Editing Missing in action (section)

===Vietnam War===
{{main|Vietnam War POW/MIA issue}}
[[File:United States POW-MIA flag.svg|thumb|POW☆MIA Flag.]]
[[File:Georgia war casualties and U.S. POW-MIA figures plaque.jpg|thumb|The fate of American POW/MIAs from the [[Vietnam War]] spurred interest in POW/MIAs from all wars. Here a roadside plaque in the U.S. state of [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]] lists such figures.]]
[[File:Missing in Action plaque, Rhome, TX IMG 7063.JPG|thumb|"Missing in Action" plaque at Veterans Memorial Park in [[Rhome, Texas|Rhome]] in north Texas]]

Following the [[Paris Peace Accords]] of 1973, 591 U.S. [[prisoner of war|prisoners of war]] were returned during [[Operation Homecoming]]. The U.S. listed about 1,350 Americans as prisoners of war or missing in action and roughly 1,200 Americans reported killed in action and body not recovered.<ref name="dpmo-hist">{{cite web | url=http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/vietnamwar/vietnam_history.htm | title=Vietnam War Accounting History | publisher=[[Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office]] | access-date=2008-11-22 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081117195507/http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/vietnamwar/vietnam_history.htm | archive-date=November 17, 2008 | url-status=dead }}</ref> By the early 1990s, this had been reduced to a total of 2,255 unaccounted for from the war, which constituted less than 4 percent of the total 58,152 U.S. service members killed.<ref name="franklin-12"/> This was by far the smallest proportion in the nation's history to that point.<ref name="franklin-12"/>

About 80 percent of those missing were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos, usually over remote mountains, tropical rain forest, or water; the rest typically disappeared in confused fighting in dense jungles.<ref name="franklin-12"/> Investigations of these incidents have involved determining whether the men involved survived their shootdown and, if not, efforts to recover their remains. POW/MIA activists played a role in pushing the U.S. government to improve its efforts in resolving the fates of the missing. Progress in doing so was slow until the mid-1980s, when relations between the U.S. and Vietnam began to improve and more cooperative efforts were undertaken. Normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam in the mid-1990s was a culmination of this process.

Considerable speculation and investigation has gone to a theory that a significant number of these men were captured as [[prisoners of war]] by Communist forces in the two countries and kept as [[Vietnam War POW/MIA issue|live prisoners]] after the war's conclusion for the United States in 1973. A vocal group of POW/MIA activists maintains that there has been a concerted conspiracy by the Vietnamese government and every American government since then to hide the existence of these prisoners. The U.S. government has steadfastly denied that prisoners were left behind or that any effort has been made to cover up their existence.<ref>{{cite news | url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE1DE1E30F93BA25757C0A965958260 | title=Old M.I.A. Theory Is Given a New Life | author=Engelberg, Stephen |work=The New York Times | date=1993-04-18}}</ref> Popular culture has reflected the "live prisoners" theory, most notably in the 1985 film ''[[Rambo: First Blood Part II]]''. Several congressional investigations have looked into the issue, culminating with the largest and most thorough, the [[United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs]] of 1991–1993 led by Senators [[John Kerry]], [[Robert C. Smith|Bob Smith]], and [[John McCain]]. Its unanimous conclusion found "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."<ref name="report-exec">{{cite web | url=https://fas.org/irp/congress/1993_rpt/pow-exec.html | title=Executive Summary | work=Report of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs | publisher=[[United States Senate]] | date=1993-01-13 | access-date=2008-01-03}}</ref>

This missing in action issue has been a highly emotional one to those involved, and is often considered the last depressing, divisive aftereffect of the Vietnam War. To skeptics, "live prisoners" is a [[conspiracy theory]] unsupported by motivation or evidence, and the foundation for a cottage industry of charlatans who have preyed upon the hopes of the families of the missing. As two skeptics wrote in 1995, "The conspiracy myth surrounding the Americans who remained missing after Operation Homecoming in 1973 had evolved to baroque intricacy. By 1992, there were thousands of zealots—who believed with cultlike fervor that hundreds of American POWs had been deliberately and callously abandoned in Indochina after the war, that there was a vast conspiracy within the armed forces and the executive branch—spanning five administrations—to cover up all evidence of this betrayal, and that the governments of Communist Vietnam and Laos continued to hold an unspecified number of living American POWs, despite their adamant denials of this charge."<ref>{{cite book | last=McConnell | first=Malcolm | author2=Schweitzer III | author3=Theodore G | title=Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives: Solving the MIA Mystery | publisher=Simon & Schuster | year=1995 | isbn=0-671-87118-8 | url-access=registration | url=https://archive.org/details/insidehanoissecr00mcco }} p. 13.</ref> Believers reject such notions; as [[Pulitzer Prize]] winning journalist [[Sydney Schanberg]] wrote in 1994, "It is not conspiracy theory, not paranoid myth, not Rambo fantasy. It is only hard evidence of a national disgrace: American prisoners were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War. They were abandoned because six presidents and official Washington could not admit their guilty secret. They were forgotten because the press and most Americans turned away from all things that reminded them of Vietnam."<ref name="schan94">{{cite news | url=http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0408,schanberg2,51267,1.html | title=Did America Abandon Vietnam War P.O.W.'s? | author-link=Sydney Schanberg | author=Schanberg, Sydney | work=[[Penthouse (magazine)|Penthouse]] | date=September 1994 | access-date=2007-06-01 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070321171551/http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0408%2Cschanberg2%2C51267%2C1.html | archive-date=March 21, 2007 | df=mdy-all }}</ref>

There are also a large number of [[North Vietnamese]] and [[Viet Cong]] MIAs from the Vietnam war whose remains have yet to be recovered. In 1974, General [[Võ Nguyên Giáp]] stated that they had 330,000 missing in action.<ref>{{cite book | last=Sorley | first=Lewis | title=A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam | publisher=[[Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]] | year=2007 | isbn=978-0-15-601309-3}} p. 458.</ref> As of 1999, estimates of those missing were usually around 300,000.<ref name="nyt041999"/><ref name="te121802"/> This figure does not include those missing from former South Vietnamese armed forces, who are given little consideration under the Vietnamese regime.<ref name="nyt041999"/> The Vietnamese government did not have any organized program to search for its own missing, in comparison to what it had established to search for American missing.<ref name="nyt041999">{{cite news | url=http://www.mishalov.com/Vietnam_MIA.html | title=Of Soldiers Lost, but Not Forgotten, in Vietnam | author=Mydans, Seth |work=The New York Times | date=1999-04-19}}</ref><ref>{{cite news | url=http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/news/story.php?d=20020421233944 | title=Vietnamese and US veterans cooperate in seeking MIA | publisher=[[Government of Vietnam]] | date=2002-04-21}}</ref> The discrepancy angered some Vietnamese; as one said, "It's crazy for the Americans to keep asking us to find their men. We lost several times more than the Americans did. In any war there are many people who disappear. They just disappear."<ref name="nyt041999"/> In the 2000s, thousands of Vietnamese were hiring [[psychic]]s in an effort to find the remains of missing family members.<ref name="te121802">{{cite news | url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/vietnam/1416535/Vietnamese-use-psychics-to-find-graves-of-missing-relatives.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220112/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/vietnam/1416535/Vietnamese-use-psychics-to-find-graves-of-missing-relatives.html |archive-date=January 12, 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live | title=Vietnamese use psychics to find graves of missing relatives | author=Johnson, Kay |work=The Daily Telegraph |location=London | date=2002-12-18 }}{{cbignore}}</ref><ref name="bbc-psychics"/> The Vietnamese Army organizes what it considers to be the best of the psychics, as part of its parapsychology force trying to find remains.<ref name="bbc-psychics">{{cite news | url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4989480.stm|title=Communicating with Vietnam's war dead | author=Phua, Joe |work=BBC News  | date=2006-05-17}}</ref> Additionally, remains dating from the earlier [[French Indochina|French colonial era]] are sometimes discovered: in January 2009, the remains of at least 50 anti-French resistance fighters dating from circa 1946 to 1947 were discovered in graves located under a former market in central Hanoi.<ref>{{cite news | url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7828287.stm | title=Fighters found in Vietnam grave | author=Pham, Nga |work=BBC News  | date=2009-01-14}}</ref>

As of May 10, 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, US Military and Civilian personnel:of 2633 MIAS of which  1061 accounted for and 1572 are still unaccounted<ref>[https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaFamWebVietnam Dpaa-Mil Vietnam accessed 15 February 2025]</ref>