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From: Joe Moore
Date: 06 Mar 2001
Time: 01:19:43
Remote Name: 64.92.84.163
Washington Post, March 5, 2001, Pg. 1
Decades After Vietnam, States Embrace POW/MIA Flag
By Craig Timberg, Washington Post Staff Writer
The man's head is bowed in silhouette. Above is a guard tower; below are the words "You are not forgotten." And three decades after a former Army pilot first sketched the stark image to commemorate those missing in action from America's longest war, it has become an enduring emblem of Vietnam, a flag second in popularity only to Old Glory itself.
The POW/MIA flag, appearing almost always in mournful black and white, has flown over the White House and the Super Bowl, at the New York Stock Exchange and at every U.S. post office. It has grown beyond the wildest hopes of its creators to become a quiet yet persistent reminder that not all the wounds of Vietnam have healed.
The Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously last month to place its state Capitol among the more than two dozen that have flown the POW/MIA flag, created in 1971 by the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. Maryland is contemplating similar bills to fly the flag atop the State House dome and at highway rest areas.
Historians and flag experts call the proliferation of the POW/MIA flag unprecedented in the history of the United States and perhaps the world. Never before, they say, have sovereign states and nations required that the flag of a political movement regularly be flown alongside their own.
In part because of that official embrace, the flag born to urge the speedy return of captured U.S. servicemen continues to grow in power and popularity. Dealers say it is their second-biggest seller after the Stars and Stripes.
"Americans don't like their people not treated right," said Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families and the sister of a Navy flier missing since 1966. "They want to know what happened to them."
The flag grew from Vietnam, but to veterans organizations it has come to represent all the missing from U.S. military actions dating back to World War II, a group totaling 88,000. Most are from World War II; fewer than 2,000 are from Vietnam.
The flag's popularity and the willingness of governments to fly it as a symbol of their own has astonished those who study the history and etiquette of flags.
"This is a permanent feature of the landscape," said Whitney Smith, director of the Flag Research Center in Winchester, Mass. He remembers when the flag appeared in the 1970s. "I never imagined how it would grow."
Sharing his surprise is the flag's creator, a former World War II Army pilot named Newton Heisley, now 80. He first sketched the imagery in pencil while working for an advertising agency contracted to design the POW/MIA flag. He intended to add color to the black and white image but never got a chance before flag manufacturer Annin & Co. in New Jersey started production.
The man's head shown bowed forward in the center is a silhouette of Heisley's son Jeffrey, then 24 and suffering from hepatitis after a Marine Corps training program at Quantico. The words "You are not forgotten" came from Heisley's memory of long military flights across the South Pacific, when he sometimes found himself imagining the terror of being captured.
But to Heisley, the words apply as well to all Vietnam veterans, who often arrived home to a reception ranging from indifference to scorn as the nation wrestled over the morality of the war.
"They deserved better," said Heisley, now retired in Colorado Springs.
Bigger veterans groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion eventually took up the flag as an issue both at the state and national levels.
It first flew over the White House in 1988 and was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1989, making it the only flag ever permanently displayed there, according to flag experts.
And in 1990, Congress adopted the flag as "the symbol of our nation's concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia."
Congress later passed a law requiring that on six holidays the flag be flown at all U.S. post offices, the Capitol, the White House, national cemeteries, military bases and the memorials for the Korean and Vietnam wars. The holidays are Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and National POW/MIA Day (the third Friday of September).
The flag continues to gain prominence today, though government officials and most veterans groups acknowledge there is little hope of finding Americans held alive in Vietnam. Accounting for the fate of every last one is now the stated goal for most veterans groups. It is a promise, they say, as much for the fighters of future wars as for those missing from past ones.
"The least the country can do is find you or your remains and bury you in American soil," said Bruce R. Harder, a retired Marine colonel who served in Vietnam and now works on foreign affairs for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The movement has rankled some. American studies Prof. H. Bruce Franklin, of Rutgers University, has written extensively and critically on the POW/MIA movement. As a former Vietnam War protester fired by Stanford University for his antiwar speeches, Franklin sees the flag and its image of imprisonment as a way for Americans to cope with a war that still makes many uneasy. Why else, he asks, fly a flag commemorating the relatively few who are missing in Vietnam instead of the millions who served there, or the tens of thousands who died?
"It is a way of perceiving ourselves as victims of the Vietnam War," Franklin said. "It's really quite bizarre."
Pushing the flag legislation in Virginia was Sen. Warren E. Barry (R-Fairfax), a former Marine who has made something of a career speaking for the traditional values of God and country in the legislature. This year, he authored a bill requiring students to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Last year, it was a moment of silence for prayer or private reflection.
The bill on the POW/MIA flag requires that it be flown at every state building on the six holidays when it is also flown at federal buildings. State budget analysts listed the cost as unknown, noting that there are 8,556 buildings on state land in Virginia.
Not a single lawmaker opposed the bill, and Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R), a former Army intelligence officer, said he likely will sign it.
Barry usually courts controversy, but he calls the POW/MIA flag a unifying issue, one that even opponents of the Vietnam War can embrace. "We didn't function with the kind of unity we're accustomed to [during the war], but we certainly can become united in terms of the missing in action and the POWs who have never been accounted for," Barry said.
There has been more opposition in Maryland, where some lawmakers argued for sticking to a two-century-old tradition of flying only the U.S. and state flags at government facilities. The House has approved the bills on the POW/MIA flag, but the Senate has not yet voted.
"I would argue that the one flag that honors all of our soldiers is the one that already flies there," said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery) in debate on the House floor last month. "That's the American flag."
Joe