An Enormous Crime

September 21, 2007
National POW / MIA Recognition Day

It is a time to remember those who never came home and to remind us that somewhere there are soldiers who have not been accounted for and may, in fact, be held against their will by the enemies of Freedom.

At the end of the Vietnam War, there reportedly were 2,583 unaccounted-for American Prisoners missing or killed in action/body not recovered.

As of April 11, 2007, there are 1,786 Americans still missing, over 90% of them in Vietnam or in areas of Laos and Cambodia where Vietnamese forces operated during the war.

The enormous crime is the deliberate abandonment of 700 US POWs in Vietnam and Laos back in 1973 — and the continued cover-up of the existence of these men.

Former North Carolina Congressman Bill Hendon spent the last 25 years digging into intelligence files in an effort to learn what really happened to those POWs:

..."right at the end of Operation Homecoming, the men were released in groups and when the last group was ready to come out, Watergate crashed down on Nixon. That was the beginning of the end for Nixon and the beginning of the end for the unreturned prisoners.

The Vietnamese were going to release them once they got their money. We promised to pay that $4.75 billion. They gave us half of our guys back and when they didn't get the money they kept the other half. The money was never even appropriated by Congress.

Back on Jan. 26, 1981, the North Vietnamese signaled to the new Reagan-Bush administration that they would "sell" living U.S. POWs for $4 billion."

The book is titled "An Enormous Crime; The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia", written by former Rep. Bill Hendon and Beth Stewart, published by St. Martin's Press.