Battle Behind Bars: Navy and Marine POWS in the Vietnam War

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Battle Behind Bars: Navy and Marine POWS in the Vietnam War

S. I. Rochester

At the start of the 1960s, in Washington's view the greater concern, and the focus of the U.S. anti-Communist effort in Southwest Asia, was not Vietnam but Laos, and it was there that the first American--and U.S. Navy--POW's of the Indochina conflict fell into enemy hands. Though the Kennedy administration was intent on restricting U.S. forces in Laos to an advisory and reconnaissance role, contact with the enemy, as in Vietnam, became inevitable as the U.S. involvement expanded and intensified. By the spring of 1961, a half-dozen Americans had already been captured by pro-Communist Laotian rebels (Pathet Lao), including Navy Seaman John McMorrow, a mechanic on board a U.S. helicopter that crashed while ferrying a squad of Royal Lao Government troops. Over the course of the decade, only a handful of Navy and Marine personnel followed McMorrow into Laotian captivity, but among those were two of the more riveting survival and escape stories of the war.