Word: pow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Colonel Charles Shelton was the last official Vietnam War POW: the one missing American still designated as being alive by the Pentagon. Shot down during a reconnaissance mission over northern Laos on April 29, 1965, the 33- year-old pilot managed to parachute safely from his RF-101C jet and make radio contact with his home base after he hit the ground. But he was grabbed by Pathet Lao fighters and vanished. Unable to verify his fate, the Air Force listed Shelton as "known captured alive" for 29 years...
Even decades later, many families of Americans who might have been left behind in Southeast Asia when the war ended have never felt satisfied that the U.S. did everything it could to find them. As the last POW was symbolically buried, TIME was piecing together the tale of the one attempt the U.S. made after the war to rescue American prisoners. The bare outlines of that 1981 plan have appeared in occasional press stories over the years. The CIA still refuses to discuss the case. Pentagon officials today say the Defense Department never had reliable intelligence on whether Americans were...
...before the JSOC's Brigadier General Dick Scholtes would risk the lives of his troops, he insisted that Delta conduct its own reconnaissance to confirm that American POW's were really at Nhommarath. According to former CIA officials, the agency argued that it should carry out any ground reconnaissance since Americans would stand out in the Laotian jungle, and Washington needed to retain plausible deniability. CIA officials demanded that Laotians on their payroll carry out the mission. National Security Adviser Allen sided with the CIA after the officials assured him there would be at least one American accompanying the team...
...want to repeat the mistake made in the Desert One fiasco when senior Pentagon officials kept too many key officers in the dark. Tuttle says he was ordered by the Chiefs to expand the circle of officers informed about this operation. On March 18, members of the congressional POW task force were briefed on the Nhommarath sightings. The result was a flood of leaks to the press. Colonel Ronald Duchin, then head of the Pentagon's news division, says he had to persuade half a dozen news organizations to hold their stories until the operation was over...
...nation raised on television and movies are simply another illustration of the hypocrisy and duplicity of American society. How many times have we chuckled at the ravings of Ralph Kramden, who, raising his fist near his wife's head, sputters, "One of these days, Alice. One of these days -- POW -- right to the moon"? How much money was grossed from films with titles such as How to Murder Your Wife? Is it only now, when the violent nature of a national sports hero is publicly disclosed, that we pretend revulsion at an epidemic that once caused us to laugh hysterically...