Barbara Birchim (With Sue Clark)
Thirty-five long years and I was still seeking
answers. If I could make someone in the government listen
to the facts, I knew they’d want to act on them. After all,
who wouldn’t want to find one of our POW/MIAs from the
Vietnam War?
IS ANYBODY LISTENING? tells of dignitaries, presidents
and those involved with the POW/MIA issue as I’ve known it
since November 1968 when my husband, a Special Forces
officer, became missing-in-action.
The pages reveal my feelings and torment during my
many trips to Southeast Asia in search of answers, and my
frustrations while wandering the halls of Washington D.C.
for help.
The book was written to show the issue’s insidious
cover-up and my commitment to the truth.
Barbara Birchim is the wife of Army Special Forces Captain James D. Birchim who is still listed as Missing In Action from the Vietnam War. She has made numerous trips to Southeast Asia and Washington, DC, in search of answers to her husband’s case. She has been interviewed by various news media on the POW/MIA issue, belongs to several military organizations, is the mother of two grown children, and uses her nursing background to help Third World countries.
While I was preparing myself for the task of finding a way to get to Vietnam, since United States citizens weren’t allowed to travel there from the U.S., I became aware of numerous articles in newspapers and magazines about Vietnam. Some of the headlines were: “American POWs Reportedly Sighted in Vietnam”
“U.S. to Study Monk’s Stories of American POWs in Vietnam”
“700 Americans Are Still Rotting in Vietnam Prisons”
“Freed Vietnam Captive Reports Seeing U.S. POWs”
* * *
It’s interesting that live sightings were not only made by individuals in Southeast Asia, but by our military.
“Indeed, a U.S. satellite image taken in June 1992 of the Dong Mang prison in northern Vietnam showed a man-made signal stamped out in the grass: GX2527. Pentagon analysts tried to argue that the image was a ‘photographic anomaly,’ but the combination of letters and digits matched the unique authenticator code of Peter Richard Matthes, the copilot of a C-130 transport shot down in Laos in November on 1969 and still listed as missing in action at the time the satellite snapped the picture.”
* * *
When the armed services first began to bring bodies back from Vietnam, family members questioned whether the body in the casket was truly their loved one.
They were told it wasn’t necessary to open the casket to verify the body.
“No, I want to look,” many families said. And when the families did open the caskets, they found things like airplane parts or bones from a pig or rocks, or other such things to add weight to the casket.
* * *
Terry Minarcin, also testified. He was a Vietnamese linguist and crypto-linguist, assigned to NSA along with Jerry Mooney from 1967 to 1984. In addition, he was a ground-based voice intercept operator/processing specialist, a technical reporter, an analyst, an intelligence reporter, an airborne voice intercept operator and an airborne instructor. He provided direct SIGINT support to “special operations” including rescue attempts. All of these jobs gave him various forms of information about American POWs—those held in the Hanoi area, in “special” camps, those sent to the Soviet Union, those held in ‘New Economic Areas,” and those captured after the cease fire in 1973.
Minarcin found that all of the American POWs were divided into three categories by the Vietnamese—political/economic exploitation, military exploitation, and general knowledge exploitation.
* * *
For years, family members have tried to prove to the government that men were left behind by using the government’s own intelligence. The response has been pretty universal. “If we had proof that any American prisoner was left behind, we’d go over there and bring them home.” Bobby Garwood is proof that the government’s statement is not true and that the government has closed its eyes and refused to act.
The Vietnamese denied holding Americans, the U.S. denied leaving Americans behind, yet somehow an American named Robert Garwood found a way out of
Vietnam. . .in 1979, long after the war ended.
* * *
In the long run, my trips to Vietnam and Thailand turned out to be quite benign. I mean, I did not ruffle any U.S. government feathers regarding MIAs or Jim’s whereabouts. At least I didn’t think I had.
However, in 1990, I began to suspect otherwise. Either that or I was beginning to go crazy.
Becoming aware of the threats to me, and my friends, began to snowball. The more I learned, the worse it got. I don’t want to say I was paranoid, because it wasn’t that. But, I must say, my feelings appeared as paranoia to a lot of people.
I kept saying, over and over, throughout the years, “Thank God most of these things happened to me when I had witnesses.”
. . .that Sunday morning, about 5 a.m., I heard someone in the house. I walked out on the 2nd floor landing of my townhouse, bent over the stairwell and said, “If there’s anybody down there, you better get the hell out because the police are coming.”
At that moment, I heard a thump, thump, thump, the front door close, and the dead bolt flip over. Whoever “he” was or “they” were, they were gone.
It was Monday after the intrusion. I unlocked the sliding glass door, and walked over to the gas grill. The gas was on. Someone had gotten inside our gated community and turned the gas on while I was gone for 45 minutes.
On Wednesday of that week, I went downstairs that morning and found my daughter’s graduation picture gone.
* * *
Over my lifetime, I have come to understand and rename that inner voice that most people label as intuition. I now prefer to think of it as God’s phone line. What I realized was that I never felt that He had left me to walk this journey alone.
Now I was looking at and listening to those feelings/hunches/intuitions from a totally different viewpoint. I began to act on those feelings without a need for tangible evidence.
To my surprise, my feelings were right about 80% of the time.
* * *
I learned some valuable lessons about the world and myself. I found that I could not rest until I had the answers to what happened to MIA James Birchim. Somewhere, somehow, someone had the information I was seeking.
