The following article has been contributed by Rick Downes, President of Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs. (Guest blog entries provide opportunities for people to share their thoughts and and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Congressman Charles Rangel.)
According to history, the Korean War armistice was agreed to in 1953 and the Cold War ended in 1989. While it is true that the shooting stopped in one and the Wall came down in the other, the two conflicts have continued for decades within the hearts and minds of the families of missing American servicemen. Even more meaningful, credible evidence indicates that it continued in captivity for an unknown number of Americans held after the armistice. More than 8000 missing American servicemen - brothers, uncles, fathers, now grandfathers - need to be accounted for from these two conflicts.
The quest to account for these missing American servicemen, along with the missing from Vietnam and World War II, is not a backward look toward lost opportunities. It is a current, vibrant, issue. The U.S. government’s umbrella budget for the accounting community as a whole reaches $100 million dollars annually. Research and recovery operations span the globe. Identification facilities are expanding. International policy and officials meeting at the highest levels are influenced by, and influence, the accounting effort.
On the other side of the coin, official documents holding vital information on missing men remain cloaked in mystery. The U.S. withholds search and recovery operations from North Korea. Identification goals project decades ahead, long after the people who care most will be gone. Live sighting reports haunt the families, as if the men themselves, ephemeral, walk among us.
Meanwhile, the wives, children, nieces and nephews of the missing men from the Korean and Cold Wars are aging, as are key witnesses in North Korea holding vital answers to so many of the men’s cases. The parents and most siblings of these men have already passed-on without learning the fate of their loved one.
In order to bring true meaning to POW/MIA Recognition Day, fulfill our promise to bring the missing men home, and find closure for their families, a number of things need to be done for the Korean and Cold Wars. Among them are:
* Develop a comprehensive protocol that requires all live-sighting debriefings be done by Americans, using polygraph testing, and exhaustive follow-up procedures.
* Return our search and recovery teams to North Korea, or at least outsource the eyewitness interviews to a third party nation having established relations with both North Korea and the U.S.
* Sharply increase the Defense Authorization Act’s mandated number of remains to be identified each year, spread the numbers over all conflicts, increase funding, and bring high level official involvement to resolve political blocks.
* Establish an unbiased review committee with declassification authority over all agencies.
The fates of thousands of missing men from all the wars are waiting to reveal themselves. Along with a day of recognition, a sense of urgency needs to be infused into the accounting effort, so that America can not only live up to its promise to account for these men but do so while the people who care most about them, hopefully even some of the men themselves, can find the closure they have sought for so long.
Rick Downes
President,
Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs
The Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs promotes the fullest possible accounting, in a timely manner, for American servicemen who remain missing from the Korean and Cold Wars.
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Thank you, Rick, for your powerful and eloquent essay.
Gary Zaetz
Nephew of USAAF 1st Lt. Irwin Zaetz, missing in action since January 25, 1944