USG Has Betrayed Us All
November 28, 2007
Bill Hendon, Elizabeth Stewart
Edit of 26 Jan 08: see the comments for additional give and take that illuminates the treason of our own government against those “left behind.”
I recommend my review of Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About POW/MIAs In The Vietnam War and also Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam.
This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.
I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.
There are several points that grab me:
Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.
Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese
The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.
I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.
It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.
See also:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
