Pow/MIA...what does it mean to me?

I was inserted onto the mountain above Kham Duc airstrip along the laotian border in 1969...along with a contingent of the 5th ARVN Rangers, and two Australians...a warrant officer and a lieutenant...long story short...when we were digging in, I hit something odd...kept digging...bones...three human leg bones...all left legs...found some miscellaneous more bones, a wallet in plastic with photos and a military ID...and a set of dog tags which didn't match the ID...so at least these were three MIAs...from when the special forces camp had been overrun a few months before...and bombed into oblivion by B52s....I notified graves registration...after we cooled the LZ...took a couple of weeks...they came out and dug some more...forensic archaelogists, more or less. They found more US remains... They would have been MIA forever. I keep a POW/MIA decal on the back window of my pickup...but I use it to remind myself of how many were lost, never to be found again...Vietnamese...millions...as well as Americans. A great book...really great book..."The Sorrow of War"...by Boa Ninh... From Publishers Weekly "Kien, the protagonist of this rambling and sometimes nearly incoherent but emotionally gripping account of the Vietnam war, is a 10-year veteran whose experiences bear a striking similarity to those of the author, a Hanoi writer who fought with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. The novel opens just after the war, with Kien working in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him, "a parade of horrific memories" that threatens his sanity, and he finds that writing about those years is the only way to purge them. Juxtaposing battle scenes with dreams and childhood remembrances as well as events in Kien's postwar life, the book builds to a climax of brutality. A trip to the front with Kien's childhood sweetheart ends with her noble act of sacrifice, and it becomes clear to the reader that, in Vietnam, purity and innocence exist only to be besmirched. The Sorrow of War is often as chaotic in construction as the events it describes. In fact, it is untidy and uncontrolled, like the battlefield it conveys. The point of view slips willy-nilly from the third person to the first, without any clear semblance of organization. The inclusion of a deaf mute who falls for Kien, and acts for a while as a witness to his life, seems gratuitous. The faults of this book are also its strengths, however. Its raggedness aptly evokes the narrator's feverish view of a dangerous and unpredictable world. And its language possesses a ferocity of expression that strikes the reader with all the subtlety of a gut-punch. Polishing this rough jewel would, strangely, make it less precious." I highly recommend it!