New Evidence Reveals That Senator John McCain and Other High-Ranking Vietnam
War POWs May Have Lied to the American Public About Being Tortured -
CovertAction Magazine
The POW/MIA Flag Still Flies High Despite Questions | US News
POW/MIA flag flying at the White House. [Source: usnews.com]
Collusion by the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media resulted
in disparagement, denial, and suppression of eyewitness testimony confirming
that most POWs were actually well-treated by their North Vietnamese captors (in
contrast to the brutal torture and death often meted out to North Vietnamese
POWs by U.S. forces).
When numerous U.S. POWs began to understand the truth about the war they had
been fighting, they spoke out against it—voluntarily—as an act of conscience.
But they were cynically portrayed as traitors, turncoats and “camp rats,” their
reputations and lives destroyed, driving many to despair and even suicide.
Among the few memories that most Americans still retain of the Vietnam War—now
nearly 60 years in the past—one of the most vivid centers around the torture
suffered by Senator John McCain at the hands of his brutal Vietnamese captors
while a prisoner of war in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (AKA The Hanoi Hilton).
This story has been told, retold, and continually burnished countless times by
admiring media interviews and a flood of books and memoirs, including several
by McCain himself.
Another memory of the war, still believed by millions of Americans, is that
hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers classified as MIA (Missing in
Action) are actually being held and tortured in secret North Vietnamese POW
camps, callously abandoned by our government and desperately praying to be
rescued—preferably in a Hollywood-style rescue by Chuck Norris or Sylvester
Stallone, who starred in the spate of Commie-hating blockbuster movies inspired
by their plight.
Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today
[Source: amazon.com]
This belief is continually reinforced by POW/MIA flags which fly at every post
office, and a ready supply of new books and movies, such as the 2018 release of
the film M.I.A. A Greater Evil.
But both memories of the Vietnam War are false memories. However passionately
believed, they were cynically manufactured fantasies implanted in
all-too-willing American minds for political purposes.
How and why these counter-factual beliefs were so successfully foisted on the
American public is the subject of the new myth-shattering book by Tom Wilber
and Jerry Lembcke, Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America
Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).
Wilber is the son of a dissenting POW, Walter “Gene” Wilber, who is featured in
the book, and has contributed to the award-winning documentary film The Flower
Pot Story by Ngọc Dũng. Lembcke is a distinguished sociologist from College of
the Holy Cross who has written a number of books debunking popular myths about
the Vietnam War.
Tom Wilber discusses his father's evolution from POW to peace advocate on Vimeo
Tom Wilber [Source: vimeo.com]
The two start their book by noting that the dominant war hero image of the
POW—who endured torture and resisted service to enemy propaganda—was to a large
extent created by high-ranking men like McCain who were captured early in the
conflict.
John McCain Was a War Hero. But He Shouldn't Have Been.
John McCain embodied the war hero image of someone who endured torture at the
hands of his North Vietnamese captors while retaining loyalty to the United
States. [Source: nymag.com]
McCain’s oft-told story of ill-treatment and torture is contradicted by Nguyen
Tien Tran, the chief prison guard of the jail in which McCain was held. In a
report by The Guardian, “[Tran] acknowledged that conditions in the prison were
‘tough, though not inhuman’. But, he added: ‘We never tortured McCain. On the
contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that
at times were not available to our own wounded’. . . . [H]e denied torturing
him, saying it was his mission to ensure that McCain survived. As the son of
the US naval commander in Vietnam, he offered a potential valuable propaganda
weapon.”
Most of the others promoting a heroized image of U.S. POW’s were graduates of
service academies and came from privileged backgrounds. They included a) James
Stockdale, who ran for Vice President in 1992 as the running mate of Ross
Perot; b) Robinson Risner, a double recipient of the Air Force Cross, the
second highest military decoration for valor; and c) Jeremiah Denton, who went
on to become the first Republican Senator from the state of Alabama and a close
ally of President Ronald Reagan.
John McCain fit well with this group because he was also academically
privileged and his family included high-ranking military officers like his
father, Jack, who was an admiral and the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.
James Stockdale, Medal of Honor, Vietnam War | Military.com
James Stockdale while in captivity. [Source: military.com]
Jeremiah Denton featured in famous film footage from his captivity. [Source:
washingtontimes.com]
After his release in 1973, Colonel Risner, right, and Maj. Gen. LeRoy J. Manor
rode in a parade in San Francisco.
Robinson Risner, right, is celebrated in a parade in San Francisco in 1973
after his return following seven years in a North Vietnamese POW camp. [Source:
nytimes.com]
With post-war military careers at stake, these high-ranking officers played up
the alleged barbarity of the North Vietnamese, demanded resistance to
interrogations from other captives, and threatened so-called deviants with
disciplinary charges after release to the U.S.
James Stockdale - Wikipedia
James Stockdale [Source: wikipedia.com]
The Nixon administration advanced their credibility and status in a desperate
ploy to stir up support at home for an unpopular conflict abroad; and further
concocted a story—announced in a press conference by Defense Secretary Melvin
Laird on May 19, 1969—that 1,300 American soldiers deemed “missing in action”
were believed to be prisoners of war.
Melvin Laird was first to publicize plight of POWs in Vietnam - Hartford
Courant
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gives the opening statement of a press
conference on May 19, 1969, to publicize the plight of U.S. POWs and MIAs in
North Vietnam. [Source: courant.com]
The unaccounted for would now publicly be described as “POW/MIA,” implying that
any serviceperson missing in Vietnam could also be a prisoner of war. This
transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one, trading
public support for sympathy. It didn’t matter why we were there in the first
place: Our boys were there, and by God were we going to do anything to get them
home.
Suddenly, the public image of Vietnam looked very different. The very real
footage of brutalized Vietnamese bodies, wailing children, and napalmed
villages was traded for a fantasy—all of the violence that had been done in
Uncle Sam’s name was now being done to him.
Kim Phuc, the napalm girl: 'Love is more powerful than any weapon'
Images like this famous one of a Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, running
from a U.S. napalm strike, were supplanted by the fixation with the plight of
American POW/MIAs. This was a brilliant public relations maneuver by the Nixon
administration in collusion with the media. [Source: irishtimes.com]
The POW issue soon became a cause célèbre. In the early 1970s, millions of “POW
bracelets” were sold by a student group called VIVA (Voices in Vital America),
each branded with the name of a missing American serviceman.
Washington Memorial Park | Pow mia, My childhood memories, Baby boomers
memories
POW/MIA bracelet. [Source: pinterest.com]
POW MIA Bracelet
[Source: audacy.com]
These shiny nickel bracelets were spotted on the wrists of celebrities like
Sonny and Cher—who had often before dressed like hippies—and Sammy Davis, Jr,
and allegedly Princess Grace of Monaco put in an order for two bracelets.
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, Episode 42 - Cher Scholar
Sonny and Cher with returned POW John “Spike” Nasmyth on their CBS comedy hour
program in March 1973 in which they announced that they wore POW bracelets with
his name. [Source: cherscholar.com]
The silver bracelets could even be spotted on the fashion runway, where models
with an interest in political activism took to wearing them. A New York Times
profile from the day quotes a model named Astrida Woods, who said she was
“dissatisfied” with her life as a model and felt the urge to give back. “I
began to do some work with Ralph Nader, and now [wearing the bracelets]. It’s a
way to contribute something.”
Pretty young women showcasing POW bracelets as part of PR campaign to unify the
nation around support for POW/MIAs, if not the Vietnam War itself. [Source:
audacy.com]
Many U.S. GIs and pilots, however, reported being humanely treated during their
captivity, with access to adequate food, recreation facilities and reading
material.
Wilber and Lembcke conclude that “instances of brutal treatment” were “less
common than [has been] purported” and that evidence of systematic torture drawn
from visitor reports, POW statements, and oral histories was scant.
Those POWs who questioned the war were dismissed by the military for their
supposedly “weak personal character” and “lack of education and backgrounds in
broken and poor families,” a typical case of “psychologizing the political.”
These men were in turn stigmatized and then forgotten by the public amidst the
manufactured concern about POW/MIAs who were supposedly brutalized and then
kept in captivity and abandoned by their government.
Camp Rats?
The ranks of the POW dissenters included Lt. Col. Edison Miller, a recipient of
the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart from California who spent six
years in captivity after his fighter plane was shot down over North Vietnamese
skies on October 13, 1967.
A person with a mustache
Description automatically generated with low confidence
Edison Miller [Source: valor.militarytimes.com]
A contemporary described Miller, a Californian who flew previously over Korea,
as a “first-rate pilot with a zeal for combat but an independent sort.”
John McCain falsely accused Miller of being a turncoat because he appeared in
North Vietnamese propaganda.
In his 1999 best-selling book Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote about Miller as
one of two “camp rats”—the other being Tom’s father Gene, who had been
executive officer of a squadron of F-4s when he was shot down over North
Vietnam on June 16, 1968.
McCain said both “had lost their faith completely.”
“They not only stopped resisting but apparently crossed a line no other
prisoner I knew had even approached,” McCain wrote. “They were collaborators,
actively aiding the enemy.”
McCain further claimed that Miller turned him into a North Vietnamese guard
when McCain tried to befriend him, and that the guard then beat McCain. Miller
said: “I never ratted out a fellow American. McCain has fabricated and
exaggerated his experience for political advantage.”
Miller’s anti-war views had been sharpened in conversation with Navy Commander
Robert Schweitzer, a captive from 1968 to 1973 who died a year after his
release while still on active duty in San Francisco.
Schweitzer felt that, because the U.S. had never declared war, there could not
legally be any North Vietnamese prisoners of war, only “Americans detained by a
foreign power,” Miller said.
A picture containing text, person, wearing, person
Description automatically generated
Robert Schweitzer [Source: valor.militarytimes.com]
A tape of a conversation between Miller and Schweitzer was played for other
prisoners, who heard not only an anti-war message but a challenge to the
legality of the U.S. military action in Vietnam.
In 1970, when Miller and Gene Wilber were interviewed on national television,
Wilber called for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal “so that the Vietnamese
can solve their own problems.”
U.S. journalists at the time, however, did not take their interview seriously,
regarding it rather as a North Vietnamese propaganda show.
The two men along with Schweitzer continued to write protest statements and
together with fellow dissenters met with American peace activists visiting
North Vietnam, including actress Jane Fonda and former U.S. Attorney General
Ramsey Clark.
Jane Fonda in Nghe An, North VN 1972 | manhhai | Flickr
Jane Fonda (center) during trip to North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: flickr.com]
Mr. Clark, left, in North Vietnam in 1972. He met with Communist officials in
Hanoi and publicly criticized American conduct of the Vietnam War.
Ramsey Clark (left) in North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: nytimes.com]
Empathy for the War’s Victims
Most dissenting POWs came from a working-class background.
Amazon.com: Black Prisoner of War: A Conscientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir
(9780700610600): Daly, James A., Bergman, Lee: Books
[Source: amazon.com]
James A. Daly, an African-American infantryman from the Bedford-Stuyvesant
section of Brooklyn, for example, was raised in poverty by a single mother.
His 1975 book, Black Prisoner of War, describes his three years of jungle
confinement after his capture by North Vietnamese soldiers and the South
Vietnam-based National Liberation Front (NLF), followed by a two-month trek
north to Hanoi on the Ho Chi Minh trail where he experienced what it was like
to be on the receiving end of U.S. ordnance.
Bob Chenoweth, from a white working-class family in Oregon, similarly developed
an empathy for the Vietnamese people and a distaste for the racist views of
most Americans toward the Vietnamese.
A helicopter crew member, before he was shot down and captured, Chenoweth said
he “couldn’t see how U.S. forces could possibly be helping the Vietnamese given
the attitude that GIs had, viewing them as ‘subhuman’ and disparaging them as
‘gooks and dinks.’”
Chenoweth and other of his contemporaries authored anti-war statements, wrote
messages to GIs asking them to follow their consciences, sent letters to
politicians, and recorded tapes to be aired via Radio Hanoi.
A person standing at a podium
Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Bob Chenoweth speaking at Veterans for Peace conference in Spokane, Washington,
in 2019. He was active in the Vietnam era anti-war movement upon his return
from the war. [Source: wagingpeaceinvietnam.com]
Higher ranking POWs responded by trying to isolate the dissenters from other
American prisoners while charging them with participating in a conspiracy
against the United States.
One of the dissidents, Abel Kavanaugh, committed suicide as a result of the
intense pressure and prospective stigma of a dishonorable discharge only a few
months after coming home from Vietnam.
Abel Larry Kavanaugh
Abel Kavanaugh [Source: findagrave.com]
Charges against the POW dissidents were eventually dropped, Wilber and Lembcke
believe, so as to not jeopardize the hero-prisoner story with too much
attention on dissent and through a possible exposure of inconsistencies in the
accusers’ own prison biographies.
Fear of Communist Infiltration
A critical trope in Cold War America was the fear of communist infiltration and
internal subversion through brainwashing and mind control.
This trope was fortified by a CIA propaganda effort that depicted Korean War
POWs who defected to the North Korean and Chinese side as having been
brainwashed in interrogation.
Brainwashing by Edward Hunter
CIA propaganda tract accusing Communist China of brainwashing U.S. POWs. The
stereotype of cunning and evil Oriental communists endured through the Vietnam
War and beyond and impacted how Americans viewed the dissenting POWs in
Vietnam. [Source: goodreads.com]
Most of these defectors were in fact African-Americans who did not want to
return to the Jim Crow South, while others were attracted by communist ideals
or saw the U.S. war as immoral.[1]
Clarence Adams with Korean prisoners of war and communist captors, in 1954.
Photos: SCMP; Della Adams; UPI
Clarence Adams with Korean POWs and Communist captors in 1954. Adams lived in
China for 12 years. He said he was well treated in captivity and stayed on in
China because he was offered the chance at education there. Later he made
propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi, eventually returning to his hometown of
Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran a chain of successful Chinese restaurants.
[Source: u.osu.edu]
The stereotype of the brainwashed POW of the Korean War turned collaborator and
traitor because of his weak character would become the backdrop for the
discrediting of the dissident POWs of the Vietnam War.
The Korean War Prisoner Who Never Came Home
POW defectors in the Korean War who stood for peace. [Source: newyorker.com]
In an appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Gene Wilber was grilled on whether he had
given in to the enemy to make antiwar statements. That he had acted on his own
“conscience and morality” was drowned out by host Mike Wallace’s implications
of collaboration and opportunism.
When he was subsequently invited to the White House POW reception, Wilber found
his hotel room broken into and marked with accusations of treason when he
returned from the reception.
In the summer of 1973, James Stockdale charged Wilber and Edison Miller with
collaborating with the enemy, mutiny, and inciting personnel to
insubordination. However, military judges found insufficient evidence to
prosecute the case, and Wilber and Miller instead received letters of censure
for their failure to meet the standard expected of officers.
Hollywood Revisionism
POW films starting from this time focused on returnees’ estrangement with their
families and society and were told as stories of spousal infidelity,
representing both individual drama as well as a sense of “home-front betrayal.”
These films were part of a post-war revisionism, which included a spate of
films that contributed to the legend of American servicemen left behind in
Vietnam.
In the 1980s, a new subgenre emerged focused on Vietnam veterans heroically
taking on the task of returning to Indochina and liberating the left-behind
POWs, who had been betrayed on the home front and abandoned by the U.S.
government.
The POWs were depicted as victimized and emasculated captives who needed to be
rescued by individualist heroes and whose honor as Americans was to be restored.
A picture containing text, book
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[Source: wikipedia.org]
This image, Wilber and Lembcke argue, fits the post-war efforts to psychologize
the once political conflicts of the Vietnam War and to depict the veteran as a
victim and loser.
More of a heroized image and the POWs’ endurance of torture was revived with
the 1987 film, The Hanoi Hilton, which starred Michael Moriarty, Ken Wright and
Paul Le Mat as U.S. POWs who defy their captors while enduring brutal treatment
at Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (aka The Hanoi Hilton).
The Hanoi Hilton (1987) - IMDb
[Source: imdb.com]
This film meshed particularly well President’s Ronald Reagan’s characterization
of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause,” fought by noble men, with the POW
dissenters by implication being ignoble.
Persistence of the Hero-Prisoner Story
In their quest to comprehend the persistence of the hero-prisoner story, Wilber
and Lembcke take their readers back to American colonial history and the
captivity narratives emerging during that time.
These stories are about a complex mix of violence against captives, temptations
to stay with their captors, the ideal to remain loyal with their fellow
colonists, and their Christian beliefs.
Indian Captives
Illustration of captives in the Indian Wars. [Source: legendofamerica.com]
Such tensions and correlations between the Self and the Other were critical in
the making of an American identity. The wars in Korea and Vietnam and the POW
experiences there can be understood as a new chapter of this identity-making
process. Here, too, Americans must prove their will and ability to endure the
brutality of a racialized Other.
A wrench in the story, however, is revealed in the autobiographical accounts of
POW-heroes like Stockdale, Denton, and Risner. They wrote about fasting as a
way of enforcing self-discipline and self-assurance, sometimes with a religious
subtext.
More bizarrely, they also wrote about self-mutilation—the deliberate infliction
of physical wounds on themselves that would be visible during filmed interviews.
The aim was to make it appear to other POWs (and to the U.S. public) that they
had been tortured. One officer wrote of how he purposely damaged his vocal
apparatus so he could not be forced to make propaganda statements.
When Hell Was in Session by Jeremiah A. Denton Jr.
[Source: goodreads.com]
In addition to some high-ranking officers attempting to portray themselves as
heroes by means of self-mutilation, Wilber and Lembcke also noted that they
tried to keep political literature and news of dissent back home away from
other POWs, fearing that these would enhance critical positions on the war and
against their authority within the prison population.
Moreover, these ranking officers often despised the more humane view of the
Vietnamese displayed by other prisoners, including an interest in their
language and culture, and an understanding of why they were fighting back
against an invasion of their country by the most powerful military force in the
world.
Bringing Back Forgotten Dissenters
Wilber and Lembcke’s book helps restore these forgotten POW dissenters to their
rightful—and honored—place among the large and diverse Vietnam generation of
dissidents, draft resisters, oppositional GIs, veteran activists, deserters,
and all those who supported them.
Antiwar Resistance Within the Military During the Vietnam War
[Source: vietnampeace.org]
The book also shows that, despite all destruction and death brought by the
invaders from the sky, North Vietnam maintained a moral superiority through
oftentimes fair treatment of the captured Americans. This was in stark contrast
to the more systematic adoption of torture methods by USAID and CIA-trained
police under the Operation Phoenix and like-minded programs.
A group of people holding signs
Description automatically generated with low confidence
Vietnam War protesters create mock Tiger Cage, replicating one in the USAID-run
Con Son prison where Vietnamese inmates were tortured in a way American POWs
claimed they had been tortured. [Source: easyyolktoofiles.wordpress.com]
The POW/MIA flag that flies today over the White House is intended to honor the
men who endured captivity; however, it continues to perpetuate a distorted
understanding of a war that was as abominable as it was unjust, and helps to
advance a dangerous nationalist ideology that will lead to future Vietnams.