Status: carried by the United States as a prisoner of war at the close of Operation Homecoming, and not returned. The account of his capture and death rests on a single postwar interview and is unverified.
He was taken while visiting a Vietnamese family. Twenty-four years later, the officer whose organization took him explained how it was done: the girlfriend was theirs.
What is known
Dallas Reese Pridemore, U.S. Army, a staff sergeant who was promoted to sergeant first class while missing, was captured in South Vietnam on Sept. 8, 1968. His name appears on the unclassified page headed Officially listed as POW at Homecoming 1973 (document 2860824010) — the ninety-eight men the United States itself carried in prisoner-of-war status at the moment the 1973 releases closed, none of whom came home.
He carries DIA case number 1274. He was abducted while visiting a Vietnamese family — not lost in action, not shot down, but taken from a house.
In 1992, the former commander of the 1st Special Action Group, Sub-Region 4, was interviewed. His account: Pridemore’s girlfriend was a local agent who compromised him and arranged the capture. The same account holds that Pridemore was later killed by U.S. bombing at a prison in Cambodia.
Separately, a communist defector’s reporting on the COSVN security camp C-53 in Tay Ninh province, which described five living Americans held there into 1974, linked one of the five to Pridemore.
The night of 8 September 1968
The Men We Left Behind, by PIP’s founder Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders, gives the case a whole chapter and supplies what the case file does not: the date, the address, and the name of the woman.
“In a country filled with hate, Dallas Reese Pridemore became a victim of love. It happened the night of September 8, 1968, as the blond military policeman lounged in yellow silk pajamas at the home of his Vietnamese fiancée, Huyen Thit Hue. Pridemore had recently divorced his American wife and extended his tour in Vietnam, all to be with a woman he knew he loved. What Pridemore apparently didn’t know was that his fiancée was a ‘secret follower of the revolution’ — a communist agent.”
“Several hours later, around 10 p.m., a force of some 60 Viet Cong guerillas led by Ngo Tung Lo infiltrated the village. Two of the troops entered Hue’s home and began searching it. Pridemore immediately tossed his uniform out the back window and into the yard. The 27-year-old had told friends that if he were ever captured in the village, he’d claim to be a civilian. But Pridemore hadn’t counted on being betrayed by his woman…”
The Men We Left Behind, Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders, National Press Books, 1993, ch. 19, p. 217
The house stood at 665 Xa Cu Kien Thiet, in a risky area outside Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Twelve days earlier his commander at the 95th MP Battalion had disciplined him for staying there. The book records that the abduction was prepared months in advance: he had been introduced to a Mr. Dat, an undercover Viet Cong political agent, and after his capture he was handed to the Saigon–Gia Dinh Special Action Unit, whose interest was his knowledge of the physical security system deployed throughout the Saigon area. The guerillas told Hue that nice girls did not associate with Americans, and promised to release Pridemore in three days. He never came back.
What Bill Bell told the Senate in secret
The book records that Pridemore was moved through the Ong Thang swamp into the COSVN security camps, and that on 25 September 1968 he arrived at a special prisoner-of-war camp in Svay Rieng province, Cambodia, commanded by Ngo Van Sung. By mid-January 1969, it states, more than 150 Americans were held at that camp, and Pridemore’s name, rank and date of capture were entered on the camp roster.
In November 1991 Garnett “Bill” Bell, the Pentagon’s senior expert on Vietnam prisoners, testified to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that Pridemore and a number of other American prisoners had survived for years after capture and were still alive when every American prisoner was supposed to have been returned in early 1973. That testimony was given in secret. Bell placed the next reliable sighting of Pridemore in May 1974, held by Cambodian communists at a coffee plantation near the village of Memot in Kompong Chan province — in the same camp as the American deserter McKinley Nolan — working under guard as a mechanic.
Two separate Vietnamese accounts of his death were given to American investigators and both were shown to be false. A senior colonel said he was blown to pieces by an American bomb shortly after capture; when that was disproved, a senior Vietnamese POW official said he had died later of malaria in Cambodia.
Chapter 19 carries no endnotes; its sourcing is Bell’s Senate testimony and his reports to the Pentagon.
What remains unresolved
- The spelling of his name. One government document prints him as “Pallas R. Pridemore.” Anyone searching the released record on the correct spelling will miss that file.
- Whether he died in Cambodia. The bombing account is a single statement in a single 1992 interview. No site is named, no remains have been recovered, and no second source is cited in the released record.
- The woman. Nothing released establishes her identity or what became of her. If the 1992 account is true she is the most direct living witness to an American’s capture, and she has never been named.
- The C-53 link. Whether the second American described at C-53 was Pridemore has never been established. Robert Garwood, shown the case during the DIA photograph session of 12 November 1990, orally denied Pridemore.
- Why a man reported killed by American bombing in Cambodia was nonetheless carried as a prisoner of war at the close of Homecoming.
Why the case matters
Every element of this case sits outside the ordinary accounting of a battlefield loss. He was not lost in combat; he was abducted from a private house. The capture was not opportunistic; it was arranged, by an agent placed close to him. And the death attributed to him did not happen in Vietnam but in a prison in a third country, at the hands of American bombs.
All of that arrived in 1992, from the man whose organization ran the operation, nearly a quarter of a century after the fact, in a single interview. It has never been corroborated and it has never been retracted.
The Cambodia element is not unique to him. The same Homecoming-era files carry a cluster of men — Demmon, Johns, Price among them — whose reporting runs toward Cambodia and toward transfer. Pridemore belongs to that cluster, and the cluster is the strongest structural pattern in the material.
Evidence and sources
- The Men We Left Behind, Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders, National Press Books, 1993, chapter 19, “The Mysterious Fate of Dallas Pridemore,” p. 217, and the photograph caption: “SFC Dallas Pridemore, U.S.A., the American soldier who was kidnapped by the Viet Cong from his Vietnamese girlfriend’s home. Pridemore was reportedly alive after the war.”
- Officially listed as POW at Homecoming 1973 — DIA/DoD document 2860824010
- DIA/DoD case 1274, in Various not returned (document 2861508001, c. late 1992)
- 1992 interview with the former commander, 1st Special Action Group, Sub-Region 4
- Defector reporting on Camp C-53, DIA case 0333, Tay Ninh province
- DIA photograph-identification session with Robert Garwood, 12 November 1990
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Accounts of Pridemore alive after his Sept. 8, 1968, abduction, from former cadres of Sub-Region 4, or guards or prisoners at the camps in Svay Rieng or near Memot, Cambodia.
- The woman he was visiting the night he was taken, or anyone who knows what became of her.
- The name and location of the Cambodian prison where he was reported killed by U.S. bombing, and anyone who saw it.
Bill Bell told the Senate in secret that Pridemore was alive in May 1974, working under guard as a mechanic near Memot. Vietnam gave two accounts of his death, and both were shown to be false. Did he die in a U.S. bomb strike in Cambodia? Did he die of malaria? Or was he kept after 1974 for what he knew about the Saigon area’s security system?
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.
Tiếng Việt
Trung sĩ Dallas Reese Pridemore — đề nghị cung cấp thông tin
Trung sĩ Dallas Reese Pridemore, Lục quân Hoa Kỳ, bị bắt tại miền Nam Việt Nam khi đang đến thăm một gia đình người Việt. Chính phủ Hoa Kỳ vẫn liệt kê ông là tù binh chiến tranh vào thời điểm kết thúc đợt trao trả năm 1973, và ông không được trao trả.
Năm 1992, người chỉ huy cũ của Đội Hành động Đặc biệt số 1, Phân khu 4, cho biết người bạn gái Việt Nam của ông Pridemore là một cơ sở tại chỗ, đã báo tin và sắp đặt việc bắt giữ. Cũng theo lời kể đó, ông Pridemore sau này thiệt mạng do bom Mỹ tại một nhà tù ở Campuchia. Điều này chưa được kiểm chứng.
Chúng tôi mong nhận được: hồi ức cá nhân về vụ bắt giữ này và về nơi ông bị giam sau đó, kể cả nhà tù ở Campuchia được nhắc tới; cùng thư từ, ảnh hoặc giấy tờ cá nhân liên quan.
Mục đích của chúng tôi là tìm hiểu số phận của những người này, không nhằm quy trách nhiệm cho ai trong một cuộc chiến đã lùi xa. Chúng tôi không công bố tên người cung cấp tin nếu không được phép.
Quý vị cũng có thể nhắn tin mã hóa qua ứng dụng Signal, tên người dùng PIP.21. Chúng tôi chỉ đề nghị hồi ức cá nhân; xin đừng gửi tài liệu thuộc bí mật nhà nước. Xin liên hệ qua email: contact@powinvestigativeproject.org