The president of the United States told Kathy Borah Duez of Le Roy, Ill., to shut up and sit down last week.
Duez was just one shouter in a group of headline-making hecklers, but she chose to take the executive order personally.
”Finally, I got his attention,” said the presidential provocateur.
”Before, nobody knew if Bush realized how we feel. Now we know he understands.”
The national media recorded President Bush`s frustration and anger at a contentious gathering of POW and MIA families in a suburban Washington hotel ballroom last Friday.
The morning after the Bush-baiting session, Duez sported a homemade button that read ”Sit Down and Shut Up! Bush `92” It is a campaign button, but definitely not one promoting the incumbent`s re-election.
The campaign it speaks to is one that dominates the lives of Duez and her family. It is their wrenching fight on behalf of Duez`s oldest brother, Daniel V. Borah Jr., a Navy pilot shot down over Laos in 1972 and never heard from again.
The pilot`s family had once accepted that he was dead, but they now believe they have photographic proof that he is alive and other evidence that shows the government has misled them concerning its knowledge of his status. Their quest has taken this inherently private family into public activism. It has seen two family members dispatched into the jungles of Laos and found others shouting down a president they once would have supported without question.
”I believe Bush had to know about American POWs being held over there because he was head of the CIA. I dislike Bush very, very much, and I think he is a liar and a hypocrite,” said Duez, whose close relationship with her big brother is reflected in her fierce advocacy of his cause.
Were it not for a twist in fate, Duez, 43, would probably have been leading cheers for Bush`s re-election campaign rather than helping to provoke him into an embarrassing public snit, she said.
”I grew up in a conservative Republican, love-your-government, love-your-country family,” said Duez, who lives with her husband and stepson in Le Roy, a central Illinois town near Bloomington.
A native of Olney in southeastern Illinois, a town near the Indiana border, Duez is the second of the six children of Betty and Dan Borah Sr. Her father still sits on the board of a local bank but is retired from his lumber business and the chairmanship of the Richland County Republican Party-a post he held more than 12 years.
Now 69, Dan Sr. spent most of early summer serving instead as county coordinator for the now-abandoned presidential campaign of Ross Perot.
”My father has been a staunch Republican all of his life, and there are people in Olney who think he`s gone off his rocker now,” Duez said.
Dan Sr. was at his daughter`s side when Bush told her to sit down and shut up. The elder Borah was already sitting down and silent, but his level of outrage is just as high, he said.
”I agreed with what she and the others were saying, but I would have been too embarrassed so I sat down,” the father said.
Borah has come to a painful conclusion after 20 years. ”I feel our government decided that the lives of my son and others were not worth the trouble it would cause to get them out,” he said.
Initially listed as missing in action but quickly reclassified as a prisoner of war, Lt. Borah was not among the 591 prisoners freed at the war`s end in 1973. More than 2,000 had been expected in the release, but then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared no more POWs remained in Vietnam. That has been the official stance ever since.
In 1977, the Navy said Borah was ”presumed killed in action.” But the Borah family believes that Dan Jr.-a University of Illinois graduate known as ”the Dazzler” by his fellow pilots-is still a prisoner in South Vietnam. They believe they have pictures to prove it. And they believe that their government has misled or lied to them repeatedly.
”People say we are just a poor grieving family who wants Dan to be alive, but we did our grieving 20 years ago,” Duez said. ”Now we are angry.”
She let fly with that anger at Bush when he tried to address nearly 400 members of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
Many of those in attendance long ago accepted the government`s stance that probably all the war`s 2,266 unaccounted for soldiers are dead. Many league members come to the annual gatherings to share memories and a kinship of heartbreak tempered by pride and patriotism, officials said.
But there were also those who, like the Borahs, had come to vent anger, despair and doubts about the government`s loyalty to its own soldiers. It was this contingent that heckled the president.
Women who looked not unlike Bush`s own wife stood up and assailed him as a liar. Men in suits jeered him. A pregnant woman in a floral print dress hissed at Secret Service agents who swarmed into the hotel.
”I think it was disgusting and embarrassing to the families,” Mary Backley, a league spokeswoman, said after Bush had departed. The league`s leadership apologized to Bush this week, saying his response to the
”outrageous” actions of a ”small minority” was justified.
Impromptu demonstration
The display of dissent provided a glimpse into the tensions that tear at the league and its 3,800 members, some of whom also belong to the more confrontational National Alliance of Families for the Return of America`s Missing Servicemen, formed three years ago.
The heckling of the president was not the only spasm of dissent among league members last week. A ”Living Quilt” ceremony staged the next day under gloomy skies next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial began as a patriotic commemoration.
But just as encircled family members finished singing ”America the Beautiful,” a woman broke from the circle, strode to its center, raised a fist and began chanting, ”Bring them home now!”
A league official tried to stop the impromptu demonstration, telling the protestor, ”This is not the time.” Others rushed in. Two men had a brief shoving and shouting match. ”Look at me, I`m shaking,” cried a middle-age woman as she staggered away.
Although the tensions stem from myriad emotional and historical factors, the league is split into two groups: those who trust the government implicitly and those who no longer trust it at all.
From a background of small-town conservatism, the Borahs have become prominent among the POW-MIA families who view the government with reflexive distrust. And they are as amazed as any by their transformation.
”I`ve come to believe that our government has gotten so powerful that it does anything it wants and then makes excuses later,” Dan Sr. said. ”I never thought I would feel that way about my government, but I do now.”
In the beginning, the family accepted the Navy`s report that on Sept. 24, 1972, Lt. Borah was shot down during a bombing mission over Laos and its conclusion that he was missing in action.
But now they believe it was only the first of many lies or misleading statements, the Borahs said. ”At the worst they lied,” said brother Jim, 44. ”At the least, they never told us all that they knew.”
Borah was allegedly killed after parachuting into enemy troops, they said. The family accepted his death-until one day in 1990, when a package came from a man they`d never heard of.
It contained more than 20 photos the sender contended were taken of Borah just a few weeks earlier in the jungles of Laos.
”I was raised to believe my government told the truth. Nothing changed my mind until I saw the pictures,” Dan Sr. said. ”We are convinced it`s him.”
`We`ve heard it all before`
In his speech before them, Bush said the POW and MIA families have been
”exploited by con men.” The Borahs, too, were skeptical and kept quiet about the photos (which came with no request for payment) until they investigated the source, which proved to be a network of Americans and Laotians in the U.S. and in Indochina who seek proof that soldiers remain captive.
The family made the photographs public last year, and shortly after that they received a packet from the government with photos of a Laotian villager who, the government said, was actually the man pictured in the Borah photos.
To counter the government`s claim, Dan Sr. spent $10,000 to send his sons Jim and Chris to Laos to meet and interview the villager. The brothers spent three weeks tracking and interviewing him. They concluded that although the Laotian bears a striking resemblance to the man in the network`s photographs, he is not the same man. The family holds to its belief that the network`s photos show Lt. Borah.
Recently, the Borahs paid $2,250 to an assistant professor of photojournalism at Middle Tennessee State University who conducted a digital imaging analysis comparing the government`s photos to the network`s.
”They are not the same individual in my opinion,” wrote the $750-a-day expert, verifying the family`s conclusion.
At the National League of Families meeting, officials of the Pentagon`s Defense Intelligence Agency conducted a session aimed at debunking the Borah photos and others purported to show U.S. soldiers still in Indochina.
None of the Borahs attended the session. They lunched at Hardees instead. ”We`ve heard it all before. We don`t believe the government,” said Dan Sr.
The Borahs and other POW-MIA activists cite a variety of reasons why their government might want to cover up the existence of American POWs. Some believe it is simply a matter of politicians and bureaucrats hiding mistakes of the past to preserve their reputations and careers, they said.
Others cite complex conspiracy theories. Duez is among those who believe the CIA and other covert groups financed unauthorized missions in Indochina by selling drugs. According to this theory, the government fears the release of missing Americans would lead to the public exposure of those drug operations. Duez admitted that some in the POW-MIA activist movement see conspiracy everywhere. But she doesn`t blame or mock them.
”We were told by one person that our family should never travel all in one car because it would be easy for the government to stage an accident,”
she said. ”Some people are real, real paranoid, and then there is us.”
The family`s mistrust of government officials did not extend to all who spoke at the league gathering. The Borahs did not heckle U.S. Sens. John Kerry of Nebraska and Robert Smith of New Hampshire, who are leading an investigation into charges that American soldiers remain in Southeast Asia.
”When the truth is out, I don`t think it is going to be the finest chapter in American history,” Smith said. ”I don`t think things were handled very well. If they had been, you would have gotten information long ago that you are trying to get now.”
The committee recently convinced the Pentagon to release previously classified documents, including a secret list of 133 soldiers believed by intelligence experts to be held in enemy prisons after the war`s end.
Lt. Borah was on that list. His family was not surprised. A year ago, the POW-MIA network said that government intelligence agents had tracked Borah`s movements in prison camps from when he parachuted safely to the ground until the end of the war, the family said.
”They lied from the start when they said he was missing in action. They knew where he was,” Duez said.
Official acknowledgment of the release of the list did nothing to restore the family`s lost faith in their government.
”It just reaffirmed the fact that they haven`t been telling us everything they know,” said Jim Borah, ”and it just makes us that much madder.”
