Lost Soldiers

Nick Ripatrazone offers a touching remembrance of his namesake, a POW lost in Vietnam:

Belief in surviving POWs “could be regarded as the closest thing we have to a national religion” [according to M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America author H. Bruce Franklin]. Hollywood has sent “saviors such as Gene Hackman, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and David Carradine… on quests to rescue imprisoned Vietnam veterans” though they “would have a more realistic chance of success in the United States, where hundreds of thousands are or have been incarcerated in jails and prisons.”