An exhibition from the archive

Bring Them Home

Under the Paris Peace Accords, 591 American prisoners of war came home from Vietnam in 1973, in what was called Operation Homecoming. But the United States had reported some 1,350 Americans as prisoners or missing in action, and about 1,200 more killed in action whose bodies were never recovered. Many believed that hundreds of men were still being held.

From the late 1960s the prisoners and the missing became one of the most recorded subjects of the war: wives and children singing for husbands and fathers, records made to raise money and awareness, welcome-home songs in 1973, and in the 1980s a wave of records insisting that men had been left behind.