and the families deserve closure. I spoke with veterans of the Korean war at a couple of the VA Medical Centers that we visited on this trip, some have not been out of the VA ward they are in for decades, many have not had a visitor for months ;( One of them who could not verbalize his name so that I could understand it, clearly asked about the missing and captured in Korea. 'so many', he said, 'so many'..) We had 2 children of MIA's from the Vietnam war ride with us on the backs of our bikes, carrying tens of posters that they had made, asking for accountability for the MIA's in Nam. "Children', huh, both ladies were over 35 and had sparse or no personal knowledge of their fathers, constant harassing and badgering of the many congressional committees established to pretend to care about these POW/MIA's over the decades had brought no action to mention. We honor and pension our politicians, each with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year! Our warriors and POW's are put out to pasture at best, ignored and cast aside more typical. I spoke with veterans at the Tuscaloosa VA Med center whom were dis-oriented but still trying to participate in lucid conversations and listened intently in Monroe, Louisiana as a younger man (younger than me) spoke with pride and tears about his great-grandfather, multi-medaled in WW1 and his grandfather in WW2 who never made it back, his dad who had served in Korea and was MIA in Vietnam and his uncle who was KIA in Nam and then of his own service in Gulf 1 and Gulf 2. We stood in front of the Monroe Veterans monument as he pointed at each of his relatives on the monument...and he saluted us as we left on our journey to DC to ask for an honest effort at accounting for the many POW/MIA's. I have been close in the past with a Prisoner of War from Korea, haven't spoke to him for nearly a decade now, he was held and tortured for over 3 years, liberated by the political treaty, weighing in at just under 80 pounds and then spending 32 months in a hospital recovering from the depth of his emaciation and torture. What did he receive? his 36 months back pay from the years he was prisoner at an elevated pay-rate since he had been eligible for promotion during that length of time that he was held and a disability rating that would qualify him to a couple of thousand a month for life. What did he do with this conundrum? He used the determination and resolve he had found in that hell-hole in Korea to attend Stanford and achieve 2 PhD's in Engineering disciplines and started several different businesses and last I heard was retiring to his property on a lake in Texas. He was accounted for as were thousands of others, but there are literally thousands of Americans still not accounted for from WWII, Korea and Vietnam! Someone that our family was surely related to way-back from the Carolinas, before our personal history inter-twined with the Trail of Tears, L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove, was last seen fighting off the Khmer Rouge as the Mayaguez rescue operation (the last combat mission of the Vietnam War) was extracted. This Marine was unaccounted-for, for decades, in 1995 an eyewitness finally gave an account that Hargrove survived for weeks evading capture, without food, water or supplies. He was finally captured but had put up such a fight that the local Khmer Rouge Commander ordered him executed on the spot. It was 2001 before some inconclusive remains were recovered by the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTFFA) but it took Joseph's home town Duplin (North Carolina) County Commissioner to get involved with JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) in 2007 to recover identifiable remains at the site of the execution. Believe it or not L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove, fought off the Khmer Rouge allowing the Mayaguez rescue operation to leave, evaded capture for weeks living off of the land, put up such a fight at his eventual capture that he was executed on the spot, this L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove was awarded a Purple Heart! Something still doesn't seem right...
This same L/Cpl Hargrove is the stimulant for one of the original founders of RFTW (Run For The Wall) in 1988. GySgt Gregory, Hargrove's superior in that fated Mayaguez incident got involved to support the demands by Vietnam Veterans for Full accounting of all POW/MIA's by riding his motorcycle from LA to DC with a gathering group of veterans and supporters to gain awareness of that effort. Gunny Gregory cites today that his motivation was Joseph Hargrove and the knowledge that Hargrove was alive during lift-off and seen alive at last sighting. Surely this un-assuming hero deserved more than official red tape and stone-walling. Gunny Gregory and the RFTW has grown over the last 23 years, so that now every May hundreds (500+ in 2010) riders leave Los Angeles to ride to DC "for those who cannot" to join up with hundreds of thousands of riders at the Pentagon parking lot on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and ride 4 abreast from the Pentagon to The Vietnam Wall to protest the lack of awareness of our missing and demand a full accounting. If you want to see a sight, watch as the 400,000+ riders parade for nearly 5 hours (it takes 4 and a half hours to empty the Pentagon parking lot, 4 motorcycles at a time!) This demonstration is rightfully deemed to be "Rolling Thunder". All Gave Some, Some Gave All
