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Book Selections:

The Vietnam War: POW-MIA Issue

Thank you for visiting my Home Page Bookstore.  If you have not visited my MIA Fact Pages, click here to do so.   I recommend you look at the MIA Fact Pages as well as some of the items linked to that page to better understand the environment in which I recommend these books, which address various aspects of the Vietnam War MIA issue.  Each of these books is available for purchase online from Amazon.com.  To see my comments on each book, click on the book title below.  Once you have read my comments, you will be able to click on a link to Amazon.com that will enable you to order that book.  You are not obligated in any way to Amazon.com by reading my comments or by following any links from this page.
 

• M. I. A.:  Accounting for the Missing in Southeast Asia.  By Paul D. Mather.

• Prisoners of Hope:  Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America.  By Susan Katz Keating.
• M.  I. A.:  Mythmaking in America.  By H. Bruce Franklin.

• Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives:  Solving the MIA Mystery.  By Malcolm McConnell.

There is another book that should be read by anyone who wants more background on how the Vietnam MIA issue took on the political stature it now has.  The Missing Man:  Politics and the MIA, by CAPT Douglas C. Clarke, U. S. Navy.   Clarke points out, among other things, how the process of declaring a man missing, then presumed dead, is weighted in favor of a determination of missing.  As a squadron commander in combat, Clarke was subject to the natural, human pressures to continue a man in missing status when, according to all evidence, the man died in his loss incident.  Why?  To keep the paycheck going to his wife and children, who often are personal friends of the men in  the squadron.

The book was published by the US Government Printing Office.  As best I can determine, it is no longer available.  I have seen it in a couple of  military and university libraries.  Look for it.  It is informative.  The book also documents how missing men from the Vietnam  War were parlayed into a political issue by a group of Southern California Republican loyalists who gained the attention of a California gubernatorial candidate -- Ronald Reagan.   If anyone finds a copy of this book, I would like to have it for my collection.  A photocopied version is fine.  E-mail me at:  joe@schlatter.org.  Thanks.

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