Customer Reviews

Leave No Man Behind: Bill Bell and the Search for American POW/MIAs from the Vietnam War

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"Leave No Man Behind" is the true guidepost to the painful saga of resolving the search for POWs and MIAs in Indochina. It should be required for anyone interested in the details and history of the quest. The author, a genuine hero, spent most of 20 years, 1973-1993, interviewing refugees, battling U.S. bureaucrats (military and civilian) and wrestling with Communist officials in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. He was also this country's senior field investigator, searching remote crash and burial sites for remains of U.S. military. Along the way he was actively involved in the final evacuation from Saigon in 1975. He learned several distinct Vietnamese dialects, the better to communicate/negotiate with the adversary. Few Americans would be that conscientious. Those of us who have followed and supported the search for POWs/MIAs all these years know how venally, dishonestly and even cruelly the Vietnamese have acted. They deny storing remains and then repatriate bodies with obvious evidence of chemical storage. They allow us to "investigate" crash sites that have been clearly sanitized in advance. Bodies are dug up, moved and reinterred. After payment of search fees, permits, excavation fees and other "costs", remains are found! And so it goes, on and on, year after frustrating year. But when Vietnamese act that way, they are being themselves! How can we explain or describe American officials, civilian and military, who descend to the same level? Mr.Bell makes it perfectly clear that a POW assignment was all too often a just soft "REMF" job. These guys did not want too many POWs being repatriated all at once. How would that look? The longer the searches went on, the longer the comfortable gigs. In the words of a previous reviewer, the whole deal was nothing more than a meal ticket. This reviewer has always suspected that we were own worst enemy and the list of "usual suspects" is long and sickening. There is no doubt in this quarter that these quislings would never want any American MIA found alive. They would be too frightened to explain the reappearance! One specific suspect on the list of lowlife Americans is President Carter, who tried very hard to underfund the original search efforts and nip them in the very bud. Another is not President Clinton but John Kerry. He was so in love with normalizing relations with North Vietnam that his so-called Senate Select Committee swept whitewashed the entire POW/MIA effort. All so his family owned company received exclusive American rights to real estate deals in North Vietnam. How Mr. Bell kept his calm and perspective dealing with so man cowardly and selfish Americans is a mystery. This review could continue at great length, but I'm sure my amazon friends have the picture clearly. In a review of Bernard Fall's "Street Without Joy", this observer closed by writing that the author would be "a great guy to have a few beers with". I feel the same about Mr. Bell except that he would not have to pay for a round. The author is a true American hero. I'll conclude this review by restating that "Leave No Man Behind" is required reading for anyone concerned with the resolution of the 1,845 men still missing in Indochina.

Whether or not a reader has the same take on the history of the POW-MIA issue as Bill Bell, most will be able to acknowledge that he took the issue to heart in a very active way. His commitment to the study of the languages of the region set him head and shoulders above the vast majority of NCOs and certainly all of the officers who were assigned to work the issue, and those linguistic skills for the most part served him very very well. Unfortunately, by the time Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia began to open up and the many years of almost hopeless interviews in refugee camps came to an end, the "issue" had devolved into a series of highly-publicized scams and silly bureaucratic turf struggles between bureaucracies with no missions, and inevitably was exploited by the odd politician or three. We ended up not serving the missing or their families as well as the naive among us would have expected. What was once a sacred cause degenerated into a comfortable meal ticket for many of those "involved," but in spite of all that, Bill often took stances which he knew would bring him his fair share of abuse. If anyone made an honest effort for an extended period of years, Bill did. Those that have hung on for decades sitting idle at the trough have much to answer for. Bill Bell was active in the pursuit of his life-defining mission, and that alone makes his writing worth our time and our respect.

Leave No Man Behind had me griting me teeth and cussing. The stonewall that Bill Bell runs into time after time, yet keeps getting up for more is remakable. I've always knew the MIA / POW issue hasn't been dealth with directly and honorably by the ones having the power to do so. Bill Bell breaks it down in an intelligent way for the rest of us, he's been there, done that. From the Vietnamese using our missing troops to ferther their agenda and look like the innocent, to our own people covering their ass with a smile, Leave No Man Behind connects the dots for me and gives hope that all the soldiers lost in Viet Nam will be found.

It was fascinating to read and learn from this author, who is multi-lingual and deeply immersed in Vietnamese culture and history, as
well as American military experience. While the writing was not always as interesting as the subject matter, this book really brought home the passion and commitment of the author in finding out what happened to the many missing soldiers from the Vietnam War.