The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue concerns the fate of United States servicemen who were reported as Prisoners of war (POW) or missing in action (MIA) during the Vietnam War and associated theaters of operation in Southeast Asia. As of 2026, operations by the U.S. Government to account for servicemen missing in action during the Vietnam War are still ongoing by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, 2,646 American Service members were listed as missing in action. As of 2026, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the remains of 1,067 Americans have been identified and returned to families for burial with U.S. military honors. While 1,566 Americans are still considered by the DPAA to be unaccounted for, a significant portion thereof are presumed dead and their remains "non-recoverable."
Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, 591 U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) were returned during Operation Homecoming. Many of those missing were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos. Investigations of these incidents have involved determining whether the men involved survived being shot down; if they did not, the U.S. government made efforts to recover their remains. Progress in resolving these cases was slow until the mid-1980s, when relations between the United States and Vietnam began to improve and more cooperative efforts were undertaken. Normalization of the U.S. relations with Vietnam in the mid-1990s was a culmination of this process.
Considerable speculation and investigation have been devoted to a hypothesis that a significant number of missing U.S. service members from the Vietnam War were captured as prisoners of war by communist forces and kept as live prisoners after U.S. involvement in the war concluded in 1973. A vocal group of POW/MIA activists has maintained that there has been a concerted conspiracy by the Vietnamese and U.S. governments since then to hide the existence of these prisoners. The U.S. government has steadfastly denied that prisoners were left behind or that any effort has been made to cover up their existence. Popular culture has reflected the "live prisoners" theory, such as in the 1985 film Rambo: First Blood Part II. Several congressional investigations have looked into the issue, culminating with the largest and most thorough, the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs of 1991–1993, which found "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."
Origins
The origins of the POW/MIA issue date back to the war itself. Suffering from a lack of accurate intelligence sources inside North Vietnam, the United States never had solid knowledge of how many U.S. prisoners of war were held. pp. 32–33. Indeed, the United States often relied upon possibly inaccurate North Vietnamese newspapers and radio broadcasts to find out who had been captured, as well as memorized lists of names brought out by the few U.S. POWs given early release. As the Department of Defense built up lists of those in the categories of killed in action, killed in action/body not recovered, prisoner of war and missing in action, its tentative numbers fluctuated, but most of the time, the number of expected returnees upon war's end was around 600.McConnell and Schweitzer, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, p. 31. However, the Nixon administration had made return of the POWs one of its central arguments to the American public for prolonging the war and bringing North Vietnam to terms. In doing so, the administration overstated the number of POWs at issue, at one point stating that there were "fifteen hundred American servicemen" held throughout Southeast Asia. These higher numbers would be the focus of much of the controversy over the issue in the years to come.
Following the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, U.S. prisoners of war were returned during Operation Homecoming from February through April 1973. During this, 591 POWs were released to U.S. authorities; this included a few captured in Laos and released in North Vietnam. U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that all U.S. servicemen taken prisoner had been accounted for. At that time, the United States listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for, including about 1,350 prisoners of war or missing in action and roughly 1,200 reported killed in action and body not recovered. The low numbers of returnees from Laos caused some immediate concern, as previous Pentagon estimates were as high as 41 for prisoners held there, although only a few had been known to be captured for certain.McConnell and Schweitzer, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, p. 42. By late 1973, the remains of over 700 Americans killed in Southeast Asia had been returned and identified.Personnel Recovery and Accounting: POW/MIA Accounting. Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, 2004. Accessed November 2019
Investigation of the fate of all the missing service personnel would end up residing with the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command also played a major role in subsequent investigations. In 1973, the Defense Department established the Central Identification Laboratory–Thailand to coordinate POW/MIA recovery efforts in Southeast Asia.
The United States conducted some limited operations in South Vietnam in 1974 to find the remains of those missing, and according to the Paris Accords, the North Vietnamese returned some remains too. These efforts halted following the collapse of the Accords and the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, and over the next ten years, little progress was made in recovering remains.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the friends and relatives of unaccounted-for U.S. personnel became politically active, requesting the United States government reveal what steps were taken to follow up on intelligence regarding last-known-alive MIAs and POWs. When initial inquiries revealed important information had not been pursued, many families and their supporters asked for the public release of POW/MIA records and called for an investigation.
U.S. Private First Class Robert R. Garwood is often cited as the last U.S. POW from the Vietnam War. In 1979, Garwood reemerged, claiming he and other POWs had remained imprisoned after the war. In a court-martial shortly after his return, he was found not guilty of desertion, solicitation of U.S. troops in the field to refuse to fight and to defect, and maltreatment. However, he was convicted on February 5, 1981, of communicating with the enemy and of the assault on a U.S. prisoner of war interned in a POW camp. Later independent investigations found no substantial evidence to support Garwood's claims and a Department of Defense investigation published in 1993 concluded Garwood was a collaborator with the enemy. A subsequent 1993 investigation conducted directly by Senator Bob Smith claimed to have found the building where Garwood was imprisoned, but the building's connection to Garwood is disputed.
POW/MIA activist organizations
The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was created by Sybil Stockdale, Evelyn Grubb and Mary Crowe as an originally small group of POW/MIA wives in Coronado, California, and Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1967. Sybil Stockdale's husband, Navy Commander James Stockdale, was shot down in 1965 and she was determined to make the American people aware of the mistreatment of U.S. POWs. This publicity resulted in better treatment of U.S. POWs from fall 1969 on.
After the war, the National League of Families became the leading group requesting information about those still listed as missing in action. It was led by Ann Mills Griffiths. Its stated mission was and is "to obtain the release of all prisoners, the fullest possible accounting for the missing and repatriation of all recoverable remains of those who died serving our nation during the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia." The League's most prominent symbol is its POW/MIA flag. Newt Heisley designed this flag to represent America's missing men. This group was more established, less radical, and more connected to the government.McConnell and Schweitzer, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, p. 390.
The National Alliance of Families For the Return of America's Missing Servicemen was founded in 1990. Its goal was and is to resolve the fates of any unreturned U.S. prisoners of war or missing in action from World War II on forward, not just Southeast Asia, and to gain the return of any live prisoners. It is a 1980s-origined splinter from the National League of Families, p. 52. created by members who were dissatisfied with Ann Mills Griffiths' leadership. Compared to the older group, the National Alliance took a more activist, radical stance, especially towards belief in the existence of live prisoners in Southeast Asia.
The chair and co-founder of the group is Dolores Apodaca Alfond, whose brother Major Victor Joe Apodaca, Jr. was shot down in 1967 during the Vietnam War. The group was visible during the Kerry Committee hearings of the early 1990s, but disagreed with the committee's findings that there was no compelling evidence of any live prisoners in Southeast Asia.
Businessman and POW/MIA advocate Ross Perot, who had done much to help POW families during the war, p. 97. was also very active on this issue.
Recovery and "rescue" From the perspective of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's history of the issue, by the late 1980s, the United States and Vietnam increased the frequency of high-level policy and technical meetings to help resolve the POW/MIA matter. The Vietnamese began allowing U.S. government search parties to operate within the country. The Laotian government also agreed to joint crash-site excavations in the late 1980s. In Cambodia, similar joint efforts began in the early 1990s. By 1992, major joint field operations were taking place in all three countries, operations that would carry on for years to come.
Several individuals were not satisfied with or did not trust U.S. government actions in this area and took their own initiative. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jack E. Bailey created Operation Rescue, which featured a former freighter and smuggling boat named the S.S. Akuna and solicited funds from POW/MIA groups.McConnell and Schweitzer, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, pp. 170–172, 418n10. While Bailey did pick up some Vietnamese refugees, he never produced any prisoners and the boat spent years never leaving its dock in Songkhla in Thailand. The effort did, however, prove adept at bringing in money through the Virginia-based Eberle Associates direct mail marketing firm. p. 123. It was later revealed that Bailey had exaggerated his military record, claiming he had been a pilot flying combat missions when he had been a ground support officer and giving himself decorations he did not have. Financial reports indicated that Operation Rescue spent 89 percent of the funds it raised on further fundraising.
In the 1980s, former United States Army Special Forces member Bo Gritz conducted a series of private missions in Southeast Asia, purportedly to locate U.S. POWs that some believed were still being held in Laos and Vietnam, including at locations such as Nhommarath. These missions were highly publicized and controversial—some critics noted that successful secret operations typically do not involve bringing women to border towns to openly sell commemorative POW-rescue T-shirts.Keating, Prisoners of Hope, pp. 131–142.