Australian Return Services League

Australian Embassy Speech to the Australian Return Services League

Australian Embassy – Washington, DC

March 19, 1998

Ladies and gentlemen I’m proud to be among you today, among men and women who love their respective countries as I love mine; who are willing to defend their homelands against all enemies, foreign and domestic; who understand and appreciate that our freedoms, and our wonderful systems of government, are precious gifts which must be carefully guarded and vigorously defended.  You honorable people have given your days, months, and years to the preservation of freedom.  Let me say again, I am honored to be here.

But I am also sad that there are others who shared this love, this passion, this commitment, who could not be here today.  Men who answered their country’s call for help, yet found the line disconnected when they called back.  Men like Peter Matthes and Henry Serex, left in their flightsuits on the field of battle, waiting – maybe even waiting today – for their beloved nation to rescue them.  I wish those men could be with us today, wish I could look out among you and see Henry or Peter or Don Carr or Tom Hart or Michael Speicher sitting out there smiling back at me.  But those men are not sitting among you, and I have to wonder why.  

I am not naïve.  I understand that soldiers die in war, that some of them, like other tools with which wars are waged, will not return.  War could not exist on any other terms, because wars are desperate struggles, and people die.

The United States and Australia share a proud heritage of battle.  Hundreds of thousands of U.S. and Australian servicemen and women are buried where they fought and died around the world.  Victoria Crosses and Medals of Honor have been earned in those same conflicts, sometimes during staggering defeats which became victories of endurance and courage and valor.  520 Australians and 58,000 Americans paid that ultimate price of war in Vietnam.

But if these same men and women managed to survive their battles, shouldn’t they have been able to come home?  Shouldn’t they have had the chance to be with us today?  What is a country’s obligation to them?

Every person in uniform knows that answer, because they’ve felt it for the man beside them, to their commanding officer, their branch of service and their country.  But what sense of obligation does a government use to guide its actions.

There’s a theme which runs through some offices in government that if at first you don’t succeed, quickly destroy all evidence that you ever tried.  After all, why should someone risk the embarrassment of failure if they can avoid it?  Sadly, I believe that attitude is held by some who control the future of POWs from past and future wars. 

Let me be clear here: I don’t think our leaders intentionally leave men behind.  It’s ridiculous to believe anything of the sort.  But when the time comes when it’s difficult to bring men home, when it threatens political stability or weakens standings in the polls, why not hide the evidence?

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren, when speaking about the men left behind in Vietnam, said, “It’s been true in administrations of both parties, when the agreements were made – and they were anxious to get agreements at the time – there were people involved who simply wanted to get the agreements and didn’t want to have all the questions raised at the time.  It was too embarrassing.  The longer it went, the more embarrassing it got to be.  Then, once somebody found out how bad it was, nobody wanted to take the blow.  They always thought, well, I’ll hand this on to the next guy to admit that we really made a big mess.  And so they kept the secret.”

That’s wrong.  We all know we left men behind in SE Asia and Korea.  The Pentagon knows it, the White House knows it, the NSA knows it, and the families know it.  In 1986, CIA Director William Casey said, “Look, the nation knows they’re there, everybody knows they’re there, but there’s no groundswell of support for getting them out.”

No groundswell of support?  What was he talking about?  My God, what does it take?  Wives, children, and parents have struggled against incredible bureaucratic stonewalling for years, trying to get the truth about their loved ones.

No groundswell of support?  POW flags fly everywhere, the internet crackles with debate and outrage, 70% of Americans believe we left men behind who might have survived.   Either Mr. Casey wasn’t looking or he wasn’t seeing.

No one likes to be embarrassed.  It doesn’t matter how old you get, you don’t want to get caught in a lie and exposed to ridicule and shame.  I don’t, you don’t, and the folks who told us these men were dead don’t.  Now I don’t know everything they know, but I expect there’s some information lurking in their files that would embarrass some of them.  Things they think we shouldn’t know or couldn’t handle.

And you know what?  I don’t care what they think. We’re talking about our brothers in arms who waited and waited for a freedom bird to pluck them from their misery and bring them home.  If their return causes someone here in Washington to lose a job or reputation or prestige, I just don’t care.

Thank God there are people whose dogged search for the truth is an important part of their identity.  Men like Lt. Gen. Tighe and Colonel Millard Peck.  Senator Bob Smith and Congressman Billy Hendon.  Colonel Ted Guy and Tom Burch.  These men all understand the value of a soldier’s life, and have not been stifled by the worry of embarrassment.  To them I say, thank you.

Like it or not, Korea and Vietnam are a part of our heritage, a factor in our national identities.  The issue of POWs from those wars will remain a divisive issue as long as it’s shrouded in mystery – the way it has been.  It will not go away being handled in secret, with scheming disinformation and a CIA defying executive orders.

We, as a people, know that a “mindset to debunk” live-sightings delayed, for decades, any help we might have given those men.  We know, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concluded in 1991, that the U.S. ignored thousand of POWs in Korea and Vietnam because “any evidence that suggested a MIA might be alive was uniformly and arbitrarily rejected.”  We’ve heard Senator Kohl, a Senate Select Committee member on POWs, say that government “perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not, perpetrated lies and cover-ups about the POW issue.”

Enough.  We all have broad shoulders.  It’s time for the people who know the truth to tell it.  It can’t be worse than we suspect.  And once learned, that truth will help us protect those soldiers who will fall into enemy hands in future wars, and prevent their use bargaining chips.  Returned POW Red McDaniel said, “I was prepared to fight, to be wounded, to be captured, and even prepared to die.  But I was not prepared to be abandoned.”

Let’s cease our abandonment of the men we left behind.  They deserve to be walking on, or buried in, the soil of their homeland.  With fanatical determination and God’s help, may we never leave another countryman in the hands of our enemies.

Thank you.