April is usually an unpleasant month in Vermont – cold, gray, muddy. This year (so far) it has been anomalously warm, sunny and dry. I took advantage of the weather to bicycle along the lakeshore Sunday afternoon, slowly picking my way along the crowded recreation path. Frisbees and soccer balls flew through the air; children and dogs scurried away from those attempting to control them. From a radio, Elton John sang, “… you can’t plant me in your penthouse, I’m going back to my plow…”

I passed the Coast Guard station and noticed the black POW-MIA flag snapping in the wind among the various jacks and ensigns. This is the 30th April since the fall of Saigon. The black flag flies at the Coast Guard station, the post office, the police and fire departments and the VFW and American Legion posts here in Burlington. It flies from thousands of flagpoles across the country. When will we decide to stop flying POW-MIA flags? What will it mean when we do?

The United States and Vietnam re-established normal relations in the 1990s; if the Vietnamese are still holding American servicemen, it’s only because they’re ashamed to admit it after so many years; no rational nation would imprison innocent people for years without cause. The chances that Americans are being held against their will in Southeast Asia are vanishingly small. The black flag, rather than a reminder of those we left behind, is a symbol of a national neurosis we are apparently unable to move beyond.

The United States, with the most powerful military on Earth, was fought to military standstill and political submission by a nation of undernourished farmers using bicycles and bamboo. Our politicians, diplomats and generals knew for years that the war could not be won, but chose to feed lies to the American people. When the end came, it was shattering, hard to accept after years of being told we were about to turn the corner. Rather than face reality, it was comforting to accuse the Vietnamese of “cheating,” of holding our servicemen in secret “ghost prisons,” of violating the Geneva Conventions. Better still, the notion that some of our GIs were being held somewhere perhaps meant that the war wasn’t really “over,” that there was a chance we could renew hostilities, free the prisoners and win the war we had lost.

Any number of charlatans kept the POW-MIA myth alive with bogus evidence of jungle prisons, exploiting families’ grief for cash. Sylvester Stallone did pretty well mining this vein, too. Never mind the napalm, the Agent Orange, the secret invasion of Cambodia, the strategic hamlets, the propping up of a succession of corrupt and illegitimate governments in South Vietnam. The black flag myth says the United States was the wronged party, the victim in Vietnam.

America’s failure in Vietnam left the U.S. Army a “broken force” that took 20 years to repair and gave rise to a cadre of neoconservative foreign policy theorists who believe America’s short-term strategic interests justify any and all actions, including a network of ghost prisons. The notion that the other side might have broken the rules 30 years ago is now enlisted to support a wholesale trashing of the standards of decency by our side.

April was a cruel month for imperialism in the 20th century. On this day in 1988, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, another Cold War superpower brought low by half-starved militiamen playing hit-and-run. As I was pedaling in Burlington Sunday, crowds in Weimar, Germany commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

For now, at least, the POW-MIA flags still flap on the spring breeze. There will probably never be a general order to take them down. The current flags will wear out one by one. Some administrators will simply decide there’s no money in the budget for replacements. Others will comprehend the irony now fluttering from their flagstaffs and furl the black flags with shame.

© Mark Floegel, 2005