I still remember visiting the Vietnam Memorial as a little kid in the 80s and there being people there from the National League of POW/MIA raising money. My old man gave them some money, and afterwards, I asked my dad why he did that since there was no way there were US POWs that the government was ignoring. He agreed and explained that people cope with difficult situations in different ways, and that their going through the motions of trying to save the supposed left behind POWs was how they coped.

When I first came across this story, that memory came back to me in an instant. Granted, the POWs probably were killed before that day at the Vietnam Memorial, but there is a real, although remote, possibility that they survived until then.

I understand McCain was a narcissistic, incompetent bitch that did what he thought he had to do out of self interest. Fuck him, but whatever. I had more disgust for everyone else in the political establishment that let that cocksucker McCain get away with this. Fuck all of them.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4064483&forum_id=2#36712495)

4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since the intercepts were made by a “third party”—namely Thailand—they could not be regarded as authentic. That’s some Catch-22: the U.S. trained a third party to take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third party did the monitoring, the messages weren’t valid.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4064483&forum_id=2#48888823)

"McCain, whose POW status made him the committee’s most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel’s work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect–she began to cry."

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4064483&forum_id=2#36724412)