News-Info-Alerts

Re: Remembering Those Who Never Returned

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 26, 2003

"Remembering those who never returned

By Hallie Arnold, Freeman staff May 26, 2003

For about 10 years, everywhere Kerry Crozier of Phoenicia went he took Maj. Samuel K. Toomey with him. Rick Olund of Ulster Park carries Navy Lt. Barton S. Creed with him every day and has for about a decade.
These two men, both members of Ulster County Chapter 60 of the Vietnam Veterans of America, are among untold numbers of men and women who wear simple bands of steel or aluminum engraved with the name, rank, branch of service, home state, date and country of capture or disappearance of one of the nearly 2,000 American service members who never returned from Asia after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

"It's a small protest in its own way," Crozier says of the POW/MIA bracelets. "The government wanted to forget them."

According to the National League of POW/MIA Families in Arlington, Va., there are 1,885 American service members unaccounted for in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Since the war, 698 have been recovered, mostly in the form of remains. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, 88,123 prisoners of war or missing in action are unaccounted for from World War II to the present.

Those still missing are "presumed dead" by the American government, but not by those who hold out hope for their return home.

"I believe there's still missing alive POWs out there," said Fred Johnson, vice president of the local Vietnam Veterans of America chapter.

Traditionally, Memorial Day is a time to remember those men and women who gave their lives in military service. These Vietnam-era vets include much more in their remembrance of their military comrades.

They remember those who never came home, long ago assumed dead by their government and their families. They remember the men and women now dying from Agent Orange-related diseases, from alcoholism and drug addiction, and from depression. They remember those soldiers who won't even acknowledge they were in Vietnam, which still carries a stigma some 30 years later.

Wearing the POW/MIA bracelets is one way they remember.

Olund, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Ulster County Chapter 60, ordered his about 10 years ago, he said, requesting only that his POW/MIA be from the Navy, in which Olund served during the Vietnam War. Like many bracelet wearers, he checked on the Internet to find out more about Creed, a Navy pilot who ejected from his aircraft after being shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Coincidentally, Creed was from nearby Peekskill in Westchester County originally and went down on Olund's birthday in 1971. "It's so scratched I can barely make it out," he says of his POW/MIA bracelet. "But I have it etched in my mind now."

Crozier has had four POW/MIA bracelets since the war. Each of the men represented on his wrist over the past 30 years have been recovered. Maj. Toomey's bracelet lasted the longest, until his remains were found at the site in Laos where his helicopter had crashed in 1968, identified and buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1990.

The POW/MIA bracelet program was launched on Veterans Day in 1970, the brainchild of two Los Angeles college students who were looking for ways young people could support the soldiers overseas without getting involved in the controversy surrounding the war. The program was later expanded to include all POW/MIAs, not just those from Vietnam.

Tradition holds that the bearer of a POW/MIA bracelet wear it until the missing person or their remains are returned to their families. "Generally, when you find out that a person has come back, you're supposed to straighten them out and sent them to the families. The circle is kind of finished once they've been found," Crozier said. "But it's kind of hard to find some of the families."

Many of the bracelets are left at memorials, particularly at what veterans call simply The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of these bracelets have been left at The Wall over the years. Every day, National Park Service staffers gather up objects left there, which are held in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution.

"It may have raised consciousness," Olund said. "The families of any soldiers who are victims, they want to find them."

For more information on POW/MIA issues, visit the National League of POW/MIA Families Web site at www.pow-miafamilies.org, or the POW Network Web site at www.pownetwork.org.

©Daily Freeman 2003 "