The POW-MIA issue is one that really hits home with me. In 1992, to realistically expect that POWs were still there 20 years after the US troops left, knowing the North Vietnamese prison conditions and especially how they handled their "re-education camps" for native South Vietnamese and the survival rate there, would be false hope at best.

Keeping POWs alive would have only been accomplished by the NVA if there was some downstream value, and that value would have been made known by one side or the other publically at some point, if only for one-upsmanship.

Groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America have had ongoing dialogue with the present Government of Vietnam on the the POW issue for years - each giving whatever information it could gather from its veterans on grave sites, etc. So much information was lost on both sides regarding individual and mass graves, making location by incident and ultimate recovery of remains (if still existing) difficult.

My heart goes out for those still grieving lost loved ones and hoping for closure. War is a hell-and-a-half, and Vietnam was no different. It was actually much worse for families of Korean and WWII POW-MIA, especially with the use of POWs as slave labor by Axis nations (nobody seems to want to recognize that anymore!)

If you want to chastise Sen. McCain, a former POW who understand the realism of it all, for not being not-as-sensitive as you would like, that's one thing. At the same time, VietVets are still waiting for Sen. Obama to publically reject Hanoi Jane Fonda's endorsement of him (that means more to many like me than his relationship with Rev. Wright). Ms. Fonda and her comrades were more instrumental in prolonging the Vietnam War and causing more hardship on American families than Reinhart Gehlen and the Black Dragons during WWII.