Sure. It was correct/necessary/humane/etx to treat U.S. pilots as POWs. But juridcally they weren't. The U.S. had not declared war on Vietnamj -- the bombing raids were no more valid than was 9/11. The U.S. wants to execute someone only marginally connected to that bombing. Incidentally, those raids included bombs deliberately set not to go off on landing. That is why a young Vietnamese woman my daughter met in Cuba was the only surviving member of a bomb disposal squad in Hanoi: unexploded bombs lying about the city, which would explode under unpredictable circumstances, made a nice terrorist weapon. She gave my daughter a pin, still around the house someplace, a DRV flag: the pin was made from the aluminum of a B-52 that had been shot down.
Carrol
"POW/MIA"
I. In the jungle of years,
lost voices are calling. Long
are the memories,
bitterly long the waiting,
and the names of the missing and dead
wander
disembodied
through a green tangle
of rumors and lies,
gliding like shadows among vines.
II. Somewhere, the rumors go,
men still live in jungle prisons.
Somewhere in Hanoi, the true believers
know,
the bodies of four hundred servicemen
lie on slabs of cold
communist hate.
III. Mothers, fathers,
wives and lovers,
sons and daughters,
touch your empty fingers to your lips
and rejoice
in your sacrifice and pain:
your loved ones' cause
was noble,
says the state.
IV. In March of 1985, the wreckage
of a plane was found in Laos.
Little remained of the dead:
rings, bone chips, burned
bits of leather and cloth;
for thirteen families,
twenty years of hope
and rumors
turned acid on the soul
by a single chance discovery.
V. Our enemies are legion,
says the state;
let bugles blare
and bang the drum slowly,
bang the drum.
VI. God forgive me, but I've seen
that triple-canopied green
nightmare of a jungle
where a man in a plane could go down
unseen, and never be found
by anyone.
Not ever.
There are facts,
and there are facts;
when the first missing man
walks alive out of that green tangle
of rumors and lies,
I shall lie
down silent as a jungle shadow,
and dream the sound of insects
gnawing bones.
W.D. Ehrhart