POW-MIA DAY BRINGS SOLUMN THOUGHTS TO MIND

Twenty-five years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Cape Girardeau Dr. Robert Sacha still wears a prisoner of war-missing in action bracelet.

The name on Sacha's bracelet is Maj. Robert Miller, an Air Force pilot captured in Laos 30 years ago, on Aug. 28, 1968.

The bracelet was purchased more than 10 years ago by Sacha's son, Brian. The Sacha family had taken a trip to Washington and visited the Vietnam War Memorial where his son bought the bracelet.

When his son died of cancer in 1991, Sacha began wearing the bracelet, and he has since. "It has become part of me," he said.

But the bracelet has a double meaning for Sacha, the second meaning reminding him of the sacrifices of prisoners of war and those soldiers reported missing in action.

Sacha spent eight years in the Air Force, from 1975 to 1983, as well as time in the reserves. The bracelet is a reminder to him of those who served and lost their lives for their country.

The bracelet had added significance Friday, a day set aside and designated as "National POW-MIA Recognition Day." In Cape Girardeau Mayor Al Spradling III signed a proclamation recognizing the day.

Special ceremonies were held at the Missouri Veterans' Home in Cape Girardeau Friday morning to honor former POWs and those who are listed as missing.

The recognition day was first observed in 1979 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when recognition of POWs and MIAs first came to national prominence.

But there have been POWs and MIAs in every war. From World War I through the Gulf War, more than 142,000 Americans were captured and held prisoners.

"For whatever reason, we ignore the fact that in every war there have always been a huge number of soldiers unaccounted for at the end of the war," said Cape Girardeau County assistant prosecuting attorney Ian Sutherland.

Sutherland served almost four years in Vietnam on three tours of duty as a major in the Air Force. He worked with special forces, covert operations and the CIA trying to locate POWs and rescue them from captivity.

"There was no question about our attempt to rescue them," he said. "We owed it to them to try to recover them."

Yet, despite their numerous attempts to rescue prisoners during the war, the military was not successful at getting POWs out.

"Everything was sacrificed and we failed," Sutherland said.

He said there were several reasons the job of rescuing the POWs was an insurmountable task, the first and foremost being faulty information about where the prisoners were being held.

He compared it to trying to find a few people hidden in Mark Twain National Forest and using primitive, uneducated people as guides.

Most informants were illiterate and could not read maps, thus making it difficult for them to tell the soldiers where the POWs were being held. They had difficulty communicating with the soldiers even when working through interpreters.

"Even when we thought the information was solid, it could turn out to be false," Sutherland said.

In 1966, Sutherland worked with a unit that had made a deal to transfer $1 million in gold to an account in Switzerland in exchange for two American POWs. But as the day for the exchange approached, the American's Viet Cong contact "faded away," in Sutherland's words, and the exchange was never made.

There were also physical difficulties in getting the prisoners out.

Most of the prison camps were in isolated jungle areas where there was no contact with the outside. Finding the camps was rarely easy, and by the time the Americans got there, the North Vietnamese were usually gone.

On one occasion, they arrived at a camp only to find it deserted. But the remains of fires in the camp were still warm. The guards and prisoners had disappeared into the jungle shortly before Sutherland's unit arrived.

Unlike the popular conception, most POWs were not held in large groups but in small camps holding no more than five prisoners and guarded by 25 to 30 soldiers. Sometimes there would be only one prisoner in the camp.

But most insurmountable was the lack of commitment to the rescue on the part of those in the higher levels of the military, Sutherland said.

There was, he said, commitment to the task at the ground level, but often just lip service at the upper levels.

"All of us were prepared to die trying to rescue them," he said.

Yet, though the upper levels of the military said it was a high priority, they did not provide the support when it was most needed, Sutherland said.

In 1970 to 1971, when the POWs were valuable to the North Vietnamese in the peace negotiations, military intelligence believed that the north had moved the prisoners to the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. There had been sightings of many American POWs in those countries.

"We were ready to go in, knowing that it would be tough and that there would be many casualties, but we never received the approval," Sutherland said.

Sutherland doesn't believe that the government was involved in any conspiracy to keep from rescuing the prisoners. Nor does he believe that any POWs are still alive in Vietnam.

Some 502 missing Americans have been identified since the end of the Vietnam War, but an additional 2,081 still remain unaccounted for.

"If they were living in the horrendous conditions that they lived through when the war was going on, they would not have survived for 25 years or better," he said.

Sacha agreed with Sutherland, doubting that any were still alive, but he added that there was still reason to recognize POWs and MIAs even if those who are missing remain unaccounted for.

"We've never had closure on Vietnam," Sacha said. "They served in an unpopular war, but they were still heroes."