>>18245675
>Purposely
Depends what you mean by this, if it is "Pvt. John was killed and his body fell out of the helicopter in the middle of the jungle" yeah I can 100% see how finding his body is going to be a pain in the ass it isn't worth the time and effort to retrieve his body.
If it is "We aren't bringing our boys home cause fuck em" no I do not believe

>>18245675
Nah, something like that would've been propaganda-fuel for the North Vietnamnese to parade around PoW's who were deliberately abandoned by the USA.

It sure does sound like a convenient way of justifying vets turning their back on the state

>>18245873
There was a Rambo movie in the 80s about this and then people started claiming they went to Vietnam and saw pows because of the effect of watching it probably. That’s my theory

>>18245675
Nixon

>>18245675
anyone who tries to convince you that their enemy is holding secret hostages for a reason that they cannot or refuse to explain is full of shit

>>18245675
No, it's a dumb conspiracy theory.
Where it stems from was that the US changed their designation for people shot down behind enemy lines from "presumed KIA" to "POW-MIA" which implied linguistically that those people were still alive.

But people went to Vietnam to investigate it, and no additional people were found.
Then conspiracists believed the POWs were sent to the USSR, but when that collapsed none were found.

So the missing number of people were just guys who died.

>>18245879
The Rambo film was based off of an existing conspiracy theory.
Nixon made a big deal about getting our POWs back before we left Vietnam. When the number Vietnam returned was less than the number we hoped existed, people assumed the Vietnamese were holding out on us.
What really happened is those guys died so couldn't be returned

>>18245911
This is like the Epstein files.