Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam
Monika Jensen-Stevenson
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: B00NS42GHK
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For many Americans, the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan bring back painful memories of one issue in particular: American policy on the rescue of and negotiation for American prisoners. One current American POW of the Taliban, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, stands as their symbol. Thousands of Vietnam veteran POW activists worry that Bergdahl will suffer the fate of so many of their POW/MIA comrades—abandonment once the US leaves that theater of war.
Kiss the Boys Goodbye convincingly shows that a legacy of shame remains from America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam. Until US government policy on POW/MIAs changes, it remains one of the most crucial issues for any American soldier who fights for home and country, particularly when we are engaged with an enemy that doesn’t adhere to the international standards for the treatment of prisoners—or any American hostage—as the graphic video of Daniel Pearl’s decapitation on various Jihad websites bears out.
In this explosive book, Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson provide startling evidence that American troops were left in captivity in Indochina, victims of their government’s abuse of secrecy and power. The book not only delves into the world of official obstruction, missing files, censored testimony, and the pressures brought to bear on witnesses ready to tell the truth, but also reveals the trauma on patriotic families torn apart by a policy that, at first, seemed unbelievable to them.
First published in 1990, Kiss the Boys Goodbye has become a classic on the subject. This new edition features an afterword, which fills in the news on the latest verifiable scandal produced by the Senate Select Committee on POWs.
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staffers you would expect to be interested in memorials. Perot swept aside any talk about books. “Mr. President, I want you to get this straight from me. You’ve gone back on your word.” That got Reagan’s attention. Carlucci interrupted to say that Mr. Perot had just been to Hanoi. It was as if the President had never known about Perot’s prolonged efforts to get presidential support for his journey. Perot went along with the pretense anyway, and quickly ran over the few simple requests made by
by Rama IX how to cultivate new crops of exotic fruits and temperate-zone vegetables for foreign markets at far greater profit than the pittance they were paid by the drug traffickers. But still operating from Thai soil were the advocates of covert war against Communism. Their activities had literally paved the road for Khun Sa from the Golden Triangle to Bangkok’s middlemen in the drug trade, when it was built as a “strategic highway.” The Thai Office of Narcotic Control was in 1990 still
on POW/MIAs remains classified. The secrecy that cloaks the issue has led many people to conclude that there are some in the government who don’t want the truth to come out. The natural question that arises is “Why?” There are undoubtedly many reasons behind the reluctance of officials to look seriously at the allegations of those most directly involved in the issue. Some of those responsible have been caught up in bureaucratic inertia, some have acted on directives that they thought were legal
Hand, and also with free-booting CIA agent Ed Wilson, who was later jailed for selling plastic explosives to Muammar Qaddaffi. Wilson implicated high-level officials in the Pentagon and CIA, claiming they were partners in deals carried out by one of his companies, Egyptian American Transport & Services Co. . . . EATSCO reaped millions of dollars in secret overseas deals. The office of the Defense Department’s Inspector General established that EATSCO skimmed some $8 million in unearned profits
enterprise were ordered by the CIA. The former small-town businessman had been urged, he insisted, to spend money on a lavish scale and to establish himself on the world stage as a financial wizard. Among his clients, as a result of this masquerade, were some of the world’s wealthiest anti-Communists, eager to find a way to funnel money into worthy covert enterprises. One was the Sultan of Brunei, worth some $25 billion. “There’s no doubt BBRDW had been a CIA enterprise,” said Taylor. The BBC