Donald G. Cook

Donald Gilbert Cook entered the Marine Corps from New York and was a captain advising South Vietnamese Marines when the war was still young on American paper. On December 31, 1964, near Bình Giã in Phước Tuy Province, the 4th Vietnamese Marine Battalion met Viet Cong forces hard enough to break the day. Cook was wounded and carried away. Vietnamese Marines saw him taken. That is the last American custody of the man.

What followed is a captivity the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency still carries as open. In December 1970 a prisoner returned to U.S. custody reported that Cook had died of malaria on December 8, 1967. Attempts to recover remains have not succeeded. The Marine Corps later promoted him to colonel on paper and, in 1980, the nation awarded the Medal of Honor for the way fellow prisoners remembered his conduct under the Code — refusing favors that cost other men, holding the line when the camps pressed for political theater.

DPAA's public profile (a0Jt0000000KYeqEAG) still reads Unaccounted For, analytical category Deferred. He is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Wall in Washington. This page will not invent camp dialogue the public file does not carry, and it will not treat a returned prisoner's report as a marked grave. A reported death in captivity is documentation of a loss. It is not a recovery.