A wanted poster for the missing: VIVA's 1973 call for a full accounting

A 1973 poster by Voices in Vital America (VIVA) of Los Angeles is laid out as a frontier wanted notice. It asks for "information leading to the accounting of over 1300 men missing in action," tells the case of a Navy pilot named Dodge, and says North Vietnam's prisoner list was "inaccurate and incomplete."

The layout

The sheet borrows the look of an Old West reward bill: ragged paper edges and heavy slab-serif capitals. What it seeks is not an outlaw but information. A photograph and a short block of text tell one man's case, a capitalized paragraph states the charge, and the close addresses the reader directly.

WANTED

Information leading to the accounting of

OVER 1300 MEN

MISSING IN ACTION

&

THOSE ASSUMED CAPTURED

[…]

NORTH VIETNAM PROMISED TO RELEASE ALL PRISONERS OF WAR HELD IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND TO SUPPLY A LIST OF THESE MEN IMMEDIATELY UPON THE SIGNING OF THE PEACE TREATY. THE LIST THEY SUPPLIED IS BOTH INACCURATE AND INCOMPLETE.

[…]

MISSING? ALIVE?

YOU ARE PUBLIC OPINION YOU CAN HELP

The body paragraph, as FRAME reads it, says Lt. Dodge, a Navy pilot, was shot down over North Vietnam; that a photograph of him being escorted by North Vietnamese first appeared in Paris Match in 1967 and has appeared on the cover of Life and on more than five million VIVA brochures; and that his name is not on the list North Vietnam gave the U.S. government.

Who made it

Voices in Vital America, a private organization in Los Angeles, printed its name and a Le Conte Avenue address with a telephone number. FRAME classes the source as openly identified. The Library of Congress copy is item 2015649170, recorded as a U.S. publication without a copyright notice.

How to read it

FRAME tags it card stacking. The poster builds the general charge, that the list is wrong, on one case, and it gives that one case all the detail. A reader learns everything about Dodge and nothing about how the figure of 1,300 was counted, what "assumed captured" means, or how many of those men had been seen alive. The specific case makes the large number feel proven. It does not prove it.

The demand itself is one any government should be held to. The families of men sent to war by their country have a claim on a full accounting, and a group of citizens pressing for it is doing what citizens are supposed to do. The poster aims its pressure at Hanoi. A reader may fairly add that the same demand for a complete record runs to every government in the war, including the one that sent the men.

VIVA's sheet appeared the same year as the Students for a Democratic Society flyer for the Inauguration Day march, "U.S. Out of S.E. Asia Now!": two private groups, opposite conclusions, both published freely. This sheet and its neighbors are gathered in US Vietnam War messaging, 1954–1975.