Leave No Man Behind: Bill Bell And The Search For American Pow/mias From The Vietnam War

"Leave No Man Behind" is the powerful story of Garnett "Bill" Bell's quest, at great personal cost, to find and bring home the POWs and MIAs of the Vietnam War. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the Vietnamese Communists and his fluency in various regional dialects, he penetrated the system the Communists had created to exploit American POWs for diplomatic concessions, or their remains and personnal effects for financial rewards. In this book, Bell shares his perspective as a witness to history as it unfolded.

Garnett "Bill" Bell was the first chief of the U.S. POW/MIA office in post-war Vietnam. Since his enlistment in the U.S. Army in 1960 to his retirement in 1993, Bill Bell played a vital role in the history of the American POW/MIA issue. In 1973, Bell was chosen as the American interpreter-translator for "Operation Homecoming," the release of U.S. POWs in Hanoi by the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao. During the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, Bell helped clandestinely evacuate American and South Vietnamese nationals from Saigon, and was one of the last American officials to leave by helicopter. In 1988, he became the U.S. Government's field investigator for the first POW/MIA search and recover operations undertaken in post-war Vietnam. George J. Veith has written countless pages about the Vietnam War, including "Code Name Bright Light: The Untold Story of U.S. POW Rescue Efforts during the Vietnam War" (Military Book Club's Book of the Month for January, 1998). He has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives on the POW/MIA issue and has been interviewed on radio and TV on behalf of the families of POW/MIAs.