Patpong is an entertainment district in Bangkok's Bang Rak neighbourhood, Thailand, catering mainly, though not exclusively, to foreign tourists and expatriates. While Patpong is internationally known as a red light district at the heart of Bangkok's sex industry, it is in fact only one of several red-light districts with some catering primarily to Thai men while others, like Patpong, cater primarily to foreigners.
The Pathet Lao was a communist political movement and organization in Laos, formed in the mid-20th century. The group was ultimately successful in assuming political power in 1975, after the Laotian Civil War. The Pathet Lao were always closely associated with Vietnamese communists. During the civil war, it was effectively organized, equipped and even led by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN). They fought against the anti-communist forces in the Vietnam War. Eventually, the term became the generic name for Laotian communists.
Thomas Eugene Robbins is an American novelist. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies". His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie in 1993 by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
Uncommon Valor is a 1983 American action war film directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Gene Hackman, Fred Ward, Reb Brown, Randall "Tex" Cobb, Robert Stack and Patrick Swayze. Hackman plays a former U.S. Marine colonel who puts together a rag-tag team to rescue his son, who he believes is among those still held in Laos after the Vietnam War.
William Martin Hendon was an American author, POW/MIA activist, and two-term Republican U.S. Congressman from North Carolina's 11th District.
The Quiet American is a 2002 film adaptation of Graham Greene's bestselling 1955 novel set in Vietnam, The Quiet American. It was directed by Phillip Noyce and starred Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen.
Michael Gruber is an American author.
The Battle of Lima Site 85, also called Battle of Phou Pha Thi, was fought as part of a military campaign waged during the Vietnam War and Laotian Civil War by the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Pathet Lao, against airmen of the United States Air Force (USAF)'s 1st Combat Evaluation Group, elements of the Royal Lao Army, Royal Thai Border Patrol Police, and the Central Intelligence Agency-led Hmong Clandestine Army. The battle was fought on Phou Pha Thi mountain in Houaphanh Province, Laos, on 10 March 1968, and derives its name from the mountaintop where it was fought or from the designation of a 700 feet (210 m) landing strip in the valley below, and was the largest single ground combat loss of United States Air Force members during the Vietnam War.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was a joint task force within the United States Department of Defense (DoD) whose mission was to account for Americans who are listed as Prisoners of War (POW), or Missing in Action (MIA), from all past wars and conflicts. It was especially visible in conjunction with the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue. The mission of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation's past conflicts. The motto of JPAC was "Until they are home".
Operation Homecoming was the return of 591 American prisoners of war (POWs) held by North Vietnam following the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Wayne Karlin is an American author, editor, and teacher. His books include A Wolf by the Ears,Wandering Souls, Marble Mountain,War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, Rumors and Stones, Crossover, Lost Armies, The Extras, and Us.
The Wednesday Wars is a 2007 young adult historical fiction novel written by Gary D. Schmidt, the author of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. The novel is set in suburban Long Island during the 1967–68 school year. The Vietnam War is an important backdrop for the novel. It was given a Newbery Honor medal in 2008, and was also nominated for the Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award in 2010.
The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was a special committee convened by the United States Senate during the George H. W. Bush administration to investigate the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, that is, the fate of United States service personnel listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War. The committee was in existence from August 2, 1991 to January 2, 1993.
The Japanese raccoon dog, also known as the tanuki, is a subspecies of the Asian raccoon dog.
The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue concerns the fate of United States servicemen who were reported as missing in action (MIA) during the Vietnam War and associated theaters of operation in Southeast Asia. The term also refers to issues related to the treatment of affected family members by the governments involved in these conflicts. Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, 591 U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) were returned during Operation Homecoming. The U.S. listed about 2,500 Americans as prisoners of war or missing in action but only 1,200 Americans were reported to have been killed in action with no body recovered. Many of these were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos. Investigations of these incidents have involved determining whether the men involved survived being shot down. If they did not survive, then the U.S. government considered efforts to recover their remains. POW/MIA activists played a role in pushing the U.S. government to improve its efforts in resolving the fates of these missing service members. Progress in doing so was slow until the mid-1980s when relations between the U.S. and Vietnam began to improve and more cooperative efforts were undertaken. Normalization of the U.S. relations with Vietnam in the mid-1990s was a culmination of this process.
Unclaimed is a 2013 Canadian documentary film about a man who claims to be former Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, who was declared dead after being shot down over Laos on a classified mission on 20 May 1968. The documentary is written, directed, and produced by Michael Jorgensen. It follows Tom Faunce, a veteran of the Vietnam War, in tracking down the man who claimed to be Robertson. Faunce was skeptical of Robertson's identity but eventually became convinced. He convinced Jorgensen to make a documentary about Robertson's story as a way to unite the man with his American family.
Thomas Gerald Franklin is an American writer originally from Dickinson, Alabama, United States, "a town of around 500 people in south central Alabama, near Monroeville, home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee". In a recent interview, Franklin reveals the role imagination played during his younger years as he grew up "playing with G. I. Joes and imagining their lives. Building sci-fi forts from cardboard boxes and bricks, drawing control panels on the walls, etc. I liked creating the forts more than I did playing in them. There was something wonderful about making something tangible, something others could see, participate in. Then I moved to drawing my own comic books. I loved comic books–Marvel, DC. I collected them and had a couple of thousand of them. I drew one sci-fi comic book that numbered up to like 24 or 25. I was serious about it. Then I started writing barbarian stories. I loved Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian and so wrote a lot of bad imitations of those." Franklin was a marginal student; for example, in high school, he characterized himself as a "C student. Instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, I was reading Stephen King. I hated math, [and] failed algebra twice."
Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War is a 2010 non-fiction book by author Bruce Henderson. Hero Found is a biography of Vietnam War hero Dieter Dengler, a German-born United States Navy naval aviator who endured six months of imprisonment and torture before being rescued. Dengler survived 23 days in the jungle after escaping from a Pathet Lao prison camp.
Andrea Kleine is an American writer, choreographer, and performance artist. She is the author of the novel, Calf, a fictionalized account of the John Hinckley Jr story published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. Her second novel, Eden, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018.
Run Me to Earth is a 2020 novel by Paul Yoon. It is his second novel and was published by Simon & Schuster on January 28, 2020. The novel tells the story of three orphans in Laos during the Laotian Civil War and follows the trajectories of their lives after they are separated. The novel is told from multiple perspectives and is divided into six stories that take place over the course of six decades.
