What to do about the MIAs? - Vietnam veterans missing in action - Column

National Review, August 14, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Representative Randy Cunningham of California was a navy pilot during the Vietnam War. He was shot down. In recalling those days, in Congress last week, he broke into tears as he spoke of American soldiers who had died in his arms. He said that the Vietnamese had killed American prisoners and were withholding evidence to that effect. His conclusion: The recognition of the government of Vietnam "is not a political issue for me. This is right and wrong."

It isn't easy to talk back to such as Mr. Cunningham, certainly not if one has had no such experience of imprisonment by the Vietnamese. But then Senator John McCain was five and a half years a prisoner who endured torture. So was it with Pete Peterson of Florida. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska wasn't a prisoner, but in pressing the goals of war he won the Congressional Medal of Honor. John Kerry of Massachusetts won a Silver Star. And these four legislators support the recognition of Vietnam.

Whatever one's conclusion in the matter, we need, on meditation, to reject the suggestion that this is a moral question. The recognition of de-facto governments is the American tradition. Cuba and North Korea are exceptions, and the question is, do we want Vietnam to continue as another exception?

Here are the unspoken points in the controversy.

1. There are no Americans alive who were put down as "missing in action." How do we know this? By the application of common sense. Since any live American soldier, captured between 1966 and 1975, surely wishes to return, why would he be kept in Vietnam?

If the Vietnamese kept hinting that a hundred Americans --let alone 1,618 Americans -- were going to arrive on a Boeing 747 the day after the United States handed over a billion dollars or whatever, the story of the MIAs would be comparable to the story of the Cubans caught by Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion, or the Americans held hostage by Iran in 1979. Nothing is more useless than a dead hostage, and for that reason talk about the "whereabouts" of the MIAs should be restricted to talk about where they are buried.

2. If they are buried. Stories about the ferocity of the Vietnamese are not exaggerated, and when Congressman Cunningham is reduced to tears recollecting what the Vietnamese did, we can reasonably assume that his memory is exact. The Vietnamese killed a number of American prisoners. As a matter of fact, Americans killed some Vietnamese prisoners. And Americans killed a great many Vietnamese women and children in air raids. Wars animate the dark side of human nature, and although there is a difference between dropping a bomb on Dresden and executing soldiers at Katyn, no combatting army is at all times governed by the models endorsed by international conventions. The American officer in charge of the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp a century ago was hanged after the war because of his treatment of prisoners, 13,000 of whom died. He was a Confederate captain, and his victims were American Unionists. We can't hang the malefactors in Vietnam because we lost the war. The short of it is that the Vietnamese don't know where all their victims were buried any more than the Argentines know where their victims -- dating back only 25 years -- were buried, in part because many of them were dropped from airplanes into the sea.

3. The Vietnamese government in recent months has been here and there cooperative in tracking down graves of dead American soldiers, but that government has not come forward with all the records it keeps.

Why is this so?

Almost certainly because those records would reveal that many Americans were in fact either killed, or permitted to die of starvation or of wounds. It should not surprise us that such records are tenaciously kept from view. And one wonders what is the nature of the satisfaction that bereaved wives and mothers would get from knowing that the man they loved, mysteriously missing since that day when he was captured, was in fact killed not in combat, but in detention? What would we have accomplished except the revival of bitterness and rage? And if we are dealing with the psychological question alone, do we really help the survivor by extinguishing hope, even hope forlorn? Would it satisfy those who have made all but a lifelong mission in search of her, to find the bones of Amelia Earhart?