The POW/MIA myth must be understood as a symptom of a profound psychological sickness in American culture. One path back toward mental health would be through an honest self-examination of how and why a society could have been so possessed by such a grotesque myth.
The bones of many Americans have mingled not just with the earth of Vietnam but also with the bones of many Vietnamese. Those who are still missing are just as dead as the husband and son of Nguyen Thi Teo, and the Vietnamese dead are just as missing as those dead Americans. When we recognize and confront all that we--and the peoples of Indochina--have truly lost and that will remain forever missing in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, perhaps we can at least recover some of our lost moral and psychological health.
As for the bone fragments recovered the first day, they were taken away by the Americans and sent to the U.S. identification laboratory in Honolulu to determine whether they were remains of "American MIAs." There is no hint in any press report that anyone considered the possibility that they might be the remains of Vietnamese MIAs, such as the husband and son of Nguyen Thi Teo.
Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking In America, p.170,175
