08/05/2025
The men are silent there, but, as you will see in this report, finally in English, mountains and caves can sometimes talk...
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/121200-000-A/arte-reportage/
50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, some Americans are still looking for their loved ones, missing soldiers forgotten in Laos and in Vietnam... How many were there? How many were kept prisoners after the war? Could some still be alive? With Cy Charpie and Aruna Popuri, we set out to find them in Laos, fighting censorship and the demons of war, getting lost in the jungles of the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail... Six months of investigation that took us to the heart of communist Laos, then to the United States to meet the families. We followed Rick, the son of an airman, in his quest for truth. We also went to America to meet his mother, and in Kansas to discover the unstoppable Carol and the emotionnal Denise, the wife and daughter of an American pilot who was captured alive but is still missing. Haunted by the ghosts of their loved ones, their stories are moving. They are like children who can’t move on, stuck in a past that is not supposed to have existed.
If the Vietnam War is a well-known conflict, the clandestine operations of the CIA in neighboring Laos are much less known. In their desperate hunt against the communists, the US army bombed Laos during nine long years. Per habitant, this remote country received more bombs than all of Europe during the Second World War! And today the scarfs of the war are still stricking. But officially Laos still refuses to speak about American prisoners.
A big thank you to Herade Feist and ARTE for trusting us and being so patient.
This report could not have been done without the help of the American government. If, for a long time, some US officials may have tried to hide the past, today there is no doubt about the commitment of all DPAA team members, the accounting agency who is still doing excvavations in Laos. Thanks for their precious help, their determination, their energy to help us even when all the odds were against this report.
A Zebra Prod production.
During the Vietnam war the American army bombed extensively neighbouring Laos, even though the country was neutral, as communist combatants were thought to be hiding across the border. American military personnel taken prisoner in Laos simply disappeared, never to return to the USA, with their famil...
