THE ADVOCATE 293
VOL. 79 PART 2 MARCH 2021
were not countries with a sophisticated bureaucracy dedi cated to recording
everything, it isn’t surprising that a number of American partici pants vanished
without trace. By now one pretty well has to conclude that they are
dead. Even if one made all of SOF’s assumptions that many American POWs
were kept hidden by the “Combloc” (or “VCs” or “Chicoms” or whatever) to
use as bar gaining chips in a peace settlement, or just for fun (we’re talking
foreigners here, you know), any value amusement or otherwise they might
have had is gone long ago. And keeping prisoners is an expensive business.
The only reason any live American might remain in either North Korea or
Vietnam that I can think of is that maybe he doesn’t want to come home.
Now these considerations weigh not all with SOF, which accepts the survival
of POW/MIAs as a matter of faith and wants to keep up the pressure
for their return because “our POW/MIAs deserve no less”. As a result, the
SOF articles focus on the fail ure of the U.S. government to produce these
will-of-the-wisps. The question is no longer the existence of live U.S. POWs.
It has become, and I quote, whether “officials have implemented a massive
conspiracy to cover up the existence of live U.S. POWs.”
This feast of unreason has, unbelievably, a considerable political clout
behind it. In 1980, President Reagan (who else?) was induced to promise
that the POW/MIA issue would receive the “highest national priority during
his administration”. Such promises rarely survive inauguration, but this one
did. A Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs was struck, and the Defense
Intelligence Agency (“DIA”) set up an office to pursue an active enquiry.
SOF tracked down a retired investigator who had been em ployed a number
of years checking sightings of POWS:
“During the period of time I was there the enquiry office I don’t recall
any real good live sighting reports that we got ... ”
“We were able to scratch off a lot of the sightings, like other sightings of
cau casian POWs working on a construction gang—there were several
about one particular guy we were later able to identify as a Swedish contract
worker.”
“And this one guy was a scam artist that was giving us these live sighting
reports so we were able to throw out the great majority of his reports as
scams.”
You and I might say, that is just the sort of thing one would expect. Not
SOF and the enthusiasts. To them, that shows a “mindset to debunk”, held
by “external elements”, which has led the DIA to “focus on the veracity of
the sources with a view to discred iting them” rather than “seeking the corroborative
data necessary to support the sighting”. I apologize for the fact
that some of SOF’s prose is thicker than mud in a bucket, but I believe the
paranoia of their thought processes shines through clear and bright. Cur-