<P> This missing in action issue has been a highly emotional one to those involved, and is often considered the last depressing, divisive aftereffect of the Vietnam War . To skeptics, "live prisoners" is a conspiracy theory unsupported by motivation or evidence, and the foundation for a cottage industry of charlatans who have preyed upon the hopes of the families of the missing . As two skeptics wrote in 1995, "The conspiracy myth surrounding the Americans who remained missing after Operation Homecoming in 1973 had evolved to baroque intricacy . By 1992, there were thousands of zealots--who believed with cultlike fervor that hundreds of American POWs had been deliberately and callously abandoned in Indochina after the war, that there was a vast conspiracy within the armed forces and the executive branch--spanning five administrations--to cover up all evidence of this betrayal, and that the governments of Communist Vietnam and Laos continued to hold an unspecified number of living American POWs, despite their adamant denials of this charge ." Believers reject such notions; as one wrote in 1994, "It is not conspiracy theory, not paranoid myth, not Rambo fantasy . It is only hard evidence of a national disgrace: American prisoners were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War . They were abandoned because six presidents and official Washington could not admit their guilty secret . They were forgotten because the press and most Americans turned away from all things that reminded them of Vietnam ." </P> <P> There are also a large number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong MIAs from the Vietnam war whose remains have yet to be recovered . In 1974, General Võ Nguyên Giáp stated that they had 330,000 missing in action . As of 1999, estimates of those missing were usually around 300,000 . This figure does not include those missing from former South Vietnamese armed forces, who are given little consideration under the Vietnamese regime . The Vietnamese government did not have any organized program to search for its own missing, in comparison to what it had established to search for American missing . The discrepancy angered some Vietnamese; as one said, "It's crazy for the Americans to keep asking us to find their men . We lost several times more than the Americans did . In any war there are many people who disappear . They just disappear ." In the 2000s, thousands of Vietnamese were hiring psychics in an effort to find the remains of missing family members . The Vietnamese Army organizes what it considers to be the best of the psychics, as part of its parapsychology force trying to find remains . Additionally, remains dating from the earlier French colonial era are sometimes discovered: in January 2009, the remains of at least 50 anti-French resistance fighters dating from circa 1946 to 1947 were discovered in graves located under a former market in central Hanoi . </P> <P> As of August 28, 2018 according to the U.S. Department of Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office, US Military and Civilian personnel still unaccounted for number 1,594 </P> <P> According to the Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office, as of June 20, 2018 there were still 126 U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the Cold War . </P>

German forces were turned back for the first time in world war ii at apex