There’s a trope among action movies and TV shows from the 1980s of American forces fighting to rescue and free Americans still held in captivity in Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 (Rambo 2, Missing in Action, etc). I’m curious if there have ever been verified cases of such military actions taking place and actually freeing prisoners still being held by the Vietnamese. I’m aware of organizations such as POW/MIA, for whom this idea is the crux of their existence, and that such missions would likely be classified but are there any documented US soldiers who had been held captive and were returned to the states years or decades after the end of the Vietnam War?
There is zero evidence that any American prisoners were held in Vietnam after 1973. It is merely a conspiracy theory.
In the spring of 1973, 591 American POWs held by North Vietnam & allied states were released and returned home, approximately in line with what the Department of Defense estimated for the number of remaining prisoners. However, the public and the families of MIA servicemen noticed that this still left several hundred people unaccounted for against the claim of 1,500 missing or prisoner the Nixon administration had announced during the Paris Peace conference. As the US withdrew, any sense of closure or celebration at the release of the prisoners was clouded by subsequent events, such as the Watergate scandal and the fall of South Vietnam to Communist forces in 1975.
As you mention, several eccentric characters held fundraisers in the 80s to finance POW recovery missions in Southeast Asia. These expeditions had similar results to those missions which periodically seek out Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster: none of them ever found any prisoners, prison camps, or human remains.
The Department of Defense has been working since the end of the war to trace what happened to the MIA cases, and locate human remains using forensic teams with the cooperation of Vietnamese authorities. Of 1,973 original Vietnam MIA cases, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) has identified and repatriated the remains of 728 cases, and listed 470 as non-recoverable cases: where there is conclusive evidence the person died but there is no possibility of recovering any remains (such as a pilot crashing in the ocean). The DPAA originally listed 196 cases as “last known alive”: people who were not confirmed killed, but went missing and were never seen again. Of these, 177 have been confirmed dead by further investigations, with the remains of 51 returned home. Only 19 of those last-known-alive cases are still unresolved. Of course, a single missing person case is heart-wrenching to the family members affected, but compare these 19 missing over the course of a 20-year conflict in a country covered in tropical jungle against 72,000 US MIA in World War II. And of course, 19 missing without a trace is a far cry from the claims of POW activists that hundreds of live prisoners still remained in the 80s & 90s. However, the quiet and patient work of these forensic investigators is a lot less exciting than the idea of Chuck Norris breaking prisoners out of a secret camp.
POW activist groups have persisted in claiming that live prisoners were kept in Vietnam after the war. There are two main groups: the “National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia” and the “National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen”. Supposedly the National Alliance of Families is more extreme in its claims, but these two activist groups both claim on their websites that there are live American prisoners in Vietnam. Today.
In the early 90s, a US Senate committee led by Vietnam veterans John Kerry & John McCain held hearings on the live prisoner issue. America was considering normalizing relations with Vietnam at this time, and POW/MIA activist groups were crying out for the US government not to do so unless all the prisoners were returned. The committee held over 1,000 interviews, took 200 sworn depositions, and sent investigators led by Kerry on multiple trips to Southeast Asia, but no prisoners were ever found. No one was able to substantiate these claims with any documentary evidence, name someone still being held, produce a Vietnamese witness, or provide any other proof that POWs had been left behind. The committee closed its proceedings in 1993, reporting that there was no proof of live prisoners in Vietnam. They did not rule out the possibility that some prisoners may have been left behind after 1973, but reported that:
“The Committee cannot prove a negative, nor have we entirely given up hope that one or more U.S. POWs may have survived. As mentioned above, some reports remain to be investigated and new information could be forthcoming. But neither live-sighting reports nor other sources of intelligence have provided grounds for encouragement, particularly over the past decade. The live-sighting reports that have been resolved have not checked out; alleged pictures of POWs have proven false; purported leads have come up empty; and photographic intelligence has been inconclusive, at best”
The POW activists were not convinced, and for years afterward they continued to smear both Kerry and McCain for supposedly participating in the cover-up conspiracy. Although they’ve produced zero hard evidence of post-1973 live prisoners, these groups have never recanted their claims or admitted that they were wrong, despite the Senate committee findings and the work of the the forensic investigators (the National Alliance says the remains repatriated by the DPAA are fake). Despite the fact that they are essentially conspiracy theorists, the POW activist groups have attracted a lot of friends in high places. The National Alliance of Families promoted an act of Congress in 2000, the “Bring Them Home Alive Act” which grants automatic refugee status to any Southeast Asian national who “personally delivers into the custody of the United States Government a living American Vietnam War POW/MIA”. In the subsequent 20 years, it doesn’t appear that anyone has ever claimed this reward.
Additionally, if the cover-up was on the US side, there would have been State Department and DoD documents which could be uncovered under freedom of information act requests, thousands of witnesses, and motivated whistleblowers available to testify about this shocking betrayal. No one has ever come forward with credible evidence in the 45 years after the fall of Saigon.
References: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, “Progress in Vietnam factsheet”, Jan 26 2021: https://www.dpaa.mil/Resources/Fact-Sheets/Article-View/Article/569613/progress-in-vietnam/
Report of the US Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 1993, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/pow/senate_house/investigation_S.html
National League of Families website: https://www.pow-miafamilies.org/
National Alliance of Families website claiming that repatriated remains are fake: https://www.nationalalliance.org/contact-us/victor-apodaca-jr
Text of the “Bring them home alive act” (H.R.1926 - Bring Them Home Alive Act of 1999) https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/1926/text?r=40&s=1