MILITARY SPOUSES FOUGHT TO LEAVE NO MAN BEHIND
Family members call it unbelievable when a set of remains is retrieved decades later from the murky waters off the coast of Vietnam, or from the jungles of Laos, or from a remote sandbar on the island of Tarawa in the Pacific Ocean, or from an unidentified grave in Lithuania. And it can be hard to believe.
When a single rib bone or a single tooth is recovered, identified and returned home to the United States 50, 60, 70 or 80 years later, families are dumbfounded. But this is America, and we have a sacred promise to “Leave no man behind.”
Yet that has not always been the case.
It was government policy to unilaterally declare all missing men service members dead after the cessation of hostilities until the Vietnam War, when the fate of our missing and captive men became a priority for the president and the nation. This fundamental shift in policy can be traced back to the work a handful of military wives set in motion during that war.
One of those women was Coronado resident Pat Mearns, wife of Air Force
Until the Vietnam War, it was U.S. policy to unilaterally declare all missing men service members dead after hostilities ended.
Maj. Art Mearns, a pilot who was shot down over the skies of North Vietnam on Veterans Day 1966. He was never heard from again. Pat joined forces with a small group of military wives who did what few women in that era could. Bucking tradition, they became accidental activists during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.
They traveled around the world and to meet with world leaders. They pounded the pavement and their fists in the halls of Congress and at the United Nations, the State Department, the Pentagon and the Oval Office. They did what military family members had never before done: They became the face of international diplomacy. Consequently, their husbands became what prisoners of war had never before been: strategic pawns.
When our nation’s prisoners of war were released from North Vietnam 50 years ago, then-President Richard Nixon appeared on live television and smiled triumphantly as he announced: “For the first time in 12 years, no American military forces are in Vietnam. All of our American POWs are on their way home.”
This was not a coincidence. The safe return of these men had become a central negotiating point at the Paris Peace Talks, which ended the Vietnam War after more than a decade of American involvement in the conflict. A Harris poll taken in June 1972 had found that 93 percent of Americans thought the nation should stay in Vietnam until all the men were released. President Nixon assured the American people that year that he agreed: “Can [the president] withdraw all of our forces as long as the enemy holds one American as a prisoner of war? The answer is no.”
The fate of these 591 men, a tiny fraction of the more than 58,000 service members who lost their lives and the 2.7 million Americans who served in the Vietnam War, became a national obsession. More than 5 million iconic POW and MIA bracelets were worn by Americans and the stark black and white POW-MIA flag became ubiquitous — all to show national solidarity and support for these men, the longest-held group of POWs in our nation’s history.
American prisoners of war now have enormous value to those who hold them. When there has been just one American captive, like Bowe Bergdahl, or Jessica Lynch, or Scott O’Grady, or Brittney Griner, the United States government has dispatched special forces for daring rescues, or traded terrorists or an arms dealer in exchange for release. The value we place on just one captive is a quintessentially American one.
It was no accident that the United States ended its longest conflict in 2021, in Afghanistan, without a single POW or MIA. Our nation can still tolerate those killed in action, but not POWs or MIAs.
But that has not always been true. Every other war in our nation’s history has produced thousands of unrecovered missing men: more than 72,000 from World War II and more than 7,500 from the Korean War. Only since the Vietnam War have we truly upheld the promise to “Leave no man behind” — made to a handful of military spouses more than 50 years ago.