Often cited as the last American POW from the Vietnam War, Robert Russell Garwood was captured on September 28th, 1965 in the Quang Nam province. He was reportedly released in 1973 along with all other American POWs, but did not return to the United States until 1979 - having either volunteered or been forced into a work group to help repair a generator located at an unnamed "Island fortress" in North Vietnam. US Marine Lt. Colonel Tom McKenney later claimed that he had been tasked to lead an assassination mission, for the American government, to kill Garwood as a traitor, though he later believed that he had been sent to kill the POWs to hide evidence that the US Government had "left behind" captured soldiers in Vietnam.[1] Controversy arose over whether Garwood was an American POW abandoned by the military, or an enemy collaborator. In 1998, the Department of Defence offiically changed his status from RETURNEE to AWOL/Deserter/Collaborator[2] Some accused the Department of Defence of trying to rewrite history, to downplay Garwood's claims that he had seen other POWs "left behind" since 1973, and that he had been a prisoner for 14 years.[3] After the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported they could locate no masonry structures in the area where Garwood had said he saw live American POWs at a motel-shaped masonry structure, Senator Bob Smith asked them to search again. After a second search produced the same results, Smith, ABC News, Garwood, and Hendon traveled to Vietnam and, by following Garwood's directions, found a masonry structure just as Garwood had described. The Vietnamese government and a former head of the DIA POW/MIA office [4] have hotly disputed the finding, claiming the structure did not exist during the years Garwood was first in Vietnam.
References
- ^ http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/renne/renne1.html
- ^ http://www.pownetwork.org/bios/g/g047.htm
- ^ http://www.pownetwork.org/bios/g/g047.htm
- ^ http://www.miafacts.org/islefort.htm
- Jensen-Stevenson, Monika, Spite House, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 1997.
- Groom, Winston, with Duncan Spencer, Conversations with the Enemy, Putnam, 1983.
