News-Info-Alerts

Re: POW - MIA Riders DC Bound

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 22, 2003

"POW, MIA effort D.C.- bound

By Sue Guinn Legg
Press Staff Writer


More than 75 motorcycles and dozens of support vehicles rumbled through the National Cemetery at Mountain Home Wednesday as participants in the annual Memorial Day Run for the Wall and Rolling Thunder Freedom Ride to Washington stopped to pay their respects.

Calling attention to the more than 92,000 American soldiers still unaccounted for in countries around the world, the 16-year-old Freedom Ride for the first time this year will include an assembly from the Tri-Cities area.

Following a wreath-laying ceremony in the cemetery and a picnic lunch on the hospital grounds, about 25 members of a newly formed local Rolling Thunder chapter put on their helmets and joined the convoy for the final 400-mile leg of the cross-country jaunt to the nation’s capital.

“The reason a lot of us are here is to remember and help heal the past, but we’re also here to ensure the future,” Scott Golden, Rolling Thunder’s state director, said, borrowing a few sentiments from Rolling Thunder’s mission statement.

Educating the public about American soldiers who have been left behind, the ongoing hurt endured by their families and the legislative efforts under way to protect future fighting men and women are Rolling Thunder’s stated goals.

“We can’t correct all the wrongs,” Golden said. But what Rolling Thunder can and does do is lobby Congress, help write new laws and keep up the fight to open intelligence records long ago closed by the government.

“We are very proud of the fact that last year there was a new law passed that gives (U.S.) asylum to anyone who provides information that helps bring a POW or MIA home from the Middle East,” he said.

Known as the “Bring Them Home Act” and also as the “Scott Speicher Law,” the measure honors the Navy pilot shot down in the 1991 Gulf War, who is the only American soldier still missing in the Middle East. The 2002 legislation is believed to have played a role in the recent rescue of 19-year-old POW Jessica Lynch.

But Rolling Thunder’s most visible demonstration of support for American POWs and MIAs is the annual Freedom Ride, which last year brought an estimated 600,000 people to the nation’s capital. “We ride for those who can’t,” Golden said of this week’s trek to Washington and the mass demonstration on The Mall planned for Sunday.

Joining members of the Knoxville, Chattanooga and Johnson City Rolling Thunder chapters in Wednesday’s stop at Mountain Home were about 80 Southern California residents who for the past 15 years have made their 3,000-mile Run for the (Vietnam War Memorial) Wall a part of Rolling Thunder’s Freedom Ride.

Stopping in cities along the way for Memorial Day weekend festivities hosted by supporters of MIA and POW issues is an important part of the ride, Kent Wilson, coordinator of this year’s Run for the Wall, said.

“We call them issues, but the fact is that we left men in Vietnam and other countries that have never been accounted for, and we want our government to get some answers from those countries on what happened to these men,” Wilson said. “That’s the issue. America needs to know what happened to her soldiers.”

“It’s not just POWs but POWs’ families that have not been treated fairly by our government,” Lou Mulsand, a POW activist and member of the Knoxville Rolling Thunder group, said.

Along with the more than 1,900 American soldiers unaccounted for in Vietnam, Mulsand said, there also are more than 1,900 families that have been “put on hold for 30 years.”

“There is no evidence (those soldiers) survived, but there is no evidence that they didn’t. We can’t just assume they are dead.”

(Contact Sue Guinn Legg at slegg@johnsoncitypress.com).


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