{"id":72920,"date":"2017-06-21T08:18:04","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T12:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=72920"},"modified":"2022-01-23T22:48:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T03:48:02","slug":"perry-james-phony-pow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=72920","title":{"rendered":"Perry James; phony POW"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Gunnery Sergeant Perry “PJ” James was listed on the old POW Network website before it closed down. Here’s his entry;<\/p>\n

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He claimed that he was a POW of the Viet Cong for a brief period before he escaped. As Hondo explained<\/a>, only 32 American military personnel were captured and escaped from the enemy. Perry James was not one of them. <\/p>\n

On April 26, 2010, the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation presented their annual Award for Patriotism to the Navajo Code Talkers Association and they introduced Gunnery Sergeant Perry James with the group for some reason as a POW\/MIA of the Vietnam War. You can hear his introduction at about 12:30 in the video at this link<\/a>. The speaker also says that James earned the POW Medal.<\/p>\n

As I said, he was not on the DPAA list as an escaped POW\/MIA Marine, nor is he listed on the “accounted for” POWs at DPAA;<\/p>\n

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According to his records, he did earn much of what he’s wearing;<\/p>\n

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There’s no mention of any time he was missing in action while he was assigned to Headquarters and Service Company of the 13th Maintenance Battalion of the 5th Marine Division as a 2531 Voice Radio Operator while he was in Vietnam. His records are quite explicit about his participation in combat operations while assigned to a Headquarters company of a maintenance battalion. It’s possible, I suppose. <\/p>\n

One thing jumped out at me – in November and December 1979, he supposedly attended the Basic Airborne Course at Fort Benning, Georgia and he completed the three week course in ten days – that would have been seven actual days of training instead of the normal fifteen work days. His training lists “Airborne”, but his awards list doesn’t say anything about parachutist wings or an assignment to a unit where airborne training would be a prerequisite. There’s also no mention of dive training. So to me, that throws all of his records into question, but nothing I can prove.<\/p>\n

I do know, however, that he wasn’t a POW nor was he ever Missing In Action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gunnery Sergeant Perry “PJ” James was listed on the old POW Network website before it closed down. Here’s his entry; He claimed that he was a POW of the Viet Cong for a brief period before he escaped. As Hondo explained, only 32 American military personnel were captured and escaped from the enemy. Perry James […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,391],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phony-soldiers","category-valorvultures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Perry-James-1.jpg?fit=498%2C502&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-iY8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}