Posted by shadow on 10/18/2007, 8:50 pm Although the relatives found little hope in Ridgeway's return, some thought If such a thing could happen to the Marine and Navy group, what about the The U.S. Government has never changed its position on the Marines, Navy and Since the war ended, over 10,000 reports of Americans prisoner, missing or
71.80.114.45
Today, there is one American missing from the Gulf War, more than 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War, more than 8,100 from the Korean War, and more than 78,000 from World War II. About the same time the crew of the EC47 was being interred in St. Louis,
another mass burial was conducted, containing 18 USMC and Navy personnel. On
January 28, 1973, PFC Ronald Ridgeway, one of those 18 "dead and buried"
servicemen, was released alive from a POW camp in Hanoi. The U.S. had not
known that he was a prisoner of war.
it entirely possible that others might have escaped with Ridgeway. How many
others, some family members wondered, had been captured without the U.S.
finding out?
EC47 lost in Laos? Unfortunately, when the war ended, no American held in
Laos was released. The U.S. has not negotiated the freedom of a single man
the Pathet Lao asserted they held prisoner in Laos.
Air Force personnel interred in mass graves in St. Louis, and has continued
to state unequivocally that they were killed in action because the families
could not produce proof otherwise. Although the government lacked positive
evidence that most of these men were dead, its assumption that they were
dead overruled any assumption that they might be alive. The Marine Corps has
admitted that some of those "buried" men could have been captured, but that
it is doubtful. Even though considerable doubt surrounds the identification
of the men buried in St. Louis, and, indeed, some of them might have
survived, official status change has been denied.
unaccounted for in Southeast Asia have been received by the U.S. Government.
It would not be erroneous to speculate that if the U.S. received a
first-hand, live sighting report on the men "buried" in St. Louis, that
report would be debunked because they are all "dead."
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