Americans had been held as prisoners of war in Vietnam from almost the first day hostilities began. Lieutenant (junior grade) Everett Alvarez Jr., a Navy A-4 pilot, was the first prisoner of war taken in North Vietnam on August 5, 1964. Although pilots made up the majority of prisoners of war, soldiers and civilians were also captured. Some were held for years in jungle prisons in the south or in Cambodia. Most of them were eventually marched north to Hanoi, where they spent the final years of the war.

Although North Vietnam had signed the Geneva Convention in 1949, which governed the treatment of prisoners of war, it did not follow the convention's regulations. The North Vietnamese used many loopholes to excuse their treatment of POWs. For example, they claimed that since the United States had never formally declared war against Vietnam, captive Americans were not prisoners...