National League of POW/MIA Families Incorporates

May 28, 1970

Overview

The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia incorporates in Washington D.C. The league emerges from a movement begun in the late 1960s in California and Virginia by the families of POWs. Its stated objective is “to obtain the release of all prisoners, the fullest possible accounting of the missing, and repatriation of all recoverable remains of those who died serving our nation during the Vietnam War.”

The National League of Families becomes the largest of the POW/MIA family organizations and helps focus public attention on prisoner-of-war issues.¹

“About the League,” The National League of POW/MIA Families, http://www.pow-miafamilies.org/about-the-league/ (link is external) (accessed 4/22/14) (see this page for quoted material); Stuart I. Rochester, The Battle Behind Bars: Navy and Marine POWs in the Vietnam War (Washington, D.C.: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2010), 57; Vernon E. Davis, The Long Road Home: U.S. Prisoner of War Policy and Planning in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2000), 220–22; Thomas M. Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 18–19, 224; Maureen Ryan, The Other Side of Grief: The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the Vietnam War (Amherst, MA: University Of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127.