Finding David: An
American Wife Betrayed by Her Government
Joseph Stalin supposedly once said, “The
death of one man is a tragedy. The death
of millions is a statistic.”
A great deal has been written about the
shameless and utterly unforgivable abandonment of American POWs in the wake of
the Vietnam War—although, thanks to the American news media, few people are
aware of it—but, up to now, no writing that we are aware of quite captures the
tragedy and, yes, the outrage of this cold and heartless policy so much as
Carol Hrdlicka’s recent book, Finding David: An
American Wife Betrayed by Her Government.
The book is an autobiography, taking us to
Carol’s early years growing up in the Mountain West, being swept off her feet
as a 16 year-old in Littleton, Colorado, by the handsome, well-built and very
mannerly 22-year-old Minnesota native, David Hrdlicka,
who was already in the Air Force but had not yet become a fighter pilot. As a suitor, he comes across as almost a
perfect Prince Charming, and we see him later as an ideal husband and father
and a very professional airman, the wingman of future Republican Congressman
Bob Dornan when they were fighter pilots together in training at a base in
California. “Every faithful American
should read this chronicle of a truly spiritual battle!” he concludes in his
introduction to the book.
Carol was just 19 years old when they were
married. When she got the news in May of
1965 at their home in Wichita, Kansas, near McConnell AFB where David was based,
that David’s plane had been shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and he
had been taken captive, she was only 27, with two young sons and a daughter in
between.
It was shattering news, but there was
reason for hope. He had parachuted into
territory controlled by the Communist Pathet Lao and was seen walking without
assistance in the company of his captors. He was never in the status of my maternal uncle,
Gray Bell, who was declared
Missing in Action in the early days of the Korean War and remains missing to
this day. Rather, his situation would
seem to have been like that of an older uncle, David Bell, who was captured by
the Germans and returned to his family at the end of World War II or that of my
great grandfather, John Henry Martin, who survived the Yankee version of the Confederacy’s
infamous Andersonville, the POW camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, and
also returned to his family at the end of the U.S. Civil War.
But one special problem Carol had from the
beginning was that Laos was not recognized as a party to the war that was being
fought over control of South Vietnam, although both sides of the war were
violating Laos’s sovereignty on a daily basis.
Officially, the war in Laos was a secret war, although it is better
described as an “open secret” war. The North
Vietnamese didn’t acknowledge that they were massively infiltrating men and war
supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the U.S. did not officially
acknowledge that they were there doing what David got shot down while doing,
attempting to interdict the infiltration.
Carol was told to keep her mouth shut about her missing husband because
it might endanger his life, and she dutifully complied. She would learn much later that all the other
families with loved ones missing or known to have been captured in Laos had
been told the same thing. More than
anything, the big hush-hush approach gave the Air Force an excuse to keep Carol
and the other families in the dark. She
had to learn about her husband’s situation from other sources than her own
government.
In July of 1966, a little more than a year
after David’s capture, her father-in-law in Colorado sent her a photograph of
David in captivity that had been published in the Denver Post. They had picked it up from Russia’s Pravda,
where it had first appeared. That
was followed in the same month by a propaganda recording in which David
denounced his country’s military policy in Laos and asked for a pardon so he
could rejoin his family. It was
reassuring to know that he was still alive, but no further information about
David’s situation followed.
From that point on, the Air Force seemed
to do its best to kill David off, if not literally, at least
administratively. The Air Force Casualty
office, in fact, gave her notification in 1969 that her husband had died in
captivity, but they provided no supporting evidence for it.
When the POWs held by the Communists were
returned in 1973, David Hrdlicka—like hundreds of
others known to have been held captive at one time—was not among them. In November of 1977, a hearing was held at
Randolph Air Force Base in Texas at which David was officially declared to be
dead. The title that Carol has chosen
for the chapter concerning that event well summarizes the evidence that the Air
Force produced for its conclusion, “Lies, Lies, and More Lies.”
But as Carol saw things at the time, all
doors that might have led to David, just over a dozen years after his falling
into the hands of the enemy, had been shut with finality. She had to get on with her life, and eventually
she remarried.
The New Carol Hrdlicka
Then in July of 1990, just over 25 years
after David’s capture, she received in the mail a heavily redacted document from
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in which someone, writing in the present
tense on June 27, 1989, states, “I AM TALKING TO COL CHAENG (BRIG GEN) PL
COMMANDER OF THE 11TH REGIMENT AT KHAM KEUT, KHAM MONAME
PROVINCE. SUSPECTING OF HOLDING D.
HERLICKA [sic] AND FRIENDS.”
At that point, her life changed
radically. She stopped being the hapless
victim of her government and its policies and turned into a fervent crusader
for her husband (She had her second marriage annulled.) and for truth and
justice. Her transformation is well
summed up by these two paragraphs from her June 1995 Congressional testimony:
David was sent into harm’s way by the U.S.
Government into a covert, unconstitutional war in Laos. Where was oversight by Congress? David was an ordinary serviceman, so why was
he used in a covert, unconstitutional war in Laos when there was no leverage to
get him released? David’s constitutional
rights have been violated, and I need the help of Congress to protect David’s
rights. (a quaint and old-fashioned notion in these days of Presidential vaccine
mandates. ed)
For many years I believed in and trusted
every government official. I accepted as
fact everything they told me about David’s case. However, after seeing the evidence, I realize
my trust has been betrayed. What is even
worse, the U.S. government has betrayed their honorable servicemen. How is it that for more than 20 years this
continual pattern of lying and deceiving the families has been allowed to
continue? We have had many hearings and
heard many promises, then in the end we are always patted on the head, and
business as usual returns. People within
the agencies, such as Mr. Trowbridge, are promoted and continued on in their
jobs. Where is Congressional
oversight? I’ve heard the lies and
the promises, yet today, I am no closer to finding the truth about David’s
whereabouts or fate. (p. 190, bolding in the original)
The “Mr. Trowbridge” referred to here is
Charles Trowbridge, the civilian picked to succeed the conscientious Army
Infantry Colonel Millard Peck, decorated veteran of three tours in Vietnam, who
had been chosen to head up the DIA’s Special Office for POWs/MIAs in July of
1990, but had lasted only eight months on the job before being forced out. Col. Peck had been forced out, apparently,
because he took his job seriously and was genuinely trying to learn the full
truth about abandoned POWs. Before
leaving office, Col. Peck posted a summary of charges against the DIA and its
POW efforts on his door, and he submitted a blistering resignation
letter.
Carol suspects that Col. Peck was
responsible for that fateful July 1990 correspondence being sent to her. She has a summary of Col. Peck’s charges, but
one can find them as well in my review of An Enormous Crime:
The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia. One can also watch his May 30, 1991, testimony
before a Congressional committee in the wake of his resignation on C-Span at https://www.c-span.org/video/?18186-1/dia-special-office-pows-mias.
Near the end of Col. Peck’s testimony,
there is a contentious exchange between Committee Chairman Stephen Solarz and Peck over his charges against Ann Mills
Griffiths, the head of the National League of Families of American Prisoners
and Missing in Southeast Asia. One can
read his charges against her as a nefarious actor in league more with a dubious
cabal within the government than with the families on page 118 and page 120 of
Carol’s book and in my review of An Enormous Crime. Carol, on page 176, comes down foursquare on
the side of Col. Peck:
Every year the government holds meetings
on the POW issue where they do briefings.
The briefings are always about remains, never about live POW
searches. There are two groups: One is
the National League of Families, which has turned into an arm of the U.S.
government and only looks for remains; the other group is The Alliance of
Families, who looks for the truth about what happened to their loved ones,
abandoned POWs.
The Role of the
Press
A critical Los Angeles Times article about Griffiths
and the League from August 11, 1991, is still online, and it makes very
interesting reading. It is unusual for a
mainstream press article in its airing of the voices of genuine POW families
and the explosive charges of Col. Peck.
His should have been a household name considering who he was and what he
was saying, but I must confess that until I read An Enormous Crime, I
can’t recall having ever heard of him.
The big news-media eye-opener for Carol
came in June of 1992 the day after a bombshell dropped by a former high
government official before the Senate Select Committee on POWs/MIAs:
During the hearings, a Senator asked the
former Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, “In your view, did we leave men
behind?”
“I can come to know other conclusion,
Senator. In 1973, some were left
behind,” said Schlesinger.”
We thought that the former Defense
Secretary’s admission would be front-page news the next day. Instead, the POW community was shocked to
find that the Schlesinger bombshell was completely blacked out, not covered by
the news at all. (p. 136)
This was the same experience that
Representatives Billy Hendon and John LeBoutillier had had in 1981 when
outgoing DIA head Gen. Eugene Tighe made a more explicit and authoritative
charge before Congress, as I recount in my review of Hendon and Stewart’s An
Enormous Crime and Carol does on pp. 137-138.
I believe the general perception that the
public has about the issue is that our government did consciously abandon POWs
in Southeast Asia. This doesn’t result
from what they have read or heard about it from the news media, though. For a good analysis of our press’s
shortcomings on the matter, go to https://www.powhrdlicka.com/news-media-exposed/ on Carol’s web
site. You will see that the press has
largely given the issue the silent treatment.
Rather than the press, popular culture,
especially the Rambo movies and the Rolling Thunder demonstrations—along
with the black and white POW/MIA flags—has kept the issue, if not in the
forefront, at least in the back of people’s minds. Not daring to attack Rolling Thunder and the
families it represents, the American press has left its dirty work for the
British to do, as we see from this concluding statement on the organization’s
Wikipedia page: “The Economist said the organization ‘was
founded...to advance a specific crackpot belief: that successive
Republican and Democratic administrations have concealed evidence that American
captives are being held alive in South-East Asia.’”
The Economist would have us
believe that “bipartisan” cover-ups in official Washington are completely
unthinkable.
At the Heart of
Our Corruption
The priority that our Deep State has given
to burying our Vietnam War POWs is well illustrated by the political fortunes
of those in the forefront of the effort.
The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, John
Kerry, later became the Democratic nominee for President, then the Secretary of
State, and is now the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate in the Biden
administration. Kerry’s committee, we
should be reminded, did its best to drive the final nail in the coffin of the
abandoned POWs.
Kerry is not the main villain of Carol’s
book, though. That dubious distinction
belongs to another member of the Select Committee, Senator John McCain of
Arizona. I thought I had captured the
man’s thorough rottenness pretty well when I wrote my song parody, “A Street Named
McCain,”
back in early 2019, but until I read Carol’s book I didn’t know the half of
it. McCain, with no more appealing a
personality than Kerry, also became his party’s nominee for President. When he died, he received a grand funeral at
the National Cathedral, with everyone who is anyone within our political
establishment heaping praise upon him.
And that brings us to the Senate Minority
Leader at the time who selected McCain to serve on Kerry’s committee, Senator
Bob Dole. Dole was hardly more
personally appealing than Kerry or McCain, but he, too, became his party’s
nominee for President. As we write these
lines, the National Cathedral is gearing up to give Dole a McCain-like
send-off.
From Carol’s book, we get a little
different picture of the man—who was also Carol Hrdlicka’s
Kansas Senator—than we will hear in the eulogies, though:
On one of our many trips to D.C. in the
early 1990s, David Jr. and I had a meeting with Senator Bob Dole to get his
help in getting David’s file declassified and given to me. As David Jr. started his presentation, he
held up a captive picture of his father…and Dole screamed and yelled…
“I’m sick and tired of those fake photos!”
I then responded to him, “How dare
you! I have had this picture in my
possession since 1966! How dare you say
that!”
Dole backtracked. He explained it was at a time when there was
a lot of POW activity and conversation and there were photos coming out of
Southeast Asia. In my opinion, he was
trying to debunk the story that David might still be alive.
William Ramsey’s excellent interview of
Carol Hrdlicka about her book is here.
December 10, 2021
To comment, go to Heresy Central.
Home Page Column Column 5
Archive Contact