MRFF Ad. Board Member Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.) Responds to Letter Sent by Nat’l League of Families to Kevin Forrest, Dir., Manchester VA Medical Center in Which They Oppose MRFF’s Proposed POW/MIA Display at VAMC

Published On: March 8, 2022|Categories: Top News|1 Comment|
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at a lectern with American flags behind.

From: Lawrence Wilkerson [email address withheld]
To: Pam Cain [email address withheld]
Sent: Tue, Mar 8, 2022 5:44 pm
Subject: Your Letter to MRFF of 7 March 2022   (*see original letter below)

Ms Pam Cain
Board of Directors
National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia
5673 Columbia Pike, Suite 100
Falls Church, VA. 22041

Dear Director Cain,

As a member of the Board of Advisors to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), I was asked by Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s chief executive, to respond to your letter to Mr. Kevin Forrest, Director of the Manchester VA Medical Center, dated 7 March 2022.  This is that response.

When I was Special Assistant to the late-General Colin Powell in his capacity as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, my office in the Pentagon was co-located with the chairman’s special group for POW/MIA affairs; so, I’m very familiar with the efforts of your group over the many years of those efforts.  I’m also a Vietnam Veteran and as such was familiar with your efforts even before working for Powell.  I applaud those efforts and wish you continued success, as I do the tireless efforts of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC), working to recover our men and women’s remains the world over.

Your personal letter, under POW/MIA letterhead, to Mr. Forrest worries me nonetheless.  There are several points of my concern.

First, what you describe as almost sacrosanct in your letter’s paragraph three is not quite accurate, and its inaccuracy drives home a major argument of the MRFF: every member of the military is NOT a believer in the Christian deity, far from it.  Perhaps a long time ago this might have been mostly true, but it is not at all true today.   In fact, it was not even true for the times you were describing.

You wrote: “They relied on faith in God…”, when referring to the POWs in Vietnam.  I happen to know that one of the most courageous of them all relied on the philosophy of the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, more than any supernatural deity, though many have tried to twist and warp and then claim Admiral Jim Stockdale’s bravery and beliefs since he was released.  I was very fortunate to undergo a seminar presented by Professor Joseph Brennan and Admiral Stockdale at the U.S. Naval War College — a seminar on ethics, to be precise — and it was quite clear to me after that seminar what Jim Stockdale believed had given him the stamina and strength to survive his ordeal — and to muster the energy and courage to kill himself at the end.  Fortunately, fate intervened — which the Admiral would have found ironic and clearly in line with Epictetus’ reasoning — and he did not have to commit suicide.   So, you are even mistaken in your principal example.  Today, you would be gravely mistaken more generally as there are a polyglot of beliefs — as well as agnostics and atheists — in today’s military.

Secondly, you are of course completely correct in your paragraph 7 about the treatment of the American flag and MRFF will correct that mistake immediately.  We simply ask others to correct their mistakes as well.

Thirdly, one of your major mistakes is claiming that Christianity — and its chief literary instrument, the New Testament, and its supporting Old Testament — are so general in their acceptance that they carry no connotation of a specific religion at all and therefore do not signify the U.S. Government’s endorsement of a specific religion by their display at a U.S. Government facility.  More than five billion people on this planet disagree with you.  This problem is at the root of the reason our Founding Fathers avoided even a mention of religion in the base document of our Constitution and then, in the added Bill of Rights, they specifically stated that the government would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”   Our Founders looked toward the many religious wars in Europe and would have none of it.  George Washington even wrote a special letter to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island — Touro Synagogue — in order to ensure its rabbi and his congregation of their protection under U.S. law.  He said, famously, “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”  In August of this year, at the Synagogue, the congregation will celebrate Washington’s letter to them and his visit to Rhode Island (1790) and the “75th Annual George Washington Letter Reading” will take place on 21 August.  You might want to attend.  I have been there and it is a thrilling place if one believes in freedom and liberty.  Later in my life, when I became chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state, I saw how vital our principles were as I watched religious conflict in Iraq and other countries in the Levant tear apart entire societies and cultures.

Lastly, several other aspects of your letter disturb me:

(1) Although the National League of POW/MIA Families was formed in 1970, it has no connection that I can find to the creation of the POW/MIA table tradition.

(2) A Bible was not part of the original POW/MIA table tradition, which was started in 1967 by a group of Vietnam combat pilots known as the “River Rats” meeting in Thailand.

(3) An exhaustive search by MRFF’s research department of decades of newspapers and other publications determined that the practice of adding a Bible to such displays didn’t emerge until over thirty years later, when the VFW Ladies Auxiliary published a script for the setting of the table in a 1999 issue of their magazine and added a Bible among the table’s items.

(4) Around the same time that the VFW Ladies Auxiliary’s script was published, the National League of POW/MIA Families published a similar script for the later six-man variation of the original display, which included a line saying: “The Bible represents the strength gained through faith to sustain us and those lost from our country, founded as one nation under God.”  The publication of its POW/MIA table script, over thirty years after the table tradition was begun, appears to be the first occasion.

(5) The American Legion, which is hardly an anti-religious organization, has never included a Bible in its POW/MIA table script, sticking to the original tradition created by the “River Rats” in 1967.

(6) You state in your letter that many organizations have adopted the POW/MIA table in various forms, but later write that a POW/MIA table that omits YOUR organization’s POW/MIA flag would have “no meaningful significance.” Really? The flag of an organization that didn’t even exist yet when the POW/MIA table tradition was started is required in order to give the table some significance? What right does your organization have to dictate what belongs in a display that it had absolutely nothing to do with creating?  This, it seems to me, is a vital question you need to answer — for yourself as well as the general public.

In conclusion, we at the MRFF are NOT anti-religion; we are FOR the U.S. Constitution.  Let as many beliefs flourish as the world will hold, so long as they comport with domestic laws and do not impact adversely the freedom and liberties of others.  This is the very essence of our democracy.  We only lament that more Americans don’t understand this important distinction.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Wilkerson
Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired)
MRFF Advisory Board Member


Letter from National League of Families that MRFF Advisory Board Member Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Retired) is responding to:

NATIONAL LEAGUE OF FAMILIES
OF AMERICAN PRISONERS AND MISSING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
5673 COLUMBIA PIKE, SUITE 100, FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041

PH —703/465-7432   www.pow-miafamilies.org   FAX —703/465-7433

March 7, 2022

Mr. Kevin Forrest
Director, Manchester VA Medical Center
718 Smyth Rd.
Manchester, NH 03104

Dear Mr. Forrest:

As a member of the Board of Directors for the National League of POW/MIA Families, I am writing on behalf of Ann Mills Griffiths, Chairman of the Board/CEO, copied here. Our organization was incorporated in 1970 with a single, threefold mission: the release of all prisoners, the fullest possible accounting for the missing, and repatriation of all recoverable remains of those who died serving our nation during the Vietnam War.

The League remains active and vigilant. We continue to advocate for expanding our government’s efforts, providing input and guidance from our 50+ years of involvement with this issue and assuring that our country’s sacred obligation to those who serve will be respected and carried out seriously.

The Missing Man Table honoring POWs and MIAs was introduced by USAF personnel, then operating out of Thailand during the Vietnam War. It has been adopted in various forms by many Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs) and other fraternal organizations and businesses at civilian and military locations throughout the country and around the world.

The League conducts a Missing Man Table ceremony at each annual meeting and, since its inception, the Holy Bible has represented what we, as impacted families, felt and later heard in testimony from our returned POWs. They relied on faith in God, their families and our Nation for their survival and ability to endure torture and return home.

The Holy Bible represented faith and hope, but did not represent “religious” or “nonreligious”. Accompanying items on the table are pertinent to the POW experience writ large, not meant to be judged by today’s politically correct terminology.

The recent legal action to create a “second” or “separate” POW/MIA display is concerning for the following reasons:

1. The United States of America flag should NEVER be used as a tablecloth, draped across a table. We find that distasteful, offensive and inappropriate. The symbol of our Nation should be proudly flown higher than any other ensign and ONLY be draped over the caskets of those who have sacrificed all for our country.

2. A second display with “POW/MIA” in its title, but omitting the POW/MIA flag and the other items currently a part of the Missing Man Table, would have NO meaningful significance to the heroes who served our Nation as Prisoner of War or Missing in Action.

We urge the VA Medical Center and all agencies and organizations involved to use common sense and, if determined to have a second display, make NO reference to those who honorably served our country as POW/MIA. To do otherwise would be insulting to America’s Armed Forces and to all citizens who respect the Stars and Stripes.

The League supports the work of the VA Medical Center to offer comprehensive health services and care of our deserving veteran population. It is our fervent hope that you will carefully consider the second display and that Mr. Weinstein and others will realize the need to do the right thing!

Respectfully and with sincere best wishes,

Pam Cain
Daughter, Col Oscar Mauterer, USAF, MIA Laos 2/15/66
Board of Directors, National League of POW/MIA Families

cc: Ann Mills Griffiths, Chairman of the Board/CEO, National League of POW/MIA Families
Michael Weinstein, President, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)

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One Comment

  1. MRFF Supporter March 9, 2022 at 2:11 pm

    As always Col W taught me some things.

    Re Pam M. Cain,
    2011 same pitch to CNN who reported it like fact
    “A Bible represents the ‘strength gained through faith in our country, founded as one nation under God, to sustain those lost from our midst.'”
    http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/15/pentagon.pow.mia/index.html

    So she’s been pushing this over a decade – surely been advised to knock it off many times.

    She uses two insidious methods:
    – other peoples’ polite reluctance to push back given her family’s loss, and
    – attempting to normalize her corrupted version of this secular ritual.
    ______________________________________-

    A Bible on these tables is NOT the norm. I saw MIA tables in many military installations over 25 years of service and recall a religious object – a Bible – once. Us JAGs advised command to remove it and they did.

    First time I saw an MIA table the salt and lemon reminded me of Jewish Seder bitters and salt water, but that didn’t make me think it was a Jewish ceremony like putting a christian Bible on the table would have said “Christian thing here.”

    Ms. Cain wants to justify a christian Bible on the table because she is sure that every MIA and their loved ones need to follow the Bible’s messages about suffering and survival, which is the baseline tenet of by the numerable sects of christianity. Ms. Cain says Jews are taken care of because her Bibles have an Old Testament. Observant Jews read the Bible in Hebrew and do not view combined and translated testaments made only by and for christians as the Bible – it is blasphemy, and embarrassing ignorance and disrespect to inflict it on Jewish people. Protestants, and especially evangelicals, read different “Bibles” and interpret them differently than the Catholic or Orthodox Churches also reject much as blasphemous. Whose Bible, Ms. Cain?

    Old World Judaism and Catholicism long banned unapproved religious texts and practices but only the Catholic Church had power in the kings to enforce it. That unleashed the repression that created protestantism and migration to this country and eventually got us our Constitution. It began with the Connecticut Constitution, the first in the world and direct model for the U.S. including its Bill of Rights and “Free Exercise” clause. Connecticut was settled by Puritans forced out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for questioning religious beliefs. The Colony was run by a religious sect persecuted by the English government which allowed only one church headed by the king. It famously replaced the single official religion for centuries, the Catholic Church, because it refused to bend religious doctrine to allow a king to divorce. This is the world our Founders inherited. There are many records of them discussing exactly how rights to free exercise of religion are trampled on: government favoring one religion. If Americans now want what the Colonists escaped from – one official State religion, others second class citizens, jailed, murdered, driven out – then you want Bibles and crosses on every table in every U.S. government building.

    This is simple – there is no American national religion, not christian, not anything else. Every one wanting our missing back searches for answers. These MIA tables are just one thing, and being supported by our government, our rule of law must be respected; no one who has served this country with their whole heart wants it otherwise. One can do any religious activity they choose anywhere else. This is something for the military/veteran community. With indisputably nothing being wrong with government supported MIA activities with secular symbols and rituals, just like all of military service is, why use it as an opportunity for anything else?

    But then, I would not think of subjecting my country to any risk of losing the gifts passed to us so far. I don’t want to live under a theocratic system, which thankfully the more advanced, educated, prosperous world has moved on from, but there are places for those who are convinced that is the answer for them.

    /MRFF Supporter, Retired JAG (25 years), Blue Star Mother, and always Twice the Citizen!

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