<div align="left">
I wonder how other Americans feel when they see that black flag flying on the same pole as the Stars and Stripes. Are they proud? indifferent? confused? annoyed? Or do they just take it for granted? How is it explained to young people? And what do foreign visitors make of this peculiar addition to our national flag?
I wonder how other Americans feel when they see that black flag flying on the same pole as the Stars and Stripes. Are they proud? indifferent? confused? annoyed? Or do they just take it for granted? How is it explained to young people? And what do foreign visitors make of this peculiar addition to our national flag?
This American feels angry, sad, and afraid: angry because that black flag is an ongoing, unaddressed desecration of our national symbol; sad at what it says about what our nation has become; afraid that it will be attached to Old Glory forever. After all, what public figure could be so "unpatriotic" as to suggest that we "Tear down this flag!"?
By federal law and by laws in all 50 states, the POW/MIA flag must fly over public buildings on particular days of every year. By law, it flies over the White House and the Capitol once a year, on national POW-MIA Recognition Day, and over every post office on that day and on five other patriotic holidays: Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day and Veterans Day. Is that really enough? No. At many venues, private and public, it flies every day.
Briefly put, that black flag is a con, a swindle, a dirty trick. It represents the politicization of our national symbol by a ruthless cabal that is draining the life of our nation as surely as that black flag is besmirching our national character. The con initially promoted the continuation of a seemingly endless war, then unyielding hostility to our former adversaries, now an attitude of stubborn commitment to militarism, imperialism and oppression. That flag represents a refusal to recognize reality or accept responsibility, and therefore contains an implicit promise to do it all over again, as, indeed, we are doing now! It says that we indulge in delusions, that we are vindictive sore losers, that we are victimizers who relish the role of victims. It’s the symbol of the takeover of our nation by a coven of deceivers commanding a legion of the deluded. That flag is a national disgrace.
Every con is based on lies. The first lie in this particular game is that by flying that black flag we are somehow "supporting" American POWs still being held captive in Vietnam 35 years after the end of U.S. combat operations there. The fact is that there are no POWs languishing in the hands of yellow/red sadists. There haven't been since the end of the war. The insinuation itself is, of course, a gross insult added to the horrific injuries we inflicted upon the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (By the way, the injuries go on through the unexploded ordnance and cruel poisons we left behind; perhaps a better focus of our concern.) But those insignificant others are no more considered by black flag enthusiasts than most people notice that there are actually two people on that flag. After all, those shadow figures are only a backdrop to our own self-absorbed drama.
The fallback lie to the first lie is that we are supporting the families of the POWs. Those families grieving for the loss of a loved one certainly deserve our sympathy, but, may one ask, are we truly helping anyone by fostering an illusion that their loved ones are trapped in a living hell? If it actually comforts anyone to enshrine this symbol of an endlessly suffering victim, or even if some are just pushing a political agenda, they are, of course, free to do so, on their own property. But the national symbol belongs to all Americans, and may not be the property of any party, faction, cult or cabal. For there are other interests at work, and the black flag represents far more than sympathy for the families of fallen soldiers.
*********************************************************************************
A brief look at the history of the swindle reveals the people and purposes behind it. (It is thoroughly examined by H. Bruce Franklin in his M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, and neatly summarized and updated in chapter 9 of his Vietnam and other American Fantasies. Arnold A. Isaacs also provides a lucid account and more detail, especially about the sordid commercial part of the story, in his Vietnam Shadows, The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy.)
The con was launched by that versatile villain, Richard Nixon, who needed some basis of support for the war he was continuing against the will of the American people. Victory was no longer considered possible. Americans were thoroughly disgusted by the atrocities we were committing to prop up a corrupt and brutal regime in "South Vietnam," a country of our own creation. But what American could fail to sympathize with our suffering POWs?
Days after Nixon's inauguration in January of 1969, therefore, the American representatives at the Paris peace talks made an unprecedented demand of their Vietnamese counterparts, that "Hanoi account for America's missing in action and negotiate the release of American prisoners separately from the question of U.S. withdrawal." (1) Other than in the courtly days of aristocratic warfare, when officers would be released on their word as gentlemen, this is contrary to all military and diplomatic custom. The days of gentlemanly war are over. And, mind you, there was not even a ceasefire in place; the war was going full tilt.
But when the Vietnamese balked at this preposterous demand, Dick's minions adroitly spun that the barbarous Vietnamese were callously using the POWs as hostages. Necessarily, because we are now firmly in Orwellian territory, the exact opposite was true; it was the Nixon regime that prolonged the POWs' captivity, their families' anguish, and an atrocious war for four more years, using the POWs as a pretext – and, ironically, producing more POWs.
Dick's little devils were active on the home front as well. They organized local groups of POW wives into the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organization which remains a contributor to the "POW/MIA issue" to this day. It was one of their members who contacted a flag company in 1971 to produce an appropriate flag. One of the company’s ad men knocked it up. The company, among others, is still selling the black flag to this day. Judging by the number of pitches on the Internet, business must be pretty good. After all, it's subsidized by our tax dollars.
Speaking of subsidies, a big recipient of Nixon regime largesse, a wacky little gent by the name of H. Ross Perot, pitched in from early on. He funded media events and other propaganda, including full-page ads in 100 newspapers, a TV program and organization entitled "United We Stand" and an imaginative tableau of Ross’s own design in the Capitol itself representing POWs in horrific conditions. Yes, in the Capitol, because congress, as is its wont, quickly capitulated.
Celebrities of a particular political persuasion – Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan, for example – lent their services. A pro-war group by the name of VIVA, the folks that brought us the POW/MIA bracelets that buyers were meant to wear until their particular "POW/MIA" was accounted for – provided a lot of personnel. This group is important because they and other zealots, family members only by self-declared "adoption," took over the League of Families in 1974.
Among those VIVA personnel was another actor, "B-1 Bob" Dornan, who went on to a long and truly odious congressional career. Just to give you a fuller idea of the species of politician who aided the movement, Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Jesse Helms of North Carolina were happy to provide false information, and George Wallace of Alabama was a proud wearer of the VIVA bracelet, as were, in the realm of pure performance, luminaries such as Bill Cosby, Pat Boone, Billy Graham and Cher. Sonny Bono straddled the line and joined B-1 Bob in the House.
********************************************************************************
Nixon could not sustain the war beyond the 1972 elections; his reelection was at stake! Thus the famous October surprise, when henchman Kissinger announced, "Peace is at hand." As part of the settlement that Dick and his backers had so long resisted, a full return of POWs followed. Defense and State Departments compiled a list of all the military and CIA personnel they thought might possibly be prisoners of war. They came up with 638 names. The Vietnamese returned 653!
We have now, regrettably, entered the nightmarish maze of POW/MIA numbers. The numbers changed over time as personnel were reclassified. Different agencies and armed services had different lists. Add to this deliberate obfuscation by the government and the black flag zealots, and the confusion can be dizzying. I will touch on the main points, but bear in mind throughout that there is really only one number you have to remember: ZERO. A mountain of investigation over decades, much of it led by the zealots themselves, has produced NO credible evidence of POWs held in Vietnam after the war.
Nor can anyone explain, incidentally, why the Vietnamese would do such a thing, unless it is because they are simply evil. They couldn't be holding them hostage, as they quite rightly deny the existence of these imaginary beings. With a booming population and high unemployment, they certainly don't need to expend precious resources guarding aging slaves. No, they are simply evil, and always were, so we were right all along and the hippies and liberals were wrong and stabbed us in the back. You get the picture.
So how can blackflaggers throw about numbers in the vicinity of 2000? By conflating three separate categories: POWs, MIAs and KIA/BNRs, Killed in Action, Body Not Recovered. These three are the subsets of "personnel unaccounted for." There are unaccounted for after every war. For the Korean War, for example, the number of U.S. unaccounted for in relation to total killed is 24 percent. For Vietnam, the figure is 3.4. Here is Professor Franklin’s account from the year 2000:
There are, it is true, 2,020 Americans listed as "unaccounted for" from the war..., but not one of these is listed as a prisoner, a possible prisoner, or even missing. Most of the "unaccounted for" were never listed as POW or MIA because well over half were originally known to have been killed in action in circumstances where their bodies could not be recovered. Their official designation has always been KIA/BNR, Killed in Action, Body Not Recovered. Crews of airplanes that exploded in flight or crashed within sight of their aircraft carrier, soldiers whose deaths were witnessed by others unable to retrieve their bodies, or men blown apart so completely that there were no retrievable body parts – all these are listed in the total of "unaccounted for." All that is missing is theirremains. The 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 Accords were signed.
The confusion thus created was quite deliberate. But this miasma was relatively mild compared to that generated by the "POW/MIA" concoction itself. Arguably the cagiest stroke of the Nixon presidency was the slash forever linking "POW" and "MIA." In all previous wars there was one category, "prisoners of war," consisting of those known or believed to be prisoners. There was an entirely separate and distinct category of those "missing in action." The Pentagon internally maintained these as two separate categories throughout the war and its aftermath. But for popular consumption, the Nixon administration publicly jumbled the two categories together into a hodgepodge called POW/MIAprecisely in order to make it seem that every missing person might possibly be a prisoner. Because this possibility cannot be logically disproved, the POW/MIA invention perfectly fulfilled its original purpose: to create an issue that could never be resolved. (2) (All italics are Franklin’s)
Indeed, the American demands on Vietnam had risen from the preposterous to the impossible. The Vietnamese were required, for example, to "account," years after the fact, for a flyer lost over the South China Sea, for whom the US Navy had searched for four days at the time of his disappearance.
This impossible demand, for a "full accounting" of all American MIAs, served several purposes. Domestically, it kept the POW/MIA movement alive. Abroad, it allowed the Nixon administration, and all the subsequent administrations, to renege on Nixon’s promise of aid to Vietnam and, further, to maintain an attitude of unrelenting hostility to our former adversaries.
Diplomatic relations were finally established in 1995. Even then, Bill Clinton had to do a bit of pandering to the bitter enders as he signed the bill, claiming that its "primary motive was to further ‘progress on the issue of Americans who were missing in action or held as prisoners of war.’" (3) In truth, the primary motive was that a more powerful though not unrelated constituency, big business, no longer wished to be excluded from a growing market.
Moreover, the "POW/MIA issue" had been resolved years before, despite all the obstacles thrown up by plotters public and private. In 1994, the last person still listed as a prisoner was removed from the Pentagon’s list, at the request of his family. He had been kept on it for "symbolic" reasons. All other cases had been resolved a dozen years before, in the early 80’s. Yet, another dozen years on, the black flag still clings like a succubus to our national symbol.
*********************************************************************************
The POWs came home in the spring of 1973 in the glare of a media event called Operation Homecoming, at which Nixon was able to say that he had achieved "the return of all of our prisoners of war." (4) But the movement did not die. A great many Americans had become emotionally invested in the "issue." Millions had bought VIVA bracelets, for example, as well as black bumper stickers, black T-shirts, black patches, black decals and black flags. Just incidentally, the black patch adorns the official robe of the Ku Klux Klan. And Nixon’s virus, the POW/MIA conflation, was and is still at work. Some of those MIAs might have been – might still be – alive! </div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left">
Representative "Sonny" Montgomery of Mississippi picked up the ball in the House. An impeccably credentialed "conservative Democrat," Montgomery instigated and chaired a Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia in 1975-76. After 15 months of intense investigation, the committee concluded unequivocally that "no Americans are still being held alive in Indochina, or elsewhere, as a result of the war in Indochina." (5) Said Sonny: "...like so many others I wanted to believe they were alive, so I did." (6)
The zealots were outraged at this perceived betrayal, but the facts simply could not be denied. The faithful received no solace from a 1979 study by Navy Captain Douglas L. Clarke of the National War College, a veteran of three hundred combat missions in Indochina. Clarke concurred with the Select Committee’s findings and added that the "matter of the missing men has worked against the best interests of the United States in a number of ways." (7) He concluded, "Whether there will ever be an adequate accounting of the men missing in Southeast Asia is extremely doubtful. There never was one in any previous conflict. The Government did the families – and therefore the lost men – a tragic disservice by encouraging the belief that there would be such an accounting in this war." (8)
Faced with these official determinations, the true believers could only escape into the dark alleys of conspiracy theory. Sinister bureaucrats were concealing the truth! Hard to say why, exactly, but maybe they were covering something up, or maybe they were just liberals and hated America – closet liberals in the administration of Ronald Reagan, "gatekeepers" who kept the truth from dear, simple, trusting President Reagan!
Now we have entered the lower hells of mental disturbance, where the world is upside down, and reality always just beyond the grasp. There was indeed a government conspiracy going on, but one designed to enable the delusion addicts. Reagan and Bush conspired to maintain the illusion that there might be POWs still alive in Vietnam, while never claiming that there actually were. If they had, they would presumably have had to do something about it. Indeed, not-so-simple Reagan once promised, "If you can bring out one U.S. POW, I will start World War III to get the rest out," well knowing that there were none there. (9) Hours before leaving office, the Reagan administration, which had exploited the movement for eight years, released, but did not publish, a report confirming the findings of the Select Committee and Captain Clarke.
Where there are junkies there are pushers. Colonel James "Bo" Gritz was the first of a string of charlatans claiming to have proof of POWs still alive in Vietnam. Like the renegade cop of the silver screen, these poseurs were prepared to take on both sets of bad guys, internal and external, to bring our victim-heroes home. But the proof was always phony, and no prisoners were ever produced.
Another set of illusionists were ready to give the story a more satisfying ending. Clint Eastwood and William Shatner (yes, Captain Kirk) bought Gritz’s story. Gene Hackman starred in Hollywood’s first rescue fantasy, Uncommon Valor (1983), and Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine (yes, Kwai-Chan), his brother Keith and John Wayne’s son Ethan soon followed with lurid trash of their own. In a land, most unfortunately, where the inhabitants have a taste for trash and a hard time separating fantasy from reality, by 1991 69% of the people believed that Americans were still being held in Indochina. And George Bush I after "Desert Storm" was able to say, "By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"
************************************************************************************
Let me correct one last belief that some may wishfully hold; that this ugly blot on our national emblem is a relic of a war long ago, that someday, somehow, this piratical flag must surely come down – maybe when the human relics of that distant age, like the present writer, do the same. Not so! A quick internet search reveals a multitude of "POW/MIA awareness raising" events that one can look forward to. The irony is delicious but sickening; if people were really aware, there would be no more events, and no more of our children would be indoctrinated into the cult.
Nor is government support lacking. The League of Families is deemed a tax-exempt, "humanitarian" organization, and the Defense Department maintains a POW/MIA information office whose "information" is as indecipherable as the zealots’. As for the Jolly Roger itself, taking that down would require congressional action. Public Law 105-85 (section 1082), requiring the display of the black flag, explains that it serves not only "...(1) as the symbol of the Nation's concern and commitment to achieving the fullest possible accounting of Americans who, having been prisoners of war or missing in action, still remain unaccounted for..." but also "...(2) as the symbol of the Nation's commitment to achieving the fullest possible accounting for Americans who in the future may become prisoners of war, missing in action, or otherwise unaccounted for as a result of hostile action." Our murderous, suicidal policies certainly ensure a plentiful supply for the future. The vicious spiral flows on down.
Militarism, imperialism and repression based on degrading proclivities and cynical lies – that has happened before, and the perpetrators in those cases wanted a new flag as well. And they didn’t let it go until it was torn from their cold, dead hands. Therefore be it resolved that, by January 27, 2023, the fiftieth anniversary of peace in Vietnam, the so-called "POW/MIA flag" no longer be required to fly over public lands. Rather than our nation, let that black flag be struck down.
Footnotes
- H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, Lawrence Hill Books, Brooklyn, New York, 1992, p. 58.
- H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, University of Massachusetts, 2000, pp. 174-175.
- Ibid., p. 174.
- Richard Nixon, "Remarks at a Reception for Returned Prisoners of War, May 24, 1973," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1973 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1975), 558. Quoted in M.I.A., p. 74.
- Americans Missing in Southeast Asia: Final Report of the Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, December 13, 1976, vii. Quoted in M.I.A., p. 15.
- "Still Trying, Ford Says on MIA’s," Washington Post, July 25, 1976. Quoted in M.I.A., p.15.
- Captain Douglas L. Clarke, The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA, Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1979, p.115. Quoted in M.I.A., p. 15.
- Ibid., p.116. Quoted in M.I.A., p. 15.
- Charles G. Patterson and Colonel G. Lee Tippin, Heroes Who Fell from Grace: The True Story of Operation Lazarus, the Attempt to Free American POWs from Laos in 1982 (Canton, OH, Daring Books, 1985), p.146. Quoted in M.I.A., p. 138.
</div>