I, too, was very suspicious, and didn't want to believe my country would leave people behind. So, realizing that I was enjoying "contempt prior to investigation" I researched it. The US left POWs behind in both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts.

If you look a little, you'll see that none of the people who were captured in Laos and Cambodia came home. That was approximately the same number as were repatriated, hundreds rather than thousands. They were to be released after Kissinger and Nixon provided funds for the rebuilding of North Vietnam. Nixon left the presidency in disgrace, and the American people were in no mood to spend money on North Vietnam. The issue to America's, and more specifically Nixon and Kissinger's shame, died.

In Korea, none of the people captured in China or the Soviet Union came back. Most of them were fliers in hot pursuit who were then shot down themselves. Korea was ostensibly a UN conflict, the Soviet Union was/is on the Security Council, and the political decision was to abandon the fliers to maintain the fiction that the USSR wasn't fighting the UN.

I'd provide citations, but folks won't believe me unless they do their own research.

Arf