Abandoned in Place – The Men We Left Behind and the Untold Story of Operation Pocket Change the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Planned Rescue of American POWs Held in Laos Six Years After the End of the Vietnam War.
There are many excellent books on the POW/MIA issue. However, none chronicles the critical period 1980 - 1981, in more detail than "Abandoned in Place." This book takes the reader from the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, in January 27 1973, to the "dysfunctional" POW/MIA accounting effort of 2014 and tells the story of the men we left behind. It painstakingly details the intelligence available in 1980 that led to the conclusion American POWs survived in Laos, six years after the end of the Vietnam War. Using never before seen documents, we reconstruct events leading up to a CIA reconnaissance mission, doomed from the start, to confirm the presence of POWs at a prison camp deep in the Laotian jungle, as members of the Joint Special Operation Command planned their rescue.
Focusing on several specific POW/MIA cases, "Abandoned in Place" highlights a post 1981 government accounting effort, crippled by the "mindset to debunk" as officials manipulated or ignored evidence, and edited witness statements to support their indefensible position no POWs survived in Southeast Asia after Operation Homecoming in 1973. This despite overwhelming evidence POWs not only survived but also continued to lay down signals in hopes of eventual rescue.
Early Reviews from -
Former Senator and Vice-Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs Bob Smith - “Lynn O'Shea has provided the best in depth analysis ever written and brilliantly combined over 25 years of personal research, evidence and a chronological portrayal of the facts to prove, without any doubt, that America left men behind in Southeast Asia at the end of the Viet Nam War. When we were told that the North Vietnamese, Lao and Viet Cong had complied with the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and returned all of our men, the evidence shows that was an outright lie and many of our government leaders and the intelligence community knew it.”
Dr. Jeffrey Donahue, Brother of Major Morgan Donahue Missing in Laos Dec. 13, 1968 – “Lynn masterfully connects a mind-boggling array of dots to not only affirm the truth of the Indochina POW-MIA issue but also to rigorously convey how and why the U.S. government knowingly left men behind and then covered it up. Lynn has woven together tens of thousands of documents and countless hours of interviews to produce a cogent and unassailable profile of one of the most tragic episodes of modern American history. The how and why have never been so brilliantly researched, documented and conveyed.”
Col. Don Gordon (USA-Ret) Special Operations Command, J2 Director of Intelligence 1980-1983 – O'Shea leads readers to form their own reasoned conclusions. She writes the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched compendium, private or government, classified or unclassified, about this complicated and emotional subject. It is an event long needed to be told accurately and with respect for the missing in action and their families. O'Shea is fidelis to that cause. She carefully distinguishes fact from speculation. Abandoned in Place is a meticulously detailed, thoroughly verified, and reliable story, well told. It describes plans to rescue about 35 United States Military servicemen strongly believed held in a prison camp in Laos in 1980. Step-by-step, O'Shea builds a strong case that some US military likely remained under North Vietnamese and Lao control after the war.
