Just watched 'Rambo'. Are there POW's still there?

[max_tranmere]

I've seen Rambo many times, I first saw it as a teenager in the cinema. It got me thinking. The film suggests there are many American POW's still held in remote camps in Vietnam, many years after the Vietnam War ended. This is interesting, and it's apparently quite a hot topic in America. Lots of people claim there still are GI's being held in remote camps, even 36 years after the War ended. What do other people think?

[andy at handiwork]

What possible reason could the Vietnamese authorities have for keeping them?

[max_tranmere]

After all these years I can not see a political reason for keeping them - but if they suddenly revealed they have them after all this time they will seriously fall out with America, and the two are more or less friends now. There may have been political reasons for holding onto them before, like in case the war re-ignited in the mid to late 1970's. It's an interesting subject, and the Rambo film caused a lot of controversy at the time by raising all of this.

[jj]

4WIW, I think there may still be some, for MT's reasons, plus
simple human embarrassment.
What little knowledge I have of the subject suggests that the US
Govt. also believes this- or at least pretends to so believe....

[Robches]

I had a chat about this once with a guy who had been a naval pilot in Vietnam. He said it was well known that any pilots who bailed out over North Vietnam were treated as POWs and returned after the war in 1973. The Russians were really interested in the technical specialists, radar operators and electronic warfare experts. If they bailed out they tended never to be seen again. It was believed they would have been taken to the USSR for interrogation. After that, there was no way the Russians could ever release them, so they would probably have been executed.

He also told me that they knew the Russians were manning the SAM network protecting North Vietnam, but that could never be publicly mentioned, for fear it would provoke World War 3. There was a hell of a lot going on in Vietnam that even today is only half known, and the full facts will probably never be known.

[jj]

Robches wrote:
> It was believed they would have been taken to the
> USSR for interrogation. After that, there was no way the
> Russians could ever release them...

This is presumably the rationale on which the Pentagon believes
some servicemen never returned.
Funny thing is, Mrs JJ was recently much taken with the BBC's
showing of the original 'Wallander' film. When I mentioned that
the name rang bells with 'Wallenberg', she didn't know who I
was talking about.
A saviour of many Jews, he was arrested one night in
'45 [supposedly on Stalin's direct order] and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
later claimed to have met him in the GULag.
Many US bomber-pilots engaged on Japanese raids, who ditched
in Kamchatka/Manchuria during '45/6 were never seen again,
either....

[Nob3y]

who can forget the end of rambo three when the message comes up at the end saying we salute you brave men of the taliban.
or words to that effect.
dont forget at the time the big enemy was the ruski's and the taliban was the good blokes.

I bet they dont show that film on yankie land now ....... hehehe

[Robches]

It certainly didn't refer to the Taliban, who took power in Afghanistan years after the Russians left. It was something along the lines of supporting the Afghan fighters, who included great men like Ahmed Shah Masood, the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was the most effective anti-Russian leader, then he kept up the fight against the Taliban. Al Quaeda murdered him just before 9/11 if you recall. Afghanistan could do with him now.

[jj]

Another bandit-prince.

[Jonesy]

Maybe not now, as they'd be very old with very limited nedical facilities, but I think that they did have POWs for many years after the end in 1975, but it was a very embarrassing episode for the US Govrnment.
I also recall in the early 1980's a crack team went in and I recalled it being partly financed by Clint Eastwood to see if there was any proof of POW activity. The film Missing in Action with Chuck Norris is far better than Rambo 2 for Vietnamese and US POWs.
If there were any left over, and with America keen to build bridges with Vietnam, I'd imagine any POWs were 'brushed under the carpet' by the Pentagon as 'expendable casualities'