Isn't it clear by now there aren't any Vietnam POWs?

Congress last year required selected federal agencies fly the POW-MIA flag with Old Glory on six holidays, including Veterans Day. So, Wednesday, the black flag with the silhouette of a prisoner was hanging sullenly in the morning rain over post offices and office buildings, as well as many town halls and Legion halls.

What is the point?

The flags were produced by a private organization, the National League of POW-MIA Families, back in the '70s to beat the drum for US soldiers missing or held prisoner in Vietnam.

Isn't it clear by now that there aren't any Vietnam POWs? That there never were any after the war ended in 1973? That virtually all MIAs have been accounted for? That "Rambo" was just a movie?

The POW-MIA phenomenon is brilliantly described by H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers University in "MIA or Mythmaking in America," (Rutgers University Press) published in 1992 and revised 1997.

America elected Nixon in 1968. He claimed to have a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. He was lying, we now know. His plan was to keep fighting, to avoid the disgrace of losing a war. But the Trickster had a problem. The country was tired of the war, peace negotiations had begun and there was no emotional support for the fighting.

With help from a little-known businessman named Ross Perot, Nixon came up with the POW-MIA issue, with the flag, the family groups, the bracelets. It was brilliant, in its perverse way. It fired up enough emotional support to keep the war going another few years, and get hundreds of thousands more people killed.

It fired up enough emotional support to get hundreds of thousands more people killed.

"By 1972, many Americans believed we'd entered the war to get our POWs out," Franklin said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Hollywood sensed the potential of the POW idea, and turned out the Rambo and Chuck Norris films. Perhaps, Franklin speculates, we couldn't deal with defeat, so we redefined the war with US pilots as victims. Perhaps the movies massaged the national spirit by replaying the war so we could win.

The point is that it was never true. Years of Bo Gritz commando raids, rewards offered, supposed "live sightings" and stunts such as floating bottles with cash and notes down the Mekong River has never produced a single unrepatriated American POW.

The POW question has now been investigated by three congressional committees, by the National Defense University, by the departments of State and Defense. Each case has been exhaustively checked out.

There are no living POWs, they all concluded. There are only 2,078 MIAs listed from the war - a tiny number, given the terrain and length of the conflict. And though the bodies haven't been recovered, all but a handful have been accounted for.

To keep the myth alive, as true believers do, is a disservice to the families. How can they close the book when they're told of a faint chance their loved one is alive?

It also obscures the real veterans' issues of substance abuse, medical care, jobs. The real MIA's are in shelters and prisons. They're here. And it ignores the devastation suffered by Vietnam.

We learned much about ourselves in Vietnam, at such cost, yet, Franklin warns, we're on the verge of forgetting it. All we remember are the movies.

As a first step back to reality, strike the flags.