Missing In Action

Missing In Action (abbreviated MIA), is a term (dating from 1946) referring to a member of the armed services who is reported missing following a combat mission and whose status as to injury, capture, or death is unknown. The missing combatant must not have been otherwise accounted for as either killed in action (KIA) or a prisoner of war (POW).

The MIA investigations in the USA

During the late 1970s and 1980s the friends and relatives of American GIs became politically active, demanding the US government

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take steps to determine the whereabouts of several thousand GIs who could not be accounted for. Popular movies showed these forgotten GIs being incarcerated in Vietnamese prisons. A significant portion of the US public seemed to find credible the idea that Vietnam had kept American GIs for over a decade following the end of the war.

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Finally, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry chaired a committee, that included fellow veteran and former POW John McCain, that held hearings to get to the bottom of these rumours. The committee did not save money, by dismissing the more bizarre theories. They investigated all of them, out of respect for the depth of feeling of those holding those theories. Through the hearings, and the committee's visit to Vietnam, most Americans realized that the Vietnamese never had a clandestine plan to brutalize POWs following the end of the war and that they were currently doing everything they could to help identify the corpses that occasionally turn up on the sites of skirmishes.

Related Topics:
Vietnam veteran - Senator - John Kerry - POW - John McCain

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A few Americans continue to hold to the theory that there has been a conspiracy to hide the fate of missing American GIs. This theory was the basis for an episode of TV drama The X-files, entitled "Unrequited."

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