The symbol of the Vietnam war, for the past two decades, has been that of the American POW.  The American prisoner of war, while indicative of defeat, was also a cipher of defiance and compassion.  After American troops were largely withdrawn in 1972, the story of the POW would be that of a brother, forgotten in isolated and inhumane prisons, abandoned to an oblivion that would accommodate the flawed 1973 Paris political settlement which would leave South Vietnam undefended and America disgraced.

H. Bruce Franklin’s M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America with great gusto attempts to debunk the idea that after the 1973 agreement there were ever POWs or any significant numbers of POWs in South East Asia. He also explains how the POW myth was born in 1969 and became embedded in the cultural imagination of the war. Franklin concludes that the machinations of Richard Nixon are ultimately to blame. Nixon manipulated the issue in order to undermine the peace movement and to justify extending the war an additional four years.

M.I.A. is divided into four parts. The first part, “Prisoners of Myth,” attempts to account for the 2,273 American servicemen who were allegedly unaccounted for after the 1973 treaty, and have been assumed in the popular imagination to be still alive in South East Asia.

The figure is misleading, Franklin argues, because of the 2,273, 1,101 were “originally known to have been killed in action in circumstances where their bodies could not be recovered.” (p. 13) The Pentagon originally designated them as KIA/BNR (“Killed in Action/Body not Recovered”).  They should not be listed as POW/MIA, Franklin argues, because they are quite obviously dead. It was only after the 1973 Paris peace treaty that they were included under the much broader, and ambiguous category of MIA.

It is in this new broader category POW/MIA that Franklin senses the hand of Richard Nixon.  The POW/MIA category was “an unprecedented invention purposely designed to suggest that each and every missing person might be a prisoner, even though most were lost in circumstances that made capture impossible.” (p. 13) Previously, Franklin argues, the POW category was reserved for “only . . .those known or believed to be prisoners.” “While lumping these two designations together in public announcements, the Department of Defense internally maintained them as separate categories throughout the war and its aftermath.” After the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement, “all but 53 men on this internal POW list were either released or reported to have died in captivity. In the next three years, intensive analysis of these remaining cases resolved all but a handful.” (p. 14) The POW issue, Franklin concludes, was resolved in Paris in 1973.

The second part of Franklin’s book is a tendentious account of the conflict and detracts from his careful discussion of the Pentagon’s POW numbers. However there is a reason for this: Franklin also wants to argue that by 1969 and 1970 a triumphant peace movement had backed Nixon into a corner and the White House was desperate for a good argument to convince the American people to continue fighting a discredited war. If slogans about killing Vietnamese communists no longer resonated with public opinion, why not reinvent the war as an attempt to save American lives? In this, Franklin implies, lies the origin of the POW myth. Franklin’s sources, however, fail him and he presents no evidence that Richard Nixon ever linked the extension of the war to falsifying the presence of American POWs in Southeast Asia. Instead, he enlists anti-war columnist Tom Wicker to provide him with his smoking gun: “Since North Vietnam was making the release of the prisoners contingent on U.S. withdrawal, the logic of Nixon’s position could be ‘we may keep both troops and prisoners there forever.’” (p. 63) From this it follows, Franklin infers triumphantly, “[If] it could never be proved that some missing American was not being held prisoner by North Vietnam, the war could literally go on forever.” (p. 63)

The third section of Franklin’s book deals with the groups which sprang to life around the POW/MIA issue, such as the National League of Families. These groups, fed misleading data about their lost loved ones, helped publicize the POW/MIA issue and inadvertently served to extend the government’s war. However, as the possibility of more POWs being held in North Vietnam became increasingly implausible, news of Nixon’s “secret wars” in Cambodia and Laos served as a catalyst to transform the MIA groups into government skeptics. The idea of government conspiracy was born. 

The final section of Franklin’s book is an account of how the “MIA myth” was taken up by popular culture and served as a sort of ideology to perpetuate hostile relations with Vietnam. Rambo, Chuck Norris, and Gene Hackman are all accused of continuing the Vietnam conflict by demonizing the Vietnamese for their “inability to account” for servicemen who have never been found and probably cannot be found.

Franklin delivers his message with the zest of a physician who, preferring to deliver his medicine by puncture, has been given a long biopsy needle. “The true act of cruelty,” he declares,  “is preserving false hope, for it condemns all who care about the missing men to what was described in 1975 [by one wife of a POW] as pure hell. . .”  He then, in his first speculations about potentially unaccounted for servicemen, suggests that they may have been deserters who formed new families, got involved with drug trafficking, or helped lead attacks on U.S. forces. (p. 24) While the author has a sense of humor, his levity is not intended to alleviate pain.

M.I.A. is an excellent book and an essential addition to any collection of works on the Vietnam war. As far as cultural histories of the war are concerned, it must be included among the best. Franklin concludes with a plea to Americans to let “bygones be bygones” and to treat the Vietnamese with the same dignity we demand for ourselves. He relates an anecdote of a recent US search team’s excavation of the crash site of a downed B-52 bomber, downed near Hanoi in 1972. The plane’s wreckage destroyed much of the village and was responsible for killing several villagers. The recent recovery of remains, however, required the further destruction of the village. There was no consideration given to whether the bone fragments found might have belonged to Vietnamese MIAs, killed in the original crash.

Franklin’s book purports to be a book debunking a myth, and his book performs a valuable service in clarifying the meaning of the numbers used in establishing who might or might not have been “Missing in Action.” It also does an impressive job tracing how these numbers have been inflated and used as the basis for a sub-genre of Hollywood war movies and literature about the war.

But Franklin has more in common with those he disparages for sustaining the MIA myth, than he thinks. In his readings of films such as The Deer Hunter or Uncommon Valor, Franklin grafts historical events from the late sixties onto the images of the late seventies and eighties. Hence the “Russian roulette” scene in the Deer Hunter is “framed to match with precision the sequence seen by tens of millions of Americans in which the chief of the Saigon secret police placed a revolver to the right temple of an NLF prisoner and killed him with a single shot; even the blood spurting out of the temple is exactly replicated.” In First Blood Part II, Franklin finds it useful to point out to his readers that Vietnam has become “Indian country” and that Rambo is an “Indian fighter,” who is “crucified” by “atheist Russian communists.” But of course Rambo, who is “actually part Indian,” is hardly a model of piety. No matter.  This is all “the myth of the frontier continu[ing] to evolve, its hero metamorphosed from being just the captive and destroyer of Indians into a figure coalescing with the Indian and the wilderness.” The historical referents are hardly restricted to American history: In Uncommon Valor, Colonel Rhodes’ choices for soldiers (“a blond hulk,” a “beefy bruiser known as Sailor), reveal a perverse idealism “recognized by those familiar with the culture of fascism and nazism.” (p. 145) Even Conan the Barbarian conceals a “neo-fascist agenda.” Just as the families of MIAs have over-interpreted information from Vietnam as a sign of their loved one’s existence, so Franklin has over-interpreted the same material, finding everywhere Nixon’s desire to wage war.

While it’s possible the Christmas Bombings, the Invasion of Cambodia and the Lam Son 719 operation may in some ways have “benefited” by the MIA issue becoming more widely appreciated by Americans, this hardly proves that they were in any way “caused” by it. It’s thus surprising that for all his feistiness,  Franklin feels no need to provide direct proof that Nixon generated the MIA issue in order to prolong the war.

But Franklin’s circumstantial indictment of Nixon, one suspects, is hardly by chance. As deep as Franklin’s skepticism is towards the government, it can’t be complete. Franklin’s government -- even when led by Nixon -- is not evil.  Rather, it is hypocritical -- and in order for this to be the case, it must at some point have admitted the truth about American POWs. For Franklin, this truth was revealed by the Pentagon which, for all its intrigues and failings, gets at least one thing correct: the number of 1,172 Vietnam era servicemen listed as Missing in Action. (p. 13) From this total, Franklin subtracts the number of servicemen accounted for following the 1973 Agreement. Then, it’s only a matter of finding plausible explanations for the remaining 53 outstanding cases in order to declare the MIA issue a myth, and the government -- not evil -- a deceiver.

It is in moments such as these that Franklin slides from the subject on which he is allegedly writing (MIAs) and substitutes another, which is a representation of American culture he disapproves of. It is this technique which enables him to use the narrow subject of MIAs as a metaphor for all sorts of other debates -- the American Indian wars, the struggle against fascism, and even images from pop culture.

It is hardly unreasonable for the family of a missing vet to wish for their loved one’s return.  And would it not be even more reasonable for this family to be suspicious of the “Pentagon’s MIA numbers,” for precisely every other reason Franklin tells his reader to be suspicious of the government? Over time the belief in MIAs has waned and passed from even the Hollywood imagination. But this has hardly been a coincidence: investigations by those who Franklin mocks as the myth’s dupes, Bo Gritz for example, have revealed little evidence of MIAs. Franklin’s own book is part of this investigative tradition. There is an obvious explanation for America’s interest in the Vietnam war: it’s because it is historically the war closest and  most traumatic to us. To the question of why are we pursuing the investigation of POWs/MIAs so vigorously, the obvious answer is why not? Americans have simply not known the truth behind the POW issue.

Franklin’s purpose, however is not to end the debate about POWs and MIAs. His greater concern is to establish that not only was Nixon a hypocrite, but that an entire culture was hypocritical and conspired to conceal its bloodlust.  The rhetoric of “hypocrisy” and “myth” that Franklin uses are not mere tropes. They are what enable Franklin to provide “evidence” of Nixon’s complicity with the MIA myth -- by quoting Tom Wicker’s speculations. In order to condemn Nixon, Franklin refers to the culture. And of course to condemn the culture, why not single out Nixon? Franklin’s own logic is similar to that he attributes to Nixon: A conspiracy must exist, because how else could a war that was so obviously wrong and unwinnable, and a politician who was so deceitful, continue to be able to prosecute it? But this conspiracy is hardly localizable in the White House in 1969, and this is why having certain proof of Nixon’s machinations is unnecessary. Franklin’s conspiracy is transhistorical, and is what enables him to roam freely over America’s cultural history, “discovering” echoes and premonitions of his own era’s failure.

While Franklin’s book is an excellent one, its fate remains linked to that of the MIA “myth” he seeks to dispose of. A mythical era will have ended not when we have given up searching for POWs, but when we have moved beyond our instinctive use of “conspiracy” in justifying our beliefs about the events surrounding the Vietnam war.

Nathan Alexander is a former Lecturer in the Department of History and Literature at Harvard University.

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