Tim O'Brien's experience & background make a striking contrast with the primary POW myth-makers':
***** The "Go Public" Campaign
The Nixon administration's "go public" campaign, designed explicitly to "marshal public opinion" for "the prompt release of all American prisoners of war," was initiated on March 1, 1969, and officially launched on May 19 in a press conference held by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird.[22] It was immediately and enthusiastically promoted by the media, which, in the relatively restrained language of _The New York Times_ editorial staff, denounced "the Communist side" as "inhuman," asserted that "at least half of the 1,300 Americans missing in action in Vietnam are believed to be alive," and insisted that "the prisoner-of-war question is a humanitarian, not a political issue."[23
By the fall, the POW/MIA campaign was already receiving media attention and exerting political influence far out of proportion to its small number of participants, especially in comparison with the millions taking part in the anti-war movement. The campaign was promoted by a medley of astute publicity schemes staged by the Nixon White House, POW family organizations, Congress, and Texas multimillionaire H. Ross Perot (a director of the Richard M. Nixon Foundation).
...On November 6, Congress unanimously passed and President Nixon signed a bill declaring November 9 a National Day of Prayer for U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Right on schedule, United We Stand, an organization formed and chaired by H. Ross Perot, on November 9 ran full-page advertisements featuring the picture of two small children praying "Bring our Daddy home safe, sound and soon."...
During the campaign's formative first few months in 1969, Richard G. Capen, Laird's assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and other officials from the State and Defense departments had visited forty-five sites to conduct unpublicized meetings with families of the missing men, thus shrewdly building foundations among those who could most readily win heartfelt support from the American people. "We brought them together for the first time," Capen later boasted of this whirlwind national trip to organize the families.[26]
The most productive meeting was arranged at the Coronado Naval Officers' Club near San Diego, where on March 26 the State and Defense departments' representatives conferred with selected wives from the Los Angeles area and a San Diego area group of wives organized by Sybil Stockdale, whose husband was the highest ranking naval officer imprisoned in Vietnam and who herself had been working closely with Naval Intelligence since May 1966.[27] By June, Stockdale had made herself the national coordinator of an organization she christened the National League of Families of American Prisoners in Southeast Asia, linking groups of POW wives from several parts of the country.[28] The following month she and several other selected POW family members huddled with Secretary of Defense Laird, and in December she and four other POW wives met with President Nixon, who pledged in their joint press conference that "this Government will do everything that it possibly can to separate out the prisoner issue and have it handled as it should be, as a separate issue on a humane basis" [by this Nixon meant that the U.S. government made a demand on the Vietnamese that they release all American prisoners & account for MIAs _before_ the USA committed itself to ending the war -- a demand unprecedented in the history of war].[29]
In the spring of 1970, Sybil Stockdale received a phone call from Republican Senator Robert Dole, who asked whether she could "deliver 1,000 family members" to a POW/MIA "extravaganza" he was planning for May 1 in Constitution Hall if he were to arrange government transportation for them. Dole pledged to orchestrate political support, putting Vice President Spiro Agnew and a bipartisan lineup of senators and representatives on the stage, and having Democratic Representative Clement Zablocki turn his Subcommittee on National Security Policy into a publicity forum just prior to the event.[30] Dole, Stockdale, and Perot collaborated in organizing the festivities, aided by a host of senators and representatives including such prominent Democrats as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senator Edmund Muskie.[31]...
From then until now, the National League of Families would play changing but always crucial roles in the dramatization and evolution of the POW/MIA issue. Almost all its principal organizers and activists were wives or parents of career officers, not draftees, mainly because the vast majority of missing and captured men were flight officers, and the politics of the organization were dominated by their outlook, especially during the war....
(endnotes omitted, H. Bruce Franklin, _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America_, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992, pp. 49-53) *****
Yoshie