Out of a Movement, a National Emblem
By: Craig Timberg, Washington Post
(Printed in the Sunday, March 11, 2001, Edition of Times Union, Albany NY.)

Experts say the use of POW/MIA flags alongside the US flag is without precedent. The man’s head is bowed in silhouette. Above is a guard tower, below are the words “you are not forgotten.” And three decades after a former Army pilot first sketched the stark image to commemorate those missing in action from America’s longest war, it has become an enduring emblem of Vietnam, a flag second in popularity only to Old Glory itself.

The POW/MIA flag, appearing almost always in mournful black and white, has flown over the White House, and the Super Bowl, at the New York Stock Exchange and at every US Post office in 48 states.

Historians and flag experts call the proliferation of the POW/MIA flag unprecedented in the history of the United States and perhaps the world. Never before, they say, have sovereign states and nations flown the flag of a political movement alongside their own.

In part because of that official embrace, the flag born to urge the speedy return of captured US service men and women continues to grow in power and popularity. Dealers say it’s their second biggest seller after the Star and Stripes.

The flag was created in 1971 by the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. It grew from Vietnam, but to veterans organizations it has come to represent ALL the missing from US Military actions, dating back to World War II, a group totaling 88,000 left behind; fewer than 2500 are from Vietnam.

The flag’s creator is a former World War II Army Air Forces pilot named Newton Heisley, now 80 and living in Colorado Springs. He first sketched the imagery in pencil while working for an advertising agency contracted to design the POW-MIA flag.

The man’s head shown bowed forward is a silhouette of Heisley’s son Jeffrey, then 24 and suffering from hepatitis after a Marine Corps training program in Quantico VA. The words “You are not forgotten” came from Heisley’s memory of long military flights across the South Pacific, when he sometimes found himself imagining the terror of being downed, captured and…forgotten.

Federal law requires that on six holidays the flag be flown at all US Post offices, the capitol of each state, the White House, national cemeteries, military bases and the memorials for the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The holidays are: Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day and National POW/MIA day, the third Friday of September.