About prisoner treatment in Vietnam
Almost all the witnesses agree on this point: the all datasets instructions that were given, after the capture of prisoners, to the Americans was to kill them if they became bothersome. You said it in your book, The New Legions ... Peter Bourne said the same thing at Captain Levy’s trial. Also, Robin Moore in his book, that there were formal instructions to kill prisoners that were definitely considered dangerous - or Viet Cong, in most cases. Can you answer this first point?
Yes. I think, in the interest of brevity, I may be improper here on procedure. You have mentioned the Levy trial. The problem as I see it here, is to show pattern and practice in the treatment of prisoners, in other words, to separate pattern and practice from isolated, individual incidents. Perhaps I can clarify this by saying that between Peter Bourne.
Robin Moore and myself, we have visited
And been in at least seventy-five per cent of Special Forces camps that existed in Vietnam at that time. I myself have been at perhaps twenty-five such camps. Of course, I could not see all of these things myself. I will talk about things I actually have seen myself, but of course in my capacity of reading the intelligence reports, the after-action reports that came from these camps that was part of my duty, I have knowledge that, in fact, these are the practices throughout the country at Special Forces camps. Now, in the book, I related two incidents in some detail - one, in which a prisoner was disembowelled with a knife under interrogation, and another event, where civilians were picked up along the route of march and abused. Both these incidents took place in Tay Ninh Sul, which is a camp, an old French fort, as a matter of fact, just outside the city of Tay Ninh.