For those of you too young to remember the events leading up the Viet Nam war – here is what happened. “…the North Vietnamese kidnapped 1,400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.” That kidnapping was immortalized in the movie Rambo: First Blood Part II and National League of Families POW/MIA flag, often referred to as the POW/MIA flag.
Maybe that’s not exactly how it went down, but that is the story Nixon was telling in 1971 when he invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam and to give himself a little bargaining power.
