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M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America: How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a nation
This paperback edition of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 14, 2023
great book! I was wondering to a colleague why no one in a book tried to bring down to earth the overinflated POW/MIA flag movement. he said that a book was written long ago by h. bruce franklin and that i should read it. i had recently read nick turse's great new book on vietnam and bought this book. this book is great at showing you why the black flag wavers are mad at the government and how the government used the "my country right or wrong" flag waving to support it's morally challenged aims. this is a great book and sorely needed. it says that for every disputed MIA there are 1,000 homeless vets on the street yet the MIA movement's focus is not on helping them first. why not? they are real and need assistance now. why not? it shows that 78,750 americans are unaccounted for from WWII and 8,177 from the korean war yet you NEVER hear anyone screaming about that. why not? interesting right? it explains everything i wanted to know except two points and three things:
1. i didn't answer my first question at the outset of reading the book - if this POW/MIA thing is so strongly supported, then how come NO one has ever put their money where their mouth was and funded a rescue of these old american dudes in tiger cages? you see it in movies! why not in real life? why aren't the koch brothers funding something to "find our boys"? [i assume no one funds such a thing is because this book is true and shows that the MIA/POW is a myth that didn't show up until 1969. only near the end of the war did the flags begin to appear in order to help the nixon administration get a boost in the ratings. in fact the idea was to replace the images of body bags, torture, killing and body bags on TV and the news with the image of the american prisoner in a simulated torture chamber stoically awaiting our help. the vietnam war is the only war in history as the author points out, that had a POW/MIA aspect. it's simple; if the war is declared over than you have to pay vietnam lots of money for damages BUT if you create out of thin air a POW/MIA issue then the war can be rebranded as never over until our last boy comes home. cool huh? this way you don't have to pay the government of vietnam anything!
2. this book didn't answer also: what we did to the vietnamese so much worse than what they did to us and we started that aggression with them, not them with us, so how did the POW/MIA movement skirt completely the issue of who the real victims were? why did no one make a big issue (including the author) about only 1,160 listed as US POW/MIA versus 200,000 vietnamese MIA? just as with the 58,000 dead US versus 800,000 to 3.1 million vietnamese we forget who the real victims are when we focus only on our own far smaller losses. i've never heard someone waving the MIA flag discussing the fact that we shouldn't have been involving ourselves in someone else's civil war in the first place. or that US support for south vietnam's dictatorship alone created more misery for the south vietnamese people (numbers killed, con son tiger cages, etc) than the "dreaded" communists caused the south. why is that?
3. the cover sucks. when you see the cover - it's so confusing you don't know what to think. i would love to redesign the cover with a POW/MIA flag taking up the width of the front cover. if you saw this book in a book store you would pass over it and think it was something old and conspiracy theory oriented.
anyway this book is great and is as solid as they come so read it if having to walk silently by all those MIA flags upsets you. all those vietnamese restaurant workers don't get to dwell on their 200,000 MIA brethren so why don't US MIA groups seek them out and empathize with them?
1. i didn't answer my first question at the outset of reading the book - if this POW/MIA thing is so strongly supported, then how come NO one has ever put their money where their mouth was and funded a rescue of these old american dudes in tiger cages? you see it in movies! why not in real life? why aren't the koch brothers funding something to "find our boys"? [i assume no one funds such a thing is because this book is true and shows that the MIA/POW is a myth that didn't show up until 1969. only near the end of the war did the flags begin to appear in order to help the nixon administration get a boost in the ratings. in fact the idea was to replace the images of body bags, torture, killing and body bags on TV and the news with the image of the american prisoner in a simulated torture chamber stoically awaiting our help. the vietnam war is the only war in history as the author points out, that had a POW/MIA aspect. it's simple; if the war is declared over than you have to pay vietnam lots of money for damages BUT if you create out of thin air a POW/MIA issue then the war can be rebranded as never over until our last boy comes home. cool huh? this way you don't have to pay the government of vietnam anything!
2. this book didn't answer also: what we did to the vietnamese so much worse than what they did to us and we started that aggression with them, not them with us, so how did the POW/MIA movement skirt completely the issue of who the real victims were? why did no one make a big issue (including the author) about only 1,160 listed as US POW/MIA versus 200,000 vietnamese MIA? just as with the 58,000 dead US versus 800,000 to 3.1 million vietnamese we forget who the real victims are when we focus only on our own far smaller losses. i've never heard someone waving the MIA flag discussing the fact that we shouldn't have been involving ourselves in someone else's civil war in the first place. or that US support for south vietnam's dictatorship alone created more misery for the south vietnamese people (numbers killed, con son tiger cages, etc) than the "dreaded" communists caused the south. why is that?
3. the cover sucks. when you see the cover - it's so confusing you don't know what to think. i would love to redesign the cover with a POW/MIA flag taking up the width of the front cover. if you saw this book in a book store you would pass over it and think it was something old and conspiracy theory oriented.
anyway this book is great and is as solid as they come so read it if having to walk silently by all those MIA flags upsets you. all those vietnamese restaurant workers don't get to dwell on their 200,000 MIA brethren so why don't US MIA groups seek them out and empathize with them?
December 8, 2024
(On a point of information there are several GR listings for this book and the author is also separately listed under H. Bruce Franklin. I believe the listing under Howard Bruce Franklin contains all his books but if you are having problems try under the other spelling).
I cannot recommend this book highly enough not only for his fascinating exposition and demolition of the MIA/POW myth/campaign but because what he reveals resonates so strongly with how the myth of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' was created to justify the invasion of Iraq. I am not going to repeat Mr. Franklin's story but if you read 'The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq' by Steve Coll you will find the same 'Verification' playbook was used with regards to MIA/POW and Weapons of Mass Destruction:
1. There is an ancient Greek saying 'All Cretans are liars' so even if a Cretan admits to lying that is a lie so you can phrase all questions along the lines
2. 'When did you stop beating your wife' there is no possible answer so the inability to give proves point 1.
Although the MIA/POW issue may no longer preoccupy Americans but how many people in the USA, and elsewhere, believe that the scenes in the film 'The Deer Hunter' accurately portray what life in North Vietnamese POW camps was like? and how many realise that those events occurred in South Vietnam not North Vietnam and only to North Vietnamese/Viet Cong prisoners?
It is not often that a 30 year book debunking government myth making is still worth reading but this one is. That there are so few GR reviews (five before mine) or ratings is depressing. Because how governments lie (and the UK is equally compromised as that of the USA) is relevant because the belief in Q anon or any of the other absurdist conspiracy theories that bedevil us are the inevitable bastard offspring of lies like the MIA/POW myth.
One of the saddest events recounted in the book is the description of how one peasant woman lost her husband and son when a USAF plane on a bombing mission was shot down and crashed into her home. Twenty years later the Americans were back to try and find the remains of the pilot. To do so they had to tear down the woman's new house and dig up her fields. They found fragments of bone but, when analysed, they were not 'American'. Do you think they were returned as the likely remains of the woman's husband and son? Can you imagine America allowing something like that to be done on their own soil? Like my earlier questions it should be obvious. But then whose MIA/POW's are really unaccounted for? why the Vietnamese and they, like the dead of later invasions, don't count.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough not only for his fascinating exposition and demolition of the MIA/POW myth/campaign but because what he reveals resonates so strongly with how the myth of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' was created to justify the invasion of Iraq. I am not going to repeat Mr. Franklin's story but if you read 'The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq' by Steve Coll you will find the same 'Verification' playbook was used with regards to MIA/POW and Weapons of Mass Destruction:
1. There is an ancient Greek saying 'All Cretans are liars' so even if a Cretan admits to lying that is a lie so you can phrase all questions along the lines
2. 'When did you stop beating your wife' there is no possible answer so the inability to give proves point 1.
Although the MIA/POW issue may no longer preoccupy Americans but how many people in the USA, and elsewhere, believe that the scenes in the film 'The Deer Hunter' accurately portray what life in North Vietnamese POW camps was like? and how many realise that those events occurred in South Vietnam not North Vietnam and only to North Vietnamese/Viet Cong prisoners?
It is not often that a 30 year book debunking government myth making is still worth reading but this one is. That there are so few GR reviews (five before mine) or ratings is depressing. Because how governments lie (and the UK is equally compromised as that of the USA) is relevant because the belief in Q anon or any of the other absurdist conspiracy theories that bedevil us are the inevitable bastard offspring of lies like the MIA/POW myth.
One of the saddest events recounted in the book is the description of how one peasant woman lost her husband and son when a USAF plane on a bombing mission was shot down and crashed into her home. Twenty years later the Americans were back to try and find the remains of the pilot. To do so they had to tear down the woman's new house and dig up her fields. They found fragments of bone but, when analysed, they were not 'American'. Do you think they were returned as the likely remains of the woman's husband and son? Can you imagine America allowing something like that to be done on their own soil? Like my earlier questions it should be obvious. But then whose MIA/POW's are really unaccounted for? why the Vietnamese and they, like the dead of later invasions, don't count.
July 13, 2025
Excellent book. There should be a follow-up studying the psychology of Americans that allows them to dissociate from reality to the point of seeing themselves as the victims of our monstrous wars.
August 17, 2019
I guarantee you don't know the truth about the whole MIA/POW thing unless you've read this book. Thoroughly researched by an excellent scholar. The title reveals the conclusion: much of what people think they know is untrue. This is NOT about POWs still there... It's about the manipulation of the country, the American people, by shrewd politicians, to keep everyone hyped up when the truth was known, even or especially by the people taking advantage of it for political gain. Okay, some of you will think this is crap, but I dare you to read it, then argue it. Franklin exposes an ugly truth. You could benefit from his work.
June 2, 2007
An eye opener. It dissects the source of many of the myths about the actual MIA numbers from Vietnam and how politicians conflated, exaggerated, and lied about them in the name of "Peace with Honor" or to keep up passion in favor of the war. It also points out how the numbers grew into an organism that was dedicated to making money off the continual misery of the families of Veterans.
August 2, 2024
A short book that effectively knocks US historical revisionism regarding the Vietnam War down a peg. Required reading for all Amerikkkans.
September 2, 2024
found in a box in my mother's basement, and i'm sure it was assigned in my fall 1998 vietnam war class. It is really interesting and crazy how easy it is to so blatantly lie. the secret letter promising aid, the role of hollywood in creating the story, the lack of a need for it to be remotely realistic. The really bone chilling part to me is how hollywood movies took american atrocities and then made them vietnamese atrocities. Propaganda. and then the one guy they did ever find who was supposedly a pow for a long time really was a deserter who joined the viet cong. He had a note about how even after there is no way any americans could be held against their will anymore because it would be beyond their lifetimes, this could still end up resonating as an example of government cover-ups as the main story (not real). I wonder how many other things like that are embedded in our history.
September 23, 2025
insightful history
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews