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The heart of the matter

You shouldn't feel all that bad if you didn't realize that a  national POW-MIA Day exists.

It's not a day a lot of people pause to observe or are even aware of. It's a day that raises the very ugly possibility that Americans have been left behind after their wars are over.

It's one of those messy issues, made easier to overlook with every passing year as memories fade and people who ask the difficult questions either give up in disgust or die. It is something most Americans don't want to believe -- the possibility of shattered and abandoned soldiers living out their lives in captivity decades after their war ended.

But then along comes this film I watched last week. It's a film that's starting to get around. It is difficult to ignore.

It's called Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search for America's POWs. It was made on a shoestring and inspired by a strong sense of family loyalty. It looks at the case of one American who never came home from Korea after the war there ended in 1953. And in the process it looks at the very murky history of efforts to find what happened to him and the hundreds of others left behind.

Filmmaker Bill Dumas made it. His uncle, Bob Dumas, planted the idea.

For 50 years, Bob Dumas has been looking for his brother, Roger, who was captured in Korea. Dumas, who is also a Korean War veteran, promised his mother just before she died that he would find her youngest son.

He's never stopped looking. And in his pushing and prodding and questioning, he has become a major irritant to those who want to put the matter to rest, who want to avoid embarrassing questions and the possible disgrace of having American POWs stay POWS for more than half a century.

I've visited Bob Dumas at his home in Canterbury, Conn., where he has turned his basement into a command center for the search for his brother and other POWs. It has also become a library filled with books and documents and pictures that tell of his long, hard slog through the federal bureaucracy in search of answers and his meetings with North Korean officials to try to set up some honest exchange of information.

Sometimes, the answers seem within reach. Then doors are closed, access is denied, promising leads are never pursued.

"They're waiting for us all to die," Dumas told me. "They just want us to fade into the woodwork."

But rather than fade into the woodwork, he sat down in front of his nephew's camera and became the lead in Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search for America's POWs. Now, when he goes on the road, he shows the film. He says you can sometimes hear a pin drop when it is over.

The film is a series of interviews and file footage. There are newsreels -- the kind we used to see before a double feature -- that show the brutal combat in the extreme heat and cold of Korea in the early '50s.

And there is one person after another who offers often compelling evidence that prisoners were kept in North Korea and other places after the war ended. Others, including North Korean defectors, provide anecdotal evidence that those men continue to live in the place where they fought a lifetime ago.

Watch this one-hour film and you will find it very difficult to dismiss the claims of those, like Bob Dumas, who insist that the United States has never honestly resolved the question of what happened to all these men.

They would be in their 70s and 80s now, if still alive. They would present a horrible picture of national betrayal if they ever returned.

In the film, former New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith, who also met with North Korean officials, says he is convinced men were left behind.

"We should accept the evidence and move ahead to find where these men are," says Smith.

But it doesn't happen.

A lot of things don't happen. A trip to North Korea to discuss POWs by Jesse Jackson during his presidential campaign is canceled by the State Department. Senate hearings into MIAs and POWs are cut short by Senators John McCain and John Kerry (both senators declined to be interviewed for the film).

There is evidence presented, then never pursued.

And there is the very personal testimony of Bob Dumas, who talks about people who told him that his brother was among a group of prisoners in 1953 taken to a place in Korea where they were supposed to be returned to United Nations officials. But, at the last minute, he was taken away with other prisoners.

"It's like Mission Impossible," said Dumas, of his half-century quest for the truth. "But we're getting closer and closer all the time."

He thinks his nephew's film will make a huge difference, make people think about something that might have seemed too far removed to deserve attention. The film has already won a first place for documentary at a film festival in Fort Myers, Fla. Dumas says it is being shown on some PBS stations.

It is very hard to watch it and not want an explanation of why so much information was ignored and why the possibility of surviving POWs was not more vigorously pursued.

For more information about the film, which is available on DVD, log on to www.MissingPresumedDead.com.

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