The Face on the POW/MIA Flag Is a Real Marine

Millions of Americans have driven past the POW/MIA flag outside a VFW hall, a post office, or a state capitol without ever wondering who the man on it actually is. He is not a generic soldier. He is Jeffrey Heisley, a Marine officer candidate who came home from training too sick to continue - and whose father turned his face into one of the most reproduced symbols in the country.

A Symbol With No Face Yet

In 1971, Mary Hoff, whose husband Michael, a Navy pilot, had been missing in action over Laos since 1970, wanted a flag that would keep America from forgetting the missing and the captured. She reached out to Annin & Co., the flag manufacturer, and the job landed on the desk of Newt Heisley, a commercial artist and advertising illustrator.

Heisley was also a World War II veteran who had flown transport missions in the Pacific. "I used to fly within range of the Japanese and wondered how I would hold up if I ever got captured," he later said. He wanted the flag to carry that same dread, and that same hope.

A Son Home From Quantico

The assignment landed just as Heisley's son Jeffrey came home from Marine officer training at Quantico, Virginia. He had gotten sick during the program and been sent home to recover.

The illness had hollowed him out. "I had all my hair cut off and lost quite a bit of weight because of the hepatitis," Jeffrey later recalled.

Looking at his son's gaunt profile, Heisley sketched it in pencil - a bowed head in silhouette, set against a guard tower and a strand of barbed wire. Jeffrey has confirmed the moment himself: "He said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jeff, let me see your profile,'" he recalled his father asking. The same instinct gave the flag its words: "You are not forgotten."

Never Copyrighted, Never Owned

Heisley submitted several concepts to the National League of Families and expected the board to eventually choose a color. He assumed black and white was just a placeholder.

The board approved the design exactly as he drew it in January 1972. Neither Heisley nor Annin & Co. ever filed for a copyright or trademark. The image entered the public domain, free for any veteran's group, VFW post, or family to print.

A Flag Like No Other

The POW/MIA flag first flew over the White House in 1982. On March 9, 1989, an official League flag was installed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, where it remains the only flag ever permanently installed there.

By 2019, federal law required it to fly wherever the American flag flies on federal property - military bases, national cemeteries, and every post office in the country.

The Face Nobody Recognizes

Newt Heisley died on May 14, 2009, in Colorado Springs. Jeffrey went on to live a private life, largely out of the public eye, occasionally surfacing to confirm the story behind the flag his father drew.

Every time the flag goes up outside a post office or a stadium, it carries his profile - a young Marine officer candidate who never went to Vietnam, standing in for the ones who never came home.