On September 18, the nation pauses to observe National POW/MIA Recognition Day, a solemn tradition held each year on the third Friday of September. It is not a federal holiday, and for many Americans it passes without notice. But for the families of more than 81,000 U.S. service members still unaccounted for — from World War II through the Gulf War and beyond — it is one of the few days each year when the country stops to remember that the wars did not end cleanly for everyone.
Born from a Wife’s Determination
The story begins not in Washington, but in a living room in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1970. Mary Hoff was the wife of Navy Lieutenant Commander Michael Hoff, whose plane had gone down over Laos the year before. Like thousands of other military spouses during the Vietnam War, Hoff had no answers — only silence from a government that, at the time, was reluctant to publicize the scale of the POW and MIA crisis for fear of complicating negotiations with Hanoi.
Hoff wanted a symbol. Something that could travel from kitchen tables to congressional offices and make the public reckon with what she and thousands of families like hers were living through. She reached out to a flag company, and the commission eventually landed with Newt Heisley, a World War II transport pilot turned commercial artist. Heisley sketched the gaunt profile of a young man for the design — modeled, family lore holds, on his own son, who had just returned from military service thin and hollow-eyed from hepatitis. Below the silhouette, a watchtower and a strand of barbed wire. Above it, five words that would become inseparable from the image: “You Are Not Forgotten.”
The National League of POW/MIA Families adopted the design, and by the early 1970s the black-and-white flag appeared at rallies, on car bumpers, and outside statehouses across the country — a grassroots emblem for a cause Washington had been slow to embrace.
From Advocacy to National Observance
By the time American involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, more than 2,500 Americans were still listed as prisoners of war or missing in action. The Paris Peace Accords brought home 591 known POWs in Operation Homecoming, but for the families of the missing, the war did not end with a ceremony on an airfield. It became a decades-long campaign for information, accountability, and, where possible, return.
That campaign found its formal expression in 1979, when Congress passed a resolution, and President Jimmy Carter signed a proclamation establishing the first National POW/MIA Recognition Day, observed that July with a ceremony at Washington’s National Cathedral. In the years that followed, the observance shifted to the third Friday of September, a date now marked annually by a proclamation from the sitting president — a tradition every administration has continued since Carter’s.
In 1997, Congress wrote the day’s significance into federal law, designating it as one of only six dates each year when the POW/MIA flag must be flown at designated federal installations, national cemeteries, and major military bases, alongside the U.S. flag. In 2019, Congress went further, passing the National POW/MIA Flag Act to require the flag’s display year-round at prominent federal sites, ensuring the black-and-white silhouette would not be seen only on a single day of remembrance but as a constant, quiet obligation.
What the Day Asks of Us
The Pentagon traditionally hosts the national ceremony, with representatives of each service branch and senior defense officials in attendance, but the observance is deliberately decentralized. Ceremonies are held at state capitols, VA hospitals, ships at sea, American Legion posts, and small-town war memorials — anywhere a community wants to say the names of those who have not come home.
Behind the ceremonies is the ongoing, unglamorous work of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the successor to earlier recovery organizations, whose forensic teams still excavate crash sites in the jungles of Laos and the waters off the Pacific, still test DNA against family samples collected decades ago, still return remains to families who have waited half a century for a name on a headstone. Of the more than 81,000 Americans still missing, the overwhelming majority are from World War II, a reminder that this accounting effort spans not one war but nearly all of them.
For veterans, the day carries a particular weight. It is a recognition that captivity is its own form of service — one measured not in engagements or medals but in endurance — and that the families of the missing have carried a burden with no clear end date, sustained for years by nothing more than the promise printed under Heisley’s silhouette.
Each September, as the flag is raised beside the Stars and Stripes at bases and cemeteries across the country, it carries forward a debt first voiced by one Navy wife in 1970: that no one who wears the uniform should ever be left to wonder if they’ve been forgotten.