Code-Name Bright Light: The Untold Story of U.S. POW Rescue Efforts During the Vietnam War
- Book Review,
by GEORGE J. VEITH
Amazon.com
At the end of Code-Name Bright Light, former Army captain George J. Veith reports the surprising results of a straw poll he took of former military personnel involved in the effort to liberate American POWs. More than half think that when the United States evacuated Vietnam in 1973, Yanks were left behind enemy lines. Veith is no conspiracy freak. He believes strongly that the military made a sincere effort to rescue captured troops, and argues his case well, yet he also reveals a troubled operation that did not liberate a single soldier due to a combination of its own incompetence and clever Viet Cong tactics. This important chapter of the Vietnam War has been largely ignored until the late 1990s, partly because so many relevant documents took that long to be declassified. Veith makes a genuine contribution to the historical understanding of the conflict, one that ought to engage those still wondering about men whose fates remain unknown.
From Library Journal
Popular and academic works on U.S. prisoners of war continue to play a central role in Vietnam War literature and historiography. But even as the number of such titles proliferate, the quality of the research and the political bias of the writers have long been issues. Although a definitive scholarly volume awaits the opening of Vietnam's archives, Veith's research in the U.S. records places his study on American rescue attempts in the forefront of the discussion. The author, a specialist on POWs/MIAs, presents a tightly written, challenging essay on the ill-starred rescue efforts of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center and associated units in Vietnam and Laos. The catalog of bureaucratic inertia, interservice rivalries, and incredible bad luck combined to frustrate the numerous missions of American and Vietnamese special forces. An arresting and dramatic story supported by exceptional research, this is an essential purchase for Vietnam War collections in academic and public libraries.?John R. Vallely, Siena Coll. Lib, Loudonville, N.Y.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Using U.S. and Vietnamese government records plus interviews with military and intelligence personnel, Veith traces U.S. attempts to find and rescue its POWs during the Vietnam War. And it's a rather dispiriting story, because though "the military did their best to recover American POWs" during the war, "they completely failed." Veith claims that the core problems (crippling interservice rivalries, bureaucratic jealousies, and too much consideration for local politics) were in place from early rescue attempts through the formation of the supposedly centralized Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). All came together to make JPRC's first major recovery operation a bloodbath. The soldiers sent on these dangerous missions displayed herculean efforts; however, Veith's history also suggests that--for all talk to the contrary--the U.S. government's resolve to get back its POWs was lukewarm. He also posits much information that suggests the military knew considerably more about still-imprisoned Americans than it revealed after Vietnam. Apt to be very controversial. Brian McCombie
From Kirkus Reviews
An all-encompassing examination of the history of American POWs in Vietnam. Veith, a former army officer, sheds much-needed light on the history of American POWs in Southeast Asia. Using recently declassified wartime POW material, and extensive interviews with former POWs and those who worked to rescue them, Veith includes many, many details on how dozens of Americans were captured, how they fared in captivity, and how they tried to escape, were released, or died in captivity. The heart of the book is a close examination of the military's efforts to find the POWs in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam and free them during the war. Veith provides an illuminating (if at times overwritten and acronym-clogged) road map of an effort that began with various military Search-and-Rescue (SAR) teams and the covert Studies and Observation Group (SOG), which worked behind enemy lines. In 1966 the SOG and SAR POW duties were folded into a new unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC), sometimes referred to by the unclassified code name Bright Light. As Veith shows, the often courageous and heroic work by these men came to naught. The Americans freed some 500 South Vietnamese POWs and recovered 110 American bodies, but not one captured American was rescued from an enemy camp. The many reasons for that failure included intraservice rivalries, intelligence breakdowns, and high-level political intransigence, especially in supposedly neutral Laos, where the Americans were waging a so-called ``secret war.'' Veith briefly addresses the heated issue of whether all American POWs were returned in 1973 and provides some food for thought about men left behind, primarily in Laos. But Veith's main task, and one at which he succeeds very well, is to offer a much-needed historial look at the vast array of efforts undertaken to recover American POWs during the war. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Gary A. Linderer author and Executive Editor of Behind the Lines magazine Jay Veith is a breath of fresh air in a morass of government double-talk, misinformation, and outright lies. Code-Name Bright Light unravels some of the confusion and the mystery and reinforces why the POW/MIA issue should never be allowed to simply fade away.
Book Description
The history of the U.S. POW/MIA intelligence and wartime rescue operations has long remained concealed under the shroud of national security, unknown both to the public and to the families of the missing. George J. Veith has assembled an extensive range of previously unseen material, including recently declassified NSA intercepts, State Department cables, and wartime interrogation reports which reveal how the U.S. military conducted a centralized effort to identify, locate, and rescue its POW/MIAs.Code-Name Bright Light also traces the development of the various national POW intelligence operations and provides an in-depth look at the activities of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, a secretive and highly classified unit in South Vietnam responsible for rescuing captives. Further, it uncovers one of the most tightly held POW/MIA secrets, the primary reason why the government did not think any Americans were left behind: a clandestine communication program between the POWs and the U.S. military. This still-sensitive program provided the identities and locations of American prisoners, defeating North Vietnamese efforts to keep their names and locations secret.The raids and efforts that make up the narrative of Code-Name Bright Light succeeded in freeing hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers but resulted in the rescue of few Americans. The vast network of efforts, however, is a testament to the U.S. military's unknown commitment to freeing its captive soldiers. Veith concludes that the United States secretly went as far as any army could go in freeing captives in this type of wartime situation.
From the Inside Flap
The history of the U.S. POW/MIA intelligence and wartime rescue operations has long remained concealed under the shroud of national security, unknown both to the public and to the families of the missing. George J. Veith has assembled an extensive range of previously unseen material, including recently declassified NSA intercepts, State Department cables, and wartime interrogation reports which reveal how the U.S. military conducted a centralized effort to identify, locate, and rescue its POW/MIAs.
Code-Name Bright Light also traces the development of the various national POW intelligence operations and provides an in-depth look at the activities of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, a secretive and highly classified unit in South Vietnam responsible for rescuing captives. Further, it uncovers one of the most tightly held POW/MIA secrets, the primary reason why the government did not think any Americans were left behind: a clandestine communication program between the POWs and the U.S. military. This still-sensitive program provided the identities and locations of American prisoners, defeating North Vietnamese efforts to keep their names and locations secret.
The raids and efforts that make up the narrative of Code-Name Bright Light succeeded in freeing hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers but resulted in the rescue of few Americans. The vast network of efforts, however, is a testament to the U.S. military's unknown commitment to freeing its captive soldiers. Veith concludes that the United States secretly went as far as any army could go in freeing captives in this type of wartime situation.
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