MIA Facts Site

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MIA Facts Site by Joe Schlatter Links on this page Purpose of this site Table of Contents and What's New Breaking News Purpose of this site This site is published to provide facts about  the issue of Americans who remain "missing in action" (MIA) from the Vietnam War.  At the conclusion of the Vietnam War,  2,583 Americans did not return.  A vast mythology has built up around what really happened to these individuals.   Misinformation, pseudo-history, and deliberate fabrication are  rampant.  As a result, myths are regularly proclaimed to be fact.  This site destroys those myths. The Myths:  Not all US POWs were released by their captors at the end of the Vietnam War. The U.S. government knew that all POWs were not released. U.S. POWs remain in captivity today. There is a conspiracy within the U. S. government to hide the continued imprisonment of Americans and, whenever the truth emerges, it is debunked. The U.S. government is doing nothing to account for or recover missing men.  The Facts:  All U.S. POWs captured during the Vietnam War were released, either at Operation Homecoming (spring, 1973) or earlier.  The only men captured and not released are 113 who died in captivity; their identities and the circumstances of their deaths are known; some of their remains have been recovered/returned.. No U. S. prisoners of war have been abandoned by the U. S. government. No U.S POWs remained in captivity after the conclusion of Operation Homecoming.  There is no conspiracy within the U. S. government to conceal the abandonment of prisoners of war (who were not abandoned in the first place).  No U.S. POWs from Indochina were taken to the Soviet Union, China, or any other third country. The U.S. government has been -- since well before the end of the Vietnam War -- exerting all possible efforts to recover or account for missing men.   That effort continues  today and is unprecedented in the history of warfare. Those who promote these false claims have produced a vast array of half-truth, untruth, hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, personal attacks, and mythology.   The accumulated effect of years of nonsense has been exactly what one would expect:  The big lie has been accepted as truth in some quarters. How many Americans are "missing" in Southeast Asia? At the end of Operation Homecoming in the Spring of 1973, 2,646 Americans did not return from Southeast Asia -- they were "unaccounted for."  Since then,  957 have been "accounted for" by (1) recovering and identifying remains; (2) return of a small number of individuals after Operation Homecoming; (3) recovering the remains of several individuals as a group whose remains are not separately identifiable. Currently, 1,689 Americans are "unaccounted for" in Southeast Asia: Vietnam:   1,296 North Vietnam : 476 South Vietnam : 820 Laos :  328 Cambodia  :  58 China (territorial waters)  :  7 These figures were last updated on :  May 30, 2011 Figures include 468 at sea or overwater losses Click here for details on the number of missing. Click here to see a chart that lists the missing by service and by country of loss.