TO: Committee on Mismanagement of Prisoner-of-War (POW/MIA) Accounting I have been compiling a list for proposals aimed at resolving the POW/MIA issue by achieving the fullest Possible Accounting. This letter is being forwarded to the Committee on Mismanagement of Prisoner-of-War (POW/MIA) Accounting. You can probably imagine that I gained a great deal of experience on this issue while serving on the Four Party Joint Military Team (FPJMT) during the ceasefire. I also served as the Chief of the US Office for POW/MIA Affairs in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) Vietnam after the war ended. I spent some 12 years in the search and recovery effort and some 359 Americans were recovered, repatriated and identified during the time that I worked on the issue. What is going on now in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia is one of several reasons I chose to salute and go home. My personal view is that so long as we are willing to be extorted (milked) for large sums of cash going to the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) POW/MIA Chapter (yes, they do have one, just like Wal-Mart in China), we will never resolve the issue. If we keep financing the General Political Directorate (GPD) there will be no incentive on the part of the VCP to provide an accounting. On the other hand, however, if the VCP collapses, the Vietnamese people will provide genuine cooperation in resolving the issue. Unfortunately however, the non-repentant GPD and Central Military Commission in Hanoi are be reluctant to afford genuine cooperation on this sensitive issue, because in their eyes we have not settled our “blood debt”. Rather than dangerous and expensive search operations, what we desperately need now is the conduct of professional investigations of missing persons cases applicable to those cases wherein the missing, or otherwise unaccounted-for personnel were last known to be alive, especially in those cases where the missing men were in the actual physical custody of communist forces. Communists cringe every time someone says “the Viet Cong won the war and America lost.” They know we killed 1.3 million of their personnel and we bombed North and Central Vietnam to shambles. The During our long war with Hanoi, Communist forces suffered 300,000 personnel “Killed-in-Action, Body-not-Recovered” (KIA/BNR). Today, some 150,000 bodies of Communist personnel remain unrecovered. There has been so much violence and bloodshed between the United States and its Allies and the Communists in Vietnam that I doubt we will change negative attitudes and hatred any time in the near future and most likely until far into the future. I realize that there is little or no animosity between the SRV civilian citizens. But this is not true for members of the VCP. I believe the only way we can ever resolve the issue is to change our position on all WWII cases and categorize them as inactive, if for no other reason based on the passage of time. The same criteria should apply for cases in Vietnam where there is adequate information, even including in some cases, American citizen witnesses. Concerning losses in deep ocean, or high speed, sharp angle impacts into remote, mountainous terrain, I believe it is incredibly ingenious to risk the lives of additional American personnel in order to go look for bones, especially when the United States Government (USG) is being gouged for millions of dollars annually for rental costs for the unsafe, obsolete, Communist supplied aircraft. You are probably aware that one Russian helicopter carrying a joint team of US/Vietnam remains specialists from JPAC, crashed into a mountain in Central Vietnam killing everyone on board. Had I extended my assignment in Vietnam any longer it is quite likely that I would have been killed along with the others. After having contemplated the current POW/MIA situation at considerable length I have gradually come to the conclusion that the only way to successfully resolve the remaining cases is to have all parties agree to and carefully implement a completely transparent program designed to a address the issue of casualty resolution as being an entirely humanitarian issue. All documentation and reporting on the POW/MIA program must be declassified and transparency on the part of all parties involved will be mandatory, with consequences for parties that violate or exploit the humanitarian program. In resolving casualties, rather than pressure the U.S. Government to pay exorbitant sums for a huge cast of laborers and specialists and require the U.S. Government to hand over cash, the USG should partner with Nongovernment Organizations to do field work to investigate the loss incidents of U.S. personnel unaccounted-for throughout former Indochina. Garnett “Bill” Bell 4209 Boys Ranch Road Lavaca, AR 72941-4726
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:39:39 +0000
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