MISSOURI COMMENTARY: EVERLASTING RESIDUE OF DREADFUL WAR

There are myths and there are myths. There are myths that go out of style with the passage of time. There are myths that take on a life of their own and never quit. POWs/MIAs in North Vietnam is one of those that won't quit. There are many Americans who believe or want to believe that Americans remain alive in captivity in North Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia.

President Richard Nixon stated categorically on March 27, 1973, that "all of our American POWs are on the way home." That did not end the myth. It simply fueled it.

One of the founding mythmakers was conservative Congressman Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi. He was chairman of the House Veterans Committee. He was convinced that American servicemen had been left behind. He lobbied long and hard that a special committee be created to look into the POW/MIA matter and that he be the committee chairman.

In 1976, after a 15-month investigation, with access to every case file and to classified information, and after reviewing five volumes of testimony, Montgomery issued his final report. "No Americans are still being held alive as prisoners in Indochina or elsewhere. ... Because of the nature and circumstances in which many Americans were lost in combat in Indochina, a total accounting by the Indochinese government is not possible and should not be expected. ... Based more on hope than on fact and more on rumors than hard evidence, like so many others I wanted to believe they were alive, so I did so erroneously believe."

Later on, President Reagan, as he left office, issued his report. Millions of captured documents were examined. Thousands of people has been interviewed and debriefed. All forms of electronic monitoring were utilized. Reagan's conclusion: "We have yet to find conclusive evidence of the existence of live prisoners. American POW returnees in 1973 knew of no Americans who were left behind in captivity."

But nothing would deter the notion that Americans were still being held. In fact, the myth-belief factor often increased as in 1992 when a photograph appeared purporting to show three identifiable POWs who had been shot down over Vietnam and Laos between 1966 and 1970. After the picture appeared on the front pages of hundreds of American newspapers, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that 69 percent of the American people believed that POWs were still being held in Vietnam. The photograph was later shown to be a certifiable fake produced by scam artists seeking to bilk more funds out of the POW/MIA families.

Perhaps most perplexing of all is to figure out any motive the Vietnamese might have to hold back Americans as prisoners and to deny their existence for twenty years or more.

Three theories persist:

* Slave laborers. Bear in mind that even the most zealous of the held-back prisoner advocates talk in terms of dozens, not thousands. In a country like Vietnam where unemployment is extreme, it's hard to believe that a few dozen POW slave laborers would have much of an impact on output. Charlton Heston, a true believer, thinks to the contrary in his narration of an emotional film: "Starved and clad only in filthy rags, American soldiers and airmen are kept chained in tiny bamboo cages ... made to work like animals pulling heavy plows ... forced to toil from daybreak to nightfall in steaming tropical heat."

* Bargaining chips. How does Vietnam bargain with chips they swear do not exist?

* Asians are inherently cruel, and Asian communists are cruel for cruelty's sake. This theory holds that it isn't for the United States to divine a rational reason. The prisoners are there. Believe it. Take it on faith. Reason about it later.

A new book has hit the bookstalls co-authored by Malcolm McConnell and Theodore Schweitzer. The latter is described as a librarian-adventurer with "tales of derring-do." He has purportedly looked into secret Vietnamese archives in Hanoi. Schweitzer quotes a Vietnamese colonel as admitting that "our darkest secret is that we killed many Americans prisoners in cold blood."

Schweitzer also concludes that Americans were not knowingly left behind, that there are no living American POWs, and that American prisoners were never turned over to the Russians, as had once been conjectured.

As our government inches toward a full diplomatic recognition of Vietnam, the POW/MIA mystique continues. For some there was always the belief, as expressed by Charlton Heston, of American soldiers and airmen still "chained in tiny bamboo cages." The psychological residue of a dreadful war is everlasting.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.