There is a chair at every formal Navy dinner that is set but not occupied. A glass turned upside down, a single rose, a slice of lemon on a plate. It is the missing man table — the table set for the one who cannot be there, the prisoner of war or the missing in action, the sailor who went out and did not come back and whose fate is not fully known. POW/MIA Recognition Day is the third Friday in September, and it is a day the Navy takes seriously, because the Navy has people it has not yet brought home.
The Scale of the Missing
The United States has accounted for the remains of some of the men lost in its wars, but a significant number remain unaccounted for — their fates uncertain, their families given a status rather than a closure. The Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency works continuously to identify remains, research archival records, and conduct field investigations that can bring answers to families decades after the conflict ended. Vietnam-era cases remain the largest category of unresolved Navy and Marine Corps missing. The Korean War and World War II have their own unresolved cases, in numbers that are difficult to fully comprehend.
For the Navy specifically, the missing include aviators who were shot down over North Vietnam, sailors and Marines killed in actions whose circumstances were never fully resolved, and men lost at sea or in circumstances where no remains were recoverable. The accounting process is painstaking, scientific, and never fully complete. Every year, the DPAA makes identifications — returns names to families — that resolve cases that have been open for half a century. Every year, more names remain on the list.
The POW/MIA Bracelet
The POW/MIA bracelet emerged in the early 1970s as a way for civilians to carry the names of missing or captive servicemembers as a reminder of their status. Millions of bracelets were made and worn during the Vietnam era, each stamped with a name, a service branch, and a date. The people who wore them — many of them civilians with no direct military connection — committed to wearing the bracelet until their servicemember came home or his fate was determined. Some wearers kept their bracelets for decades. Some never took them off at all.
The bracelet tradition has continued beyond Vietnam. New bracelets have been made for personnel missing from subsequent conflicts. The object is simple and the commitment it represents is not — a daily acknowledgment that there is someone whose status is not resolved, whose family is still waiting, whose country has not yet done everything it can do.
What the Navy Owes the Missing
The Navy’s commitment to accounting for the missing is both a legal obligation and a moral one. The Geneva Conventions require signatories to account for the dead and missing; the United States has gone beyond that minimum obligation in establishing a dedicated agency and devoting significant resources to the identification process. But the obligation is also simpler and more personal than any treaty: these were people who accepted orders, went where they were sent, and did not come back. The institution that sent them owes them a reckoning.
POW/MIA Recognition Day is, in part, a statement that the reckoning is ongoing — that the cases are not closed, that the families have not been forgotten, that the Navy and the country still count these men among their own. The missing man table at the formal dinner is not a gesture. It is a promise.
The Navy’s Prisoners of War
The American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam — the men of the Hanoi Hilton and the other camps where aviators were imprisoned for years — include some of the most remarkable people in the history of American military service. Shot down over North Vietnam, subjected to years of imprisonment and torture, isolated from their families and their country, these men maintained their military organization and their resistance despite everything the North Vietnamese attempted. The story of the POWs is a story about what human beings can endure when they have a framework of duty and brotherhood to hold onto. The Navy’s aviators who endured captivity in North Vietnam are part of that story, and their experience is part of what POW/MIA Recognition Day honors.
If you served or want to honor someone who did — including those who didn’t come home — The Ship’s Store carries collections for the ships where they served.