News-Info-Alerts

Re: Raising POW-MIA Awareness

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: August 12, 2003

"Riders raise POW/MIA awareness

By Nancy Vendrely The Journal Gazette

Rolling Thunder members are clear about their mission and proud of their most visible means of delivering their message.

Yet the public perception of the group often is incorrect.

At the organization's annual demonstration in Washington, on Memorial Day weekend, thousands of motorcycles ride through the city to the Vietnam Wall.

But Rolling Thunder is not a bike club.

Member after member will tell you that, but the annual Run for the Wall, which calls nationwide attention to the group, continues to reinforce the idea that it is.

"In a way, it gives the wrong impression of what we're about," Dennis Hayes says. "Our issue is POWs and MIAs. Our goal is to help veterans."

Hayes is president of Fort Wayne's Rolling Thunder Indiana Chapter 3, which has 20 members - men and women - and seven junior members, age 18 and younger.

Hayes says, while it was Vietnam veterans who started Rolling Thunder, members are not exclusively from that era, nor do members have to be veterans.

"They don't even have to have a connection (to a veteran). Just stand behind the POW/MIA and veterans' issues and fight for them. . . . And they don't have to ride. Just be people who care," Hayes says.

Yet many do ride. Hayes himself, a 17-year Navy veteran, has been riding a motorcycle for 22 years. This year, for the first time, he rode in the Run for the Wall.

Riders start in the Pentagon parking lot and end at the Vietnam War Memorial. Jay Teipen, Indiana State Director of Rolling Thunder, in Fort Wayne recently for a Chapter 3 event, estimates 350,000 bikes were there this year.

"It took four hours from the time the first riders left the Pentagon parking lot until the last rode out," Teipen says. "It's not a rowdy demonstration. It's just the appearance and the noise that makes a statement."

The Rolling Thunder name comes from that sound. It has been likened to the bone-jarring roar of B-52s flying in carpet-bomb formation in Vietnam.

For the two veterans whose idea to get hundreds of people to ride to the memorial wall in 1988 as a way to call attention to Americans unaccounted for after Vietnam, the name seemed apropos. Twenty-five hundred riders and 5,000 marchers came to that first demonstration, and out of that, the non-profit, volunteer Rolling Thunder organization was born.

That first year the focus was on the more than 2,500 POW/MIAs in Vietnam. Since then, it has shifted to include POW/MIAs from all wars and has been expanded to helping all veterans.

Today, there are 78 Rolling Thunder chapters nationwide. Indiana's chapters are relatively young - Indianapolis was first, five years ago. South Bend was second; Fort Wayne, not yet two years old, was third; Greencastle, fourth; Muncie, fifth. A sixth chapter is forming in Columbus.

Nationally, Rolling Thunder members are seeking co-sponsors for H.R. 103, a bill introduced in Congress in February. It would establish a select committee on POW and MIA affairs to "conduct a full investigation of all unresolved matters relating to any United States personnel unaccounted for from the Vietnam era, the Korean conflict, World War II, Cold War missions or gulf war, including MIAs and POWs."

Tiepen says, while there have been U.S. government attempts to find remains of POWs and MIAs, Rolling Thunder members believe there still are live prisoners and that they have been abandoned.

He cites the 1991 examination of U.S. policy by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in which Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., reported that "despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the real, internal policy of the U.S. government was to act upon the presumption that all MIAs were dead." And that "any evidence that suggested an MIA might be alive was uniformly and arbitrarily rejected."

Such statements were fueled by the resignation at the same time of Col. Millard A. Peck, chief of the Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, who cited "high-level knavery," a "cover up" and "a mind-set to debunk" reports and sources as his reason for leaving.

Teipen believes it's time to reopen the hearings and says Rolling Thunder members are writing letters and making phone calls to their congressional representatives across the country in support of H.R. 103.

More than that, some members are taking action on their own. Teipen says Buzz Parish, the first president of Indiana Chapter 1, has been in Thailand for three or four years, along with Mark Smith, an ex-POW from Vietnam. There, they connect with others who are in that area for the same reason - to follow leads, track down suspected graves or wreckage sites and identify remains found.

According to the Indiana Chapter 1 Web site, Hoosiers still missing include 560 from World War II, 112 from the Korean War and 60 from Vietnam.

Rolling Thunder members and several veterans' organizations will honor them and all Hoosier veterans at the Indiana State Fair Sunday, where the Veterans Day theme will be "A Tribute to POW/MIAs." More than 700 ex-POWs in Indiana, as well as families of military serving in Iraq, have been invited to be honored guests.

About 200 of Rolling Thunder's Hoosier members are expected to ride in the 6 p.m. parade, following a day of activities. While it likely will reinforce the notion that Rolling Thunder is a bike club, members are grateful for the chance to get their message out to more Hoosiers that day.

"We feel a little swell of pride when attention is paid (to our cause)," Teipen says. "We are watching. We are a force on Capitol Hill."


Rolling Thunder events


In Indianapolis: Veterans Day at the Indiana State Fair; starting 9 a.m. Sunday; with 6 p.m. parade led by 200 Rolling Thunder riders.


In Fort Wayne: POW/MIA Remembrance Day; Sept. 13; Veterans' National Memorial Shrine, 2122 O'Day Road."