A mission to bring back the missing
Bob Kerr
It is impossible to dismiss Bob Dumas if you sit down with him in his basement command center. It is impossible to dismiss the piles of documents he has collected. It is impossible to dismiss his personal odyssey through the halls of Congress and the teasing twists and turns of the news media.
Dumas has been on a mission for more than 50 years. And time after time, when it seems that he might be getting close to his goal, close to a truly national examination of a possible national disgrace, he is disappointed. Hearings are abruptly ended. Network television interest suddenly disappears.
Vin Russo and I drove over to Canterbury, Conn., a few weeks ago to visit Dumas. Russo, a retired Narragansett Electric worker who lives in Providence, is, like Dumas, a veteran of the Korean War. And, like Dumas, he firmly believes that American prisoners of war were left behind when the war ended.
The two men have covered some ground together in search of the elusive straight answer and a full and open accounting of our prisoners of war.
Most people donÕt think much about the things that keep Dumas and Russo going.
Heck, most people donÕt think much about the war weÕre in now, so to get some real public interest in men who fought their war decades ago is a hard and often lonely piece of work. The possibility of old men showing up to tell of years of abandonment by their country would be so untidy, so politically embarrassing and so out of step with the cherished ideal of never leaving our own behind. So those who push the cause of those old men get marginalized. When their hopes are raised, they are inevitably brought back down.
ÒWhat keeps me going is my brother and my mother,Ó says Dumas.
His brother, Roger Dumas, was one of four Dumas brothers to serve in Korea. He was captured. Former prisoners who were with him have told Bob Dumas that on the day they were released, Roger Dumas was taken away.
Bob Dumas promised his mother just before she died that he would find her youngest son if it took the rest of his life. That was more than 50 years ago. He is still at it. Last Thursday, he was on his way to see his congressman.
He has testified before Congress. He has met with North Koreans. He has been agonizingly close to a breakthrough, to actually arranging for people to go to North Korea to investigate. But it never happens.
He has a collection of reported sitings, including those provided by North Korean defectors. He refers to the testimony of Col. Millard Peck, who quit as chief of the Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. Peck called the entire effort a charade and said he saw firsthand how the Òpolicy peopleÓ are ready and willing to sacrifice or abandon those who might be political liabilities.
Dumas says he has twice been contacted by CBS News, twice heard encouraging words that his was a story that needed to be told. But he heard no more. A similar thing happened with the Larry King show on CNN, he said.
Probably all of us have seen the black POW/MIA flag flying from a public building or from the home of a veteran. Behind that flag is the belief that not all prisoners of war are accounted for.
And it is not just the Korean War. Vietnam veterans make their own case, pointing out, among other things, the now infamous quote from former Russian President Boris Yeltsin that American prisoners from Vietnam were held in Russia. U.S. officials said he misspoke.
There is simply too much evidence, and too many instances of government interference, to dismiss the commitment of Dumas and Russo and others as some kind of old guy refusal to give it up.
ÒTheyÕre fine when it comes to finding the remains of people,Ó says Dumas. ÒBut they donÕt want to talk about the live guys.Ó
When we talked at his home in Connecticut, he was feeling a little bit positive again. He was talking about the rally to mark POW/MIA Recognition Day in Chicago on Sept.15. It was going to be big, he said. It was going to focus national attention on the issue. Presidential candidates were going to be invited to state their positions.
The rally is off. Dumas says one of the organizers was taking fundraising money and using it for other things.
It has been rescheduled to September 2008 in Washington, D.C.