Ted Sampley

In 1984 Homecoming II, a POW/MIA information project named after Operation Homecoming, the original return of POWs after the war, was founded in Kansas as a local effort. The founders began compiling information on POW/MIA cases, from biographies to reports of their possible survival in captivity, and began lobbying the U.S. and Vietnamese governments. Within a year, they realized they had compiled and made public more information about the cases than the Pentagon had given a congressional task force investigating the issue.[14]

The following year the group established a booth on the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial where they initially kept a vigil to raise awareness of the POW/MIA issue and sold merchandise to support it. They also supported demonstrations in the area by veterans, including one who locked himself in a bamboo cage and began a hunger strike. It was named The Last Firebase, after the fire support bases established by U.S. artillery units in Vietnam to support infantry operations against the Vietcong.[14]

In 1989 the founder of Homecoming II stepped down due to family issues and asked Sampley to take over. He led the organization until its dissolution in 1993. The archives the group had compiled were transferred to the newly created The Last Firebase Veterans Archive Project. A year later Sampley would use information from those files to identify the Vietnam Unknown Soldier as missing Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie.[14]

Rolling Thunder riders passing onlookers at the Arlington Memorial Bridge into the District of Columbia at the 2009 ride. Arlington National Cemetery is in the background.

In 1987 Ray Manzo, a Marine veteran of the war, visited the memorial in Washington. After stopping at a booth near the memorial run by one of Sampley's organizations, he learned about the POW/MIA issue. As a Marine trained to leave no man behind, the idea that living POWs might still be in Southeast Asia disturbed him, and he resolved to do something about it. He joined forces with Sampley and two other veterans to organize Rolling Thunder, a motorcycle ride from the Pentagon parking lot to the memorial named after a bombing campaign during the war, to show that veterans still cared about their missing comrades. The first run, held the following year, attracted 2,500 riders, a number that has grown with the years. It has since been held every year on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and has become one of the capital's best-attended annual events.[6][15]

The organization established to support the annual runs has also lobbied for passage of laws supportive of the POW/MIA issue. In 1993 Congress passed the Missing Service Personnel Act, which requires that the Defense Department have substantial evidence that a missing servicemember was killed in action before listing them as such. Two years later the Postal Service issued a stamp with the POW/MIA flag on it, following Rolling Thunder's lobbying.[15]

The 1984 ceremony at which the Vietnam Unknown Soldier, later identified as Michael Blassie, was buried

In 1984 Sampley had gone to Washington again for another Vietnam War-related ceremony, the interment of apparently unidentified remains from that war in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A decade later he published an article in his newspaper asserting that the remains could, in fact, be identified. Items found with the remains in 1972, he alleged, indicated that the fallen serviceman was Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie, whose A-37 Dragonfly jet fighter had been shot down in the area five months before six bones found during the Battle of An Lộc. No other U.S. MIA within 2,500 square miles (6,500 km²) of where the remains were found, Sampley wrote, would have had the life raft, parachute, holster and identity card found with the body.[16]

Sampley contacted Blassie's family after publishing his article. Their inquiries found that the South Vietnamese Army patrol which found the bones had also found his ID card and a wallet with a picture of his family and relayed that information to U.S. forces in the area. However the Army lab charged with identifying remains found it unlikely that the remains were Blassie's based on identification techniques later found to be questionable; the ID and wallet had been lost or stolen during their transfer there. In 1980 they were classified as unknown; the remains were later buried as the Vietnam Unknown Soldier, despite not meeting selection criteria calling for 80% of the body, in the wake of political pressure from the president and Congress.[17]

In 1997 Vince Gonzales, a junior CBS News correspondent, read Sampley's article and began replicating the research with requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. He came to the same conclusion as Sampley, and the following year CBS reported that the remains were likely those of Blassie.[16] The remains were later exhumed and DNA was found to be a match to Blassie's family; they were reburied near his home and the crypt in which he had lain for 14 years at Arlington was deliberately left empty to symbolize the fallen from Vietnam still not returned home.[17] Sampley told CNN the whole process "was at the very best premature and at worst a politically expedient attempt to further close the books on the POW/MIA issue".[16]

In 1988 Vietnam returned the remains of Navy Cmdr. Edwin B. Tucker, who had been listed as MIA and presumed dead after his plane was shot down over the country in 1973. Shortly after they were buried, Sampley held a news conference in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the Navy's Atlantic Fleet, where Tucker had been based during his service. Sampley claimed that instead of having been just discovered by the Vietnamese, Tucker's remains had in fact been kept on public display during the intervening years, after he had been beaten severely by the villagers where he parachuted into. In order to get them back, Sampley claimed, the Tucker family had been forbidden to say this. Tucker's son publicly denied this the next day and questioned why anyone would keep an unpreserved human corpse on display under glass for that long.[9]

According to Susan Katz Keating, a former reporter for the conservative Washington Times who went from believing completely in the possibility of living POWs to considering it a hoax, Sampley told a similar story of a downed American pilot killed by natives of the country he had parachuted into early in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. She recalled him calling her about Robert Wetzel, another Navy pilot shot down over Iraq, saying that he was carved up by natives who found his nametag and assumed him to be Jewish, then distributed portions of his body as souvenirs and was telling her despite the Pentagon's attempts to keep the story secret; he had nevertheless told Wetzel's family. Wetzel was later released unharmed; Keating recalled that Sampley later told her he had never completely believed the story but told it anyway to keep attention on the plight of POWs still believed to be in Southeast Asia.[9] Later, Sampley responded that he had indeed found a story reporting that an American pilot had been beaten and killed by a Baghdad mob after being shot down and distributed it in good faith; he never told the Wetzels about it.[18]

In 1992 one of Sampley's protests resulted in the NLF publicly distancing itself from his actions. He had organized a group to disrupt a speech by President George H. W. Bush to the organization's annual assembly. NLF officials were able to prevent Sampley himself from attending the event, and Secret Service officers arrested him for trespassing before Bush appeared. But his group began heckling the president with chants of "No more lies!". After they refused Bush's requests to let him finish, he finally yelled "Would you please shut up and sit down!" at them; the incident made national news.[9][19] The NLF's leadership was fearful that this would damage their relationship with the administration, and Griffiths not only personally apologized to Bush in a letter[20] but took out newspaper ads with the same message.[9]

In the late 1980s an organization Sampley founded, The Last Firebase (TLF), began operating a booth near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where it sold T-shirts and other memorabilia to support the POW/MIA cause. This brought them into conflict with other veterans' groups, such as the NLF and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Not only did they object to commercial activity so close to what they considered to be a solemn site of reflection and remembrance, they pointed out that TLF and two other organizations that were using the adjacent space for similar purposes were operating under National Park Service (NPS) permits that were intended for public gatherings on federal parkland, such as the 24-hour vigils for POW/MIA servicemembers that they had started out doing.[4]

Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation (VVMF), who had spearheaded the effort to erect the memorial, was especially incensed. "[They're] a blight on what's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the country," he told the Washington City Paper in 1991, pointing to a photo of the trash the booths left behind. Scruggs' opposition was particularly antagonistic to Sampley and other POW/MIA activists who volunteered at the booths since Scruggs was highly skeptical of claims that any American military personnel otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, having suggested that believing they were was akin to believing that UFOs were real.[4]

Scruggs had also angered the veterans at the booths by saying that they perpetuated stereotypes of Vietnam veterans as disgruntled and alienated from society. He noted that he himself, like many other veterans, had gone onto a professional career, in his case in law, after his return from Vietnam and efforts to build the memorial. "I suppose some of them are down there having a good time", he said in 2001. "It's better than working at Wal-Mart."[4]

The NPS was reluctant to take action against TLF and the other organizations operating the booths, since they were in compliance with the terms of their permits,[21] which allow merchandise sales. In 1991 Scruggs and sculptor Frederick Hart, whose The Three Soldiers was added to the memorial shortly after its completion to make those it memorializes less abstract, discovered TLF was selling T-shirts with the sculpture on it, without having licensed the image from the sculptor and the VVMF, who jointly owned the copyright, and filed suit against Sampley and TLF for infringement.[4]

Sampley refused multiple offers from Scruggs to settle the case out of court, offering to let him and TLF license the image. He also rebuffed similar efforts by Tom Burch, another outspoken POW/MIA activist, to work out a settlement. Instead, Sampley attacked Hart in his newspaper, noting that by the sculptor's own recollection he had been gassed during antiwar demonstrations in the late 1960s and asserting that Hart had made a large amount of money from others' licensing fees (in fact, he did not keep any of the money he received).[9]

Scruggs came in for some criticism as well. Sampley noted that under the legislation which authorized the memorial, the fund Scruggs started to pay for it should have spent its remaining money and dissolved itself in 1984 after the memorial was completed and opened to the public. Instead, Sampley wrote, Scruggs had turned it into the VVMF and made it permanent, on the argument that some of the memorial's granite panels had already cracked and needed repair.[22]

Sampley noted that money that had been raised from the public to pay for those repairs was instead being spent on high-priced Washington lawyers in the lawsuit. He argued in court that since the statue had been placed on public land and was maintained at public expense, it was a "national symbol" that could not be copyrighted. Nevertheless, he offered to settle the case by having Homecoming II pay for the panel repairs.[22]

In 1993 the federal court hearing the case held for Hart and Scruggs. They were awarded almost $360,000 in unpaid royalties; as part of the judgment they were entitled to seize Sampley's house and business. Records he had filed with the court showed that he had made more money than the judgment from T-shirt sales.[9]

Sampley had formed one company, Red Hawk, to make the T-shirts, which it then sold to Homecoming II, a non-profit POW/MIA organization started by others in the 1980s whose founders had asked Sampley to take control of after a few years. Sampley himself claimed to have almost no money, but Red Hawk grossed almost $2 million over three years[9] (Sampley claimed later that Scruggs's lawyers had deliberately exaggerated that number by including revenues from his for-profit businesses[22]). At the same time, Keating wrote in her book, the Homecoming II volunteers who manned the booths received nothing beyond free lodging at a house owned by the organization.[9]

Before Hart and Scruggs could collect, however, Sampley, who had vowed never to pay "homage" to Scruggs,[22] shut down both Red Hawk and Homecoming II, transferring their assets to new companies and organizations. By the time collection efforts began, there was nothing to collect.[9] He never paid, and Scruggs and Hart eventually stopped trying to collect.[23]

Sampley did comply with the aspect of the court's ruling enjoining him from further sales of T-shirts with the statue on them. In 1995, as a result of the court's ruling, the NPS banned all organizations with permits to operate booths on the Mall from selling T-shirts, save the company that operates the guest services kiosks;[4] two years later the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban as not infringing on First Amendment rights.[24] Sampley later attributed the whole affair to his own stubbornness. "It was the biggest mistake of my life", he told the City Paper in 2001.[4]

Scruggs later told Keating that two months before Sampley's death, he ran into him at an event at the memorial, and the two had a pleasant and civil conversation over their mutual heart problems; he recalled that Sampley looked weak. Sampley later donated $5,000 to the foundation for an educational center. Although Sampley never said so, Scruggs believes it was an attempt to reconcile.[23][lower-alpha 2]

Senators John Kerry (left) and John McCain (shown in 2014), both members of the Select Committee, were attacked by Sampley-led groups when they ran for president.

In 1991, the Senate convened a select committee to examine the POW/MIA issue, chaired by John Kerry and thus known as the Kerry Committee. It began holding hearings during the next Congress. Sampley and other activists were dubious about whether the committee, whose membership included all the sitting senators who were Vietnam-era combat veterans, was really committed to fully investigating the issue.[18] They believed that its true purpose was to resolve the issue by concluding that all POW/MIAs had been accounted for and none were still alive in order to clear a major obstacle to normalizing relations with Vietnam.[25]

The committee did indeed reach a conclusion that if there were any remaining living POWs, there were not many and all the other cases that could be accounted for had been, prompting criticism from one of its members, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who had introduced the resolution that created the committee. Kerry and John McCain, ranking Republican on the committee and himself a former POW, both rejected claims that the committee had covered up evidence contradictory to that conclusion, or allowed federal officials to lie under oath to the committee.[26] Early in the process, Sampley had called for Kerry to resign after what he alleged was witness tampering by committee staff who reported to him; in response, he claimed, the committee began investigating him and his business activities related to POW/MIA activism; when Keating published her book the next years, with an entire chapter devoted to him, Sampley accused her of doing so at the behest of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he believed had been trying to discredit him and other activists who believed there were still living POWs.[18]

McCain in particular had drawn the activists' ire early in the hearings. He had stated publicly that most of them were "not zealots in a good cause. They are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam."[18] McCain also publicly embraced former North Vietnamese Army colonel Bùi Tín while reducing one POW/MIA family member to tears with harsh questioning.[5]

As the hearings wound down, in December 1992, Sampley wrote an article about McCain for his newspaper, calling him a "Manchurian candidate", beholden to the Vietnamese and depicting him on the cover with a queen of diamonds in the background, alluding to the film and novel from which the term came. While in Washington, he began leaving copies of his newspaper in every senator's office. Although he intended to skip McCain's, he said later that he had been in a hurry and did not look closely at the name on the door, and thus left one in the Arizona senator's.[18]

McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter, confronted him when he entered and ordered him to leave, which Sampley said he was already doing when Salter followed him into the hall because, according to Salter, Sampley had told him he had something to tell him. In Sampley's account, that was an invitation to a fistfight outside. Salter, by his own later admission, touched Sampley first, pushing him from behind—after, Sampley wrote, following him down the hall; Salter says he merely tapped Sampley's shoulder. In response, Sampley "decked" him.[5][9][18]

Capitol police intervened and arrested Sampley after, he claimed, Salter misrepresented the situation. After two days in jail, he was released. Salter asked him if he would agree to stay away from the senator and his staff, but Sampley refused, so he pressed the assault charge. The judge at trial took Salter's word, and sentenced Sampley to time served and 180 days' probation. He also issued a restraining order similarly barring Sampley from contact with McCain or his staff.[9][18]

In 2000 McCain sought the Republican presidential nomination. Sampley and other veterans still angry with the senator over his 1993 performance formed Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. On his newspaper's website, Sampley posted a page of links to articles by himself and others, going back to 1997, criticizing McCain's service as a POW. In 1993 during the hearings, Sampley claimed, McCain along with Rep. Pete Peterson, another former Vietnam POW who became the first postwar U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, had privately beseeched the Vietnamese government to never make its files on American POWs public. Sampley suggested that during his confinement, McCain had collaborated with the Vietnamese at one point in exchange for medical treatment,[lower-alpha 3] and wanted to prevent that from becoming public knowledge.[27][28]

Four years later, Kerry, a Navy veteran of the war who had called Sampley a "stupid ass" in response to his attacks on McCain, won the Democratic nomination for president. Sampley helped organize Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and disseminated material disparaging the Massachusetts senator's antiwar activism as unpatriotic and a betrayal of his fellow veterans.[29] McCain came to Kerry's defense, saying that Sampley was "the most despicable person I have ever had the misfortune to encounter." Sampley called the remark "unbecoming" a senator[3] and later addressed it more specifically: "What does that say about his relationship with the Vietnamese prison guards whom he claims brutally tortured him daily?"[18]

In 2008, McCain again ran for president and this time won his party's nomination, although he lost to Democrat Barack Obama in the general election. Once again, Sampley organized efforts to oppose him and distributed his accusations of collaboration, this time in the form of Vetting John McCain, a self-published book.[30] He was joined by other veterans who had supported the effort before and former Republican congressmen Bill Hendon and John LeBoutillier, who had strongly supported the cause of POW/MIA activists during brief House terms in the early 1980s. "He took away the only leverage we had for getting those soldiers back", Sampley told the New York Daily News, referring to McCain's role in normalizing relations with Vietnam in the 1990s. "Why? He was paying back the Vietnamese for keeping quiet about him."[31]

In his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For, McCain's opinion of Sampley was mutual:

[He] was quite a character ... I took him for a charlatan within five minutes of meeting him. And nothing he has done since has caused me to change that opinion ... During our hearings, he would boo or hiss every witness who cast doubt on the conspiracy theory or every time I would ask a skeptical question. He liked to give me the finger once or twice a day, and I would usually give it right back.

McCain wrote that he later decided to take Sampley's accusations in stride, referring to himself as the "Manchurian Candidate" in speeches "probably more often than Sampley has repeated the accusation."[32] It was repeated and disseminated among McCain's critics after Sampley's death, especially during the administration of Donald Trump, whom McCain had criticized frequently until his own death in 2018.[33]