I think very few ground pounders were captured.
See the Roll Call of Heroes re US POWS during the VN war.
I knew several of them, including the late Don Rander and Jon R. Cavaiani (who died within the last year). Jon was the terror of the VC, who had reportedly killed his adopted Vietnamese son, and suffered his revenge for it.
His story, and that of some other POWS can be found in “The Soldiers’ Story: Vietnam in their words”, Ron Steinman, Barnes & Nobles Book, NY, 1999,2000. Included in the book are Cavaiani, Fred Cherry, Paul Galanti, and John McCain.
Another Special Forces member I knew, the late Major Nick Rowe (”Five Years to Freedom”), was assassinated in the Philippines many years ago by the Communist NPA. His book is a fascinating look into how a man, as a POW of the VC< had the will to live when others around him were executed or just gave up and died.
Another unwritten book (but many articles about and by him) would be that of Mike Benge, a former Marine who served many years in Vietnam’s Central Highlands helping the indigenous tribal peoples there, as the head of the AID (Agency for International Development) resettlement and reforestation programs until captured during Tet while making sure that all his employees had gotten to safety.
What he endured/suffered for at least a year in a real “tiger cage” (not Don Luce’s Con Son Island Hoax cages), and on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, before arriving at the Hanoi Hilton, should be made into a movie all by itself.
He saw the VC/NVA kill fellow prisoners (So. Vietnamese and foreign medical help, if only by starving them to death or not giving them any medical help.
Mike made life very uncomfortable for his NVA guards, esp. at the time of the Christmas 1972 bombings, and later he made life very uncomfortable for Hanoi Jane.
Also there were American civilian POWS, including Mike’s cellmate Larry Stark, who had to pull Mike away from their cell’s window during the 72 Xmas bombing. Mike, just being a continual pain in the ass to his captors, yelled at his guards (in good Vietnamese) that they were all going to die, but he was dangerously ignoring flying wood and metal fragments coming his way from the NVA barracks nearby that were being reduced into toothpicks.
Fortunately Mike and Larry escaped unhurt, and came back to America to continue on their war against the communists, their collaborators like Jane Fonda, and to advocate for the known POWS and the MIAS who were never released, or were murdered including Ron Dodge and Hrdlicka, among others.
We owe these men (and there were some American women who were temporarily captured), our gratitude and respect, forever.
from an Old Bao Chi, VN/Cambodia, 1970.