Keeping the Promise: The Story of MIA Jerry Elliott, a Family Shattered by His Disappearance, and a Sister's 40-Year Search for the Truth

by Elliott Donna E.

  The following day Nixon sent another message to Dong, “U.S. records show there are three hundred seventeen American military men unaccounted for in Laos and it is inconceivable that only ten of these men would be held prisoner in Laos.” Regardless, the exchange of prisoners went forward until Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, froze U.S. troop withdrawal unless Hanoi returned all of the POWs as agreed upon in the Peace Treaty. The next day President Nixon withdrew the order.

  Unaware of either of the President’s communications to Dong, within sixty days the U.S. Senate voted eighty-eight to three against any aid to North Vietnam. Congress realized that “reconstruction” actually meant reparations, or amends, and Americans would never compensate for war when no misdeed was evident. Conceivably, had Congress known the North Vietnamese still held hundreds of live American POWs as human collateral, prisoners for money, a majority might have voted to demand their release.

  Although the USG issued a press statement claiming there were no more Americans alive in Southeast Asia, Nixon, Kissinger, and DoD knew from intelligence data this was not true. Intelligence analysts and their superiors were also fully aware hundreds of men did not return. According to a March 1973 DoD message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. to Camp Smith, Hawaii, DoD had prepared for the release of thousands of POWs. Arrangements included transportation and hospital assignments for POW/MIAs on covert missions not factored into official casualty figures during the entire war.

  Incremental releases totaling 5,300 POWs were to begin with four-hundred POWs on March 25; followed by five-hundred on March 26; 1,900 on March 27; and 2,500 POWs returned on the following day, March 28. DoD reported the North Vietnamese repatriated five hundred ninety-one POWs, to include twenty-five American civilians, and fifty-two returnees carried in an MIA status prior to Homecoming. Five thousand three hundred POWs corresponds to July 1971 USSR documents released in 1992 that discuss a proposal by M. V. Zakharov to transport five thousand people from Hanoi via Moscow to Paris by chartered Russian Aeroflot flights at the request of Knoblokh, director of “Osstturist,” an East German tourist firm. Aeroflot representatives in Paris concluded the topic of discussion was the transfer of American POW’s, and believed the DRV and USA were in the process of, or had already, agreed to free them.

  When officials signed the cease-fire agreement, five hundred twenty-eight Americans were on the POW/MIA list in North Vietnamese controlled Laos. There were at least three hundred reports and photographs of American prisoners held in prison camps and caves throughout northern Laos. Of these, ninety-seven sighting reports were from the CIA. Only nine POWs captured in Laos, held separately in Hanoi, and never integrated into the regular POW system, returned during Operation Homecoming. According to a DoD message declassified in August 1992, the North Vietnamese held in reserve eighty-nine percent of the American POWs who were alive after March 28, 1973.

  Defense Secretary James Schlesinger would later defend the government’s action with this statement, “One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States...was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roll the waters...”

  Accountability for the POW/MIAs became a numbers game. In his quest for exact statistics, Sedgwick Tourison, investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, would later remark in an interoffice memorandum, “There is no single and reliable U.S. government record of all Americans who may have been captured during the war in Southeast Asia.”

  The POW/MIA families now had a new battle to fight. With the announcement of no American POWs left behind, North Vietnamese officials would not openly divulge they held prisoners back. At a minimum, if Hanoi publically backtracked to admit they held U.S. POWs, and gained nothing in return, in the eyes of their people their actions would be considered illogical. Besides worldwide criticism, the DRV would risk loss of face. To lose face is an Asian social concept that translates into loss of prestige, power, influence, and authority.

  In May 1973, the North Vietnamese asked Colonel (COL) Bernie Russell, head of the Four Party Joint Military Team, if the U.S. had taken any action to provide aid to Vietnam. The answer was, “No.” A simple response, yet one that virtually ended North Vietnamese cooperation on the MIA issue.

  Brigadier General Robert C. Kingston, Commander of the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Thailand, told the Associated Press there was no indication that any Americans listed as missing-in-action were still alive. Actually, there were two hundred four Category 1 POWs when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975. Category 1 Confirmed Knowledge means the enemy identified the POW by name; trustworthy sources made a positive identification; highly reliable intelligence sources made a report; or identification analysis of all-source intelligence.

  Regardless, Nixon and Kissinger considered their deceitful treatment of the POW/MIA issue as damage control. They wanted the nation to celebrate the end of the war and forget the POW/MIAs. Official USG policy had gone from the pledge of a full accounting to the broad presumption all remaining POW/MIAs were dead. This bold move staggered the trust of the families and veterans. The majority of Americans quietly accepted this bitter news, which signified a psychological end to a very unpopular war. Foreign policy and world opinion quickly became more important than our missing soldiers.

  With this new political policy firmly in place, the USG no longer demanded North Vietnam return our POWs. Future discussions would focus only on permission to search and recover remains. Many families had hard evidence their loved one survived capture, and the North Vietnamese held them hostage at some point during the war. If all these men died in captivity, where were the remains? DoD, covert by principle and capability, did not reveal sensitive information about live sightings even to Congress, much less family members. Families who insisted the USG seek an accounting for their POW/MIA tolerated policies designed to discredit and stonewall. In April 1974, fifteen months after officials signed the Peace Treaty, a DoD classified internal report “concluded beyond doubt that several hundred living American POWs remained in captivity in Southeast Asia.” Implausibly, this critical information remained buried for years until a Senate Select Committee POW/MIA investigator discovered the report in the early 1990s.

  North Vietnam continued to claim, “The U.S. has not carried out and has no intention to carry out in the near future its obligation regarding the healing of the wounds of war in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” Washington ignored Hanoi’s subtle reference to Nixon’s still secret letter. “Peace with honor” almost achieved, Congress began to pull remaining troops and logistical aid from South Vietnam. The outcome of this decision would result in the fall of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. By April 30, 1975, the conquest of North over South was complete.

  When the North overran Saigon and took control of the South, Thieu lashed out bitterly at South Vietnam’s former ally for reneging on assured aid, “At the time of the peace agreement the United States agreed to replace equipment on a one-by-one basis. But the United States did not keep its word. Is an American’s word reliable in these days? The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men.”

  When the last CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter loaded with Marines lifted off the roof of the American Embassy a final message went out, which indicated perhaps the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam with lessons learned: “Let us hope we do not repeat history. This is Saigon station signing off.”

  With the war over, each military service swiftly considered every case on the POW/MIA list in order to issue a statutory declaration of PFOD. Essentially, this was a bureaucratic action to resolve all the open cases, which allowed the Department of Defense to denounce any evidence of live Americans. A later review of live-sighting reports at DIA would again reveal a disturbing pattern of arbitrary rejection of evidence, with emphasis placed on finding remains, rat
her than a search for live POWs.

  To protect missing family members from illogical Presumptions of Death, the National League of POW/MIA Families filed a lawsuit against the United States government. A federal court issued a restraining order to stop the Pentagon from reclassifying the POW/MIAs. The POW/MIA families also sought help from Congress, and managed to force a congressional investigation on POW/MIAs in Indochina. The issue turned political, but quickly faded to a painful memory when the Watergate Scandal, a series of political crimes, resulted in the indictment of several advisors and the eventual resignation of President Nixon himself on August 9, 1974. The mainstream media concentrated on Watergate. For American’s, tired of being prisoners of the past, the POW/MIA issue became less than noteworthy.

  In November 1975, House Resolution 335 established the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia. Known as The Montgomery Committee, members had Congressional authorization to probe the issue of U.S. personnel still identified as MIA, as well as the KIAs whose bodies had not been recovered (KIA/BNR).

  Signing of the Paris Peace Agreement left many families, veteran organizations, and concerned American citizens suspicious concerning possible secret agreements between Vietnam and the United States. There was supposition the Vietnamese intended to use the American POWs as a political advantage insuring Washington paid the promised war repatriations.

  Historically, it was common for Vietnam to hold POWs back after a war. Thirteen French soldiers captured at Dien Bien Phu in the 1950’s returned home sixteen years later, but only after a hushed ransom that included government aid. A 1969 Rand Corporation study concluded, “...a quid pro quo that the DRV is likely to demand—and one that the United States may want to consider accepting—is the payment of reparations to North Vietnam in exchange for U.S. prisoners.”

  In June 1975, the North Vietnamese newspaper, Nhan Dan, reported normal relations could happen only when the U.S. met its “obligation” of postwar reconstruction. The same month, Premier Pham Van Dong stated in a letter to twenty-seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives, “...healing the wounds in both zones of Vietnam is linked to information on the MIAs.”

  Dong met with four members of the Montgomery Committee in Hanoi in late December 1975. He told them the U.S. had an obligation to implement Article 21 of the Paris accords, which confirmed the United States would “contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam and throughout Indochina.” Committee Chairman G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery told the Vietnamese they would not receive reconstruction aid, and the U.S. would not “bargain or pay blackmail.”

  Dong then revealed Hanoi possessed a letter from former President Nixon. The correspondence discussed U.S. participation in the postwar reconstruction of North Vietnam as a means of avoiding the appearance of paying ransom for the men kept behind as human collateral. Congressman Montgomery was reportedly astounded when the Vietnamese revealed the existence of Nixon’s letter in Hanoi, but the Committee did nothing with the information. Although, his performance as an investigative chairman was rather lackluster, Montgomery’s diplomatic skills did break through the bureaucratic impasse that impaired the search for the remains, and established the beginning of a more open dialogue between the U.S. and Vietnam.

  Without the cooperation from the governments of Laos, Cambodia, and especially Vietnam, it would be impossible to account for the POW/MIAs. The Communist leaders in Hanoi wanted no dialogue about anything except the money. Persistence being a way of life in Asia, they would wait and see what time would bring their way.

  The North Vietnamese continued to maintain they withheld no American POWs. Hanoi refused to allow U.S. team’s into the country to search for remains until America paid the war repatriations Nixon promised. The families of the missing waited for the USG to issue an ultimatum to the Vietnamese Communist Party for the return of all the POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia. Instead, Washington extended North Vietnam’s trade embargo to include South Vietnam. Dong met with U.S. Senator George McGovern in January 1976, and again pointed out the U.S. “must seriously implement its obligation” under Article 21 to “create favorable conditions” for normalization.

  Montgomery refused to subpoena Kissinger to give a sworn statement regarding the Nixon letter. Kissinger, in a breakfast meeting with the Montgomery Committee, stated the letter “...did not contain a commitment of U.S. aid to North Vietnam.” The New York Times broke the story on February 2, 1976. Kissinger had lied to the Montgomery Committee during the informal breakfast meeting. Neither the press, nor the public, paid much attention. Considering the divisive nature of the Vietnam War, U.S. politicians, the general public, and in particular a large segment of Vietnam veterans, didn’t want to face the possibility we left men behind in Southeast Asia.

  Family members and veteran’s organizations were astonished and disappointed at the events and procedures that surrounded the Montgomery Committee investigation. Mistrust led to significant doubts regarding the validity of what would be their final report to Congress, and the world, on the topic of possible live American prisoners in Southeast Asia.

  Families nationwide, promised the truth about the POW/MIAs, were left empty-handed and brokenhearted. If a soldier was not one of the five hundred ninety-one POWs who stepped off a plane during Operation Homecoming, no matter what his status was, or what solid evidence existed to the contrary, the USG officially considered him KIA. America began to believe Jerry must be dead, although there was no substantiation for issuing his death sentence.

  As Hanoi tactfully manipulated the issue of American POW/MIAs, the Defense Intelligence Agency discredited any information that opposed official policy. Washington politicians turned a blind-eye to the concealment of facts. The American government’s controversial backroom deals took an emotional toll on the families.

  Jerry, 1948.

  Our family wasn’t an exception. Our parents, despondent over the realization there was nothing they could do to help find their son, spiraled into deep depression. Fortunately, love for Randy provided a tonic for our family. He looked so much like his Uncle Jerry it must have been déjà vu’ for Mama and Daddy. With his birth, Mama had gone from holding Jerry’s picture and sobbing, to rocking her grandson and loving again. Even as a toddler, Randy liked to sit on the arm of her comfortable old green chair and read the Wall Street Journal with his Mam-Ma. With her grandson at her side, she probably wondered time and again what had happened to her little boy; was he dead, or hurt and waiting?

  Rendy, 1969.

  No answers to the countless questions surrounding Jerry’s disappearance created a maddening situation. Mama intensely grieved Jerry’s absence, but without knowing his fate, she was unable to mourn or feel any degree of release. Mama sought professional care to combat her despair. The doctors assumed the possibility of Jerry coming home alive altered her perception of reality. They instructed her to accept that her son was dead without evidence to preserve her sanity. This bit of advice, rather than help the situation, drove Mama closer to the edge. When someone tries to convince a POW/MIA family member, “He is probably dead,” our brains respond with an equally justifiable possibility, “What if he survived?”

  A child in torment is an unbearable thought to any mother. Around the time of Jerry’s twenty-eighth birthday, Mama shocked and terrified us with a life-threatening overdose of prescription medication. Psychologists determined Mama was clinically depressed and needed hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, but a family member had to sign her in because she had refused treatment. Daddy asked me to sign papers to commit Mama, claiming he had to live with her when she got out. I didn’t believe I had a choice. Mama might hate me, but at least she would be alive. Maybe, just maybe, the doctors could help Mama find her way out of the black hole where she’d crawled to try and hide from the pain. I signed the papers to commit Mama against her will into St. Vincent’s Hospital. Afterwards, she endured clueless counselors, unsolici
ted shock treatments, additional hospital stays, and a long series of doctor visits. Nothing seemed to help.

  Running out of options, Daddy had a long talk with me about allowing the Army to change Jerry’s status. He didn’t want me to fight a PFOD decision any longer. Daddy thought if we agreed to say Jerry was dead, Mama could grieve and get well.

  The expression of love and concern on his face made me realize that in spite of the problems that Mama and Daddy were experiencing, they still loved each other. They had loved each other for a long time. I wondered, for the first time, when and where that love began. I realized I didn’t know how my parents had actually met. Mama had almost slipped away from us. Suddenly struck with what that meant in terms of lost opportunities, I asked if he would share the story of their first meeting. Daddy smiled as he spoke, but I could tell from the faraway look in his eyes that he gazed beyond me into the past.

  After WW II ended, he worked at an auto body shop in Clarksdale, Mississippi, with his best friend and fellow veteran, Harris Bouler. One day, this beautiful dark-haired girl with two long, curly pigtails came in. Her name was Mary. She was there to ask a pal if he was going to Greenville that weekend because she wanted a ride to see friends. Up to that point, he hadn’t even considered going home for the weekend, but before he knew it, he had offered Mama a ride. The rest was history, they had been together ever since.

  Declaring Jerry dead was a painful decision for Daddy, he felt forced to choose between his wife’s mental health and his son’s life on paper. I wasn’t prepared to pronounce my brother deceased if it meant the USG would discontinue the search for him, but the final decision wasn’t mine to make. In actuality, the USG, my parents, nor I could arbitrarily decide if Jerry was dead or not, only investigation and research could determine his true fate. Inconclusive evidence left no verification of Jerry’s destiny after the ambush at the Old French Fort, however, Mama’s mental state was at risk, and she was priority.