He is credited with the research that identified Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie as the Vietnam fatality buried at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and for his role in organizing the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle event in Washington.

Afterwards he became a Green Beret and served another tour leading and training a Civilian Irregular Defense Group along the Cambodian border, earning four Bronze Stars, an Army Commendation Medal and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.

[2] Following his honorable discharge, Sampley worked in journalism and then settled in Kinston, North Carolina, where he opened a craft store selling ceramics, an art he had learned from local artisans in his off-duty time while stationed on Okinawa at the beginning of his military career.

In the early 1980s he began his activism, after learning that not all the POWs and MIAs in Vietnam at the end of the war had been accounted for, joining groups demanding that the U.S. put pressure on the Vietnamese government.

[5] He was then promoted to sergeant and spent a second tour commanding a B-36 MIKE Force unit of indigenous minority population along the Cambodian border, part of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program.

[9][a] At the ceremonies he heard many other veterans express doubt that all the POWs and other servicemembers officially considered missing in action from Vietnam-era combat operations in Southeast Asia had been accounted for as the government had claimed since 1975, particularly those they had known personally.

He had protestors in bamboo cages, similar to those in which some POWs were exhibited publicly during their time in Vietnam, placed on the front lawn of Donald Regan, then chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan.

He also led another group to the house of Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci during a heavy snowstorm, where they blocked his driveway with 1,800 care packages intended for POWs they believed were still alive and being held in Laos.

[14] The following year the group established a booth on the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial where they initially kept a vigil to raise awareness of the POW/MIA issue and sold merchandise to support it.

[17] In 1997 Vince Gonzales, a junior CBS News correspondent, read Sampley's article and began replicating the research with requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Shortly after they were buried, Sampley held a news conference in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the Navy's Atlantic Fleet, where Tucker had been based during his service.

Sampley claimed that instead of having been just discovered by the Vietnamese, Tucker's remains had in fact been kept on public display during the intervening years, after he had been beaten severely by the villagers where he parachuted into.

[9] According to Susan Katz Keating, a former reporter for the conservative Washington Times who went from believing completely in the possibility of living POWs to considering it a hoax, Sampley told a similar story of a downed American pilot killed by natives of the country he had parachuted into early in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

[9] Later, Sampley responded that he had indeed found a story reporting that an American pilot had been beaten and killed by a Baghdad mob after being shot down and distributed it in good faith; he never told the Wetzels about it.

[9] In the late 1980s an organization Sampley founded, The Last Firebase (TLF), began operating a booth near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where it sold T-shirts and other memorabilia to support the POW/MIA cause.

Not only did they object to commercial activity so close to what they considered to be a solemn site of reflection and remembrance, they pointed out that TLF and two other organizations that were using the adjacent space for similar purposes were operating under National Park Service (NPS) permits that were intended for public gatherings on federal parkland, such as the 24-hour vigils for POW/MIA servicemembers that they had started out doing.

"[They're] a blight on what's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the country," he told the Washington City Paper in 1991, pointing to a photo of the trash the booths left behind.

Instead, Sampley wrote, Scruggs had turned it into the VVMF and made it permanent, on the argument that some of the memorial's granite panels had already cracked and needed repair.

At the same time, Keating wrote in her book, the Homecoming II volunteers who manned the booths received nothing beyond free lodging at a house owned by the organization.

Sampley and other activists were dubious about whether the committee, whose membership included all the sitting senators who were Vietnam-era combat veterans, was really committed to fully investigating the issue.

[18] They believed that its true purpose was to resolve the issue by concluding that all POW/MIAs had been accounted for and none were still alive in order to clear a major obstacle to normalizing relations with Vietnam.

[26] Early in the process, Sampley had called for Kerry to resign after what he alleged was witness tampering by committee staff who reported to him; in response, he claimed, the committee began investigating him and his business activities related to POW/MIA activism; when Keating published her book the next years, with an entire chapter devoted to him, Sampley accused her of doing so at the behest of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he believed had been trying to discredit him and other activists who believed there were still living POWs.

"[18] McCain also publicly embraced former North Vietnamese Army colonel Bùi Tín while reducing one POW/MIA family member to tears with harsh questioning.

[5] As the hearings wound down, in December 1992, Sampley wrote an article about McCain for his newspaper, calling him a "Manchurian candidate", beholden to the Vietnamese and depicting him on the cover with a queen of diamonds in the background, alluding to the film and novel from which the term came.

[27][28] Four years later, Kerry, a Navy veteran of the war who had called Sampley a "stupid ass" in response to his attacks on McCain, won the Democratic nomination for president.

Sampley called the remark "unbecoming" a senator[3] and later addressed it more specifically: "What does that say about his relationship with the Vietnamese prison guards whom he claims brutally tortured him daily?

And nothing he has done since has caused me to change that opinion ... During our hearings, he would boo or hiss every witness who cast doubt on the conspiracy theory or every time I would ask a skeptical question.

He proposed to a group of Kinstonians he assembled at a local cafe that they organize to build a life-size replica of the CSS Neuse, an early ironclad of the Confederate States Navy whose remains are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and put it on the lot as a tourist attraction.

[34] In the 1990s the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources had built the first structure to house the remaining hull of the original Neuse on another lot in downtown Kinston.

Sampley and other local historians believed that site possibly also contained the true grave of North Carolina's first governor, Richard Caswell, who had also done the original land survey of Kinston.