a gesture of respect and because, in a sense, she, too, was a victim of the war.
Eleanor Gregory of Shrewsbury, Mass., has been searching for her brother since 1966, when he was reported missing in action. In 1970, she says, she was told for the first time that he was a POW in Laos and felt that the government has "lied from day one." In 1981 Gregory placed an ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine asking for information about her brother. One source said he had been captured; another told her how to demand her brother's records from the Defense Department. What she got was heavily censored--but she also discovered that her brother's Army ID card had somehow turned up 17 years after his disappearance. "I feel in my heart that my brother was alive when the war ended." Gregory says, "He was my baby brother. You know you'll never forget."
Given the enormous emotional stakes involved, the one thing everyone fears is that the new photographs will turn out to be a hoax. The POW/MIA movement has been riding a roller coaster of alternating hope and despair for 20 years: a disappointment now, when hope is at an all-time high, could crush the movement and turn many of its members into emotional wrecks. "I hope to God it's true," says George Brooks. "But if its not [whoever produced the photographs] should be hung. They are the cruelest people in the world." There is no doubt that there will more mysterious photos, more fragmentary evidence and more allegations of a 20-year cover-up. But everyone, even the most dedicated conspiracy theorist, knows there is only one way you prove or disprove the MIA dream. That is to go into the jungles of Southeast Asia and find a missing American--if, after all these years, there is one.
[ distributed through the P.O.W. NETWORK ]
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