This site is dedicated to the memory of Marion Shelton.

Marion was one of the founders of the National League of POW/MIA Familes. Her husband is one of the more compelling stories of the Vietnam Prisoners of War in Vietnam. He was captured by the Pathet Lao after parachuting from his crippled plane. He was known to have been a captive. He was the object of a U.S-sponsored rescue attempt. Yet, he did not return home at the end of the war, and Vietnam and Laos cannot, or will not produce his remains. Shelton was captured by the Pathet Lao, not the Vienamese. Their explanation is that his grave was destroyed in a B-52 bombing.

Marion fought long and hard to find her husband. She worked with every major figure in the POW/MIA issue. She had friends at the highest levels of government, including many generals and several Presidents. Shelton was the only MIA to be maintained in a POW status after all others were declared to be MIA in the late 1970's. Because of this, she became a magnet for individuals of every sort in the POW/MIA issue.

Shadowy individuals constantly fed her stories about her husband. She spent a fortune. The stories associated with her husband made him a legend in the POW/MIA community, but much of it is suspect. At one time the government sponsored a mission to rescue Shelton using indigenous forces, but eventually concluded that those forces and their information were unreliable. DOD personnel say there is reason to believe he died within a few months of being captured.

The POW/MIA issue is a bottomless pit of information and stories -- most of it suspect. Some family members believe that men were held by the Vietnamese and Pathet Lao after the Vietnam War for one simple reason -- the men at the top, the men heading the U.S. Government and its intelligence agencies, acted as if there were men still held, at least, up until the late 1980's. After that, they behaved as if there were no men held. Why they changed can only be speculated.

We may never know all of the reasons for Marion's despair, or why, in 1989, she took her own life. She had been pushed and pulled by every element of the POW/MIA issue. She had friends and sources of information at the highest levels of Government, but her despair became overwhelming

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