The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “He says he doesn’t know, because he lives far from the center of the village. He doesn’t know what they were doing.”

  “Does he pay any taxes?”

  “Yes. The V.C. collect two piastres a month.”

  “What’s his occupation?”

  “He says he is a farmer.”

  “Let’s see his hands.”

  Martinez had the man stand up and hold out his hands, palms up. By feeling the calluses on the palms, Martinez explained, he could tell whether the man had been working the fields recently. Aside from asking questions, Martinez employed only this one test, but he employed it on the majority of his suspects. He squeezed the old man’s palms, rubbed the calves of his legs, then pulled up his shirt and felt his stomach. The old man looked down uneasily at Martinez’s big hands on his stomach. “He’s not a farmer,” Martinez announced, and then, with a touch of impatience and severity, he said, “Ask him what he does.”

  The interpreter talked with the suspect for about half a minute, then reported, “He says that recently he works repairing bicycles.”

  “Why did he say he was a farmer?”

  “He says he has repaired bicycles only since he finished harvesting.”

  Deliberately accelerating the intensity of the interrogation, Martinez narrowed his eyes, looked straight at the suspect crouching below him, and, in a suddenly loud voice, snapped, “Is he a V.C.?”

  “No, he says he’s not,” the interpreter answered, with an apologetic shrug.

  Martinez relaxed and put his clipboard down on a table. A weary smile took the place of his aggressive posture. “O.K. He can go now,” he told the interpreter.

  The interpreter, a thin young man with sunglasses, who had spoken to the suspect in a courteous, cajoling manner throughout the questioning, seemed pleased that the interrogation was to involve nothing more unpleasant than this. He gave the old man a smile that said, “You see how nice the Americans are!” and then patted him on the shoulder and delivered him into the hands of a guard.

  After the old man had gone, Martinez turned to me with the smile of a man who has some inside information and said confidentially, “He was a V.C. He was probably a tax collector for the V.C.” After a moment, he added, “I mean, that’s my supposition, anyway.”

  The other interrogations were very similar. Martinez asked the same questions, with little variation: “Where does he live?” “Is he a farmer?” (Then came the touch test.) “Has he seen any V.C.?” And, finally, “Is he a V.C.?” And the suspects, instead of insisting that the National Liberation Front actually governed the village and involved the entire population in its programs, supported him in his apparent impression that the Front was only a roving band of guerrillas. To judge by their testimony to Martinez, the villagers of Ben Suc knew the Front as a ghostly troop of soldiers that appeared once a fortnight in the evening on the edge of the forest and then disappeared for another fortnight. When one young suspect was asked if he had “ever seen any V.C.s in the area,” he answered that he had seen “fifty armed men disappearing into the forest two weeks ago.” Another man, asked if he knew “any V.C.s in the village,” answered in a whisper that he knew of one—a dark-complexioned man about forty-five years old named Thang. Still another man said that he had been “taken into the jungle to build a tunnel a year ago” but couldn’t remember where it was. I had the impression that the suspects were all veterans of the interrogation room. For one thing, they were able to switch immediately from the vocabulary of the Front to the vocabulary of the American and South Vietnamese–government troops. It is a measure of the deep penetration of propaganda into every medium of expression in wartime Vietnam that few proper names serve merely as names. Most have an added propagandistic import. Thus, to the Americans the actual name of the National Liberation Front is “Vietcong” (literally, “Vietnamese Communists”)—a term that the Front rejects on the ground that it represents many factions besides the Communists. Likewise, to the Front the actual name of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam is “Puppet Troops.” Even the names of the provinces are different in the two vocabularies. The Front refuses to comply with a presidential decree of 1956 renaming the provinces, and insists on using the old names—calling Binh Duong, for instance, by its old name of Thu Dau Mot. There is no middle ground in the semantic war. You choose sides by the words you use. The suspects made the necessary transitions effortlessly. (Confronted with this problem myself, I have tried in this article to use for each organization the name that its own side has chosen for it.)

  Several women were brought into the schoolhouse for interrogation, sometimes carrying a naked child balanced astride one hip. Unlike the men, they occasionally showed extreme annoyance. One young woman only complained loudly, and did not answer any of the questions put to her. Her baby fixed the interrogator with an unwavering, openmouthed stare, and an old woman, squatting next to the suspect, looked at the ground in front of her and nodded in agreement as the young mother complained.

  “Do you know any V.C.s in this village?” the interrogator, a young man, asked.

  The interpreter, having tried to interrupt the woman’s complaining, answered, “She says she can’t remember anything. She doesn’t know anything, because the bombs were falling everywhere.”

  “Tell her to just answer the question.”

  “She says she couldn’t bring her belongings and her pig and cow here.” The interpreter shook his head and added, “She is very angry.”

  The interrogator’s face grew tense for a moment, and he looked away, uncertain of what to do next. Finally, he dismissed the woman and impatiently turned his pad to a fresh sheet.

  The Vietnamese troops had their own style of interrogation. At eleven o’clock that morning, an ARVN officer stood a young prisoner, bound and blindfolded, up against a wall. He asked the prisoner several questions, and, when the prisoner failed to answer, beat him repeatedly. An American observer who saw the beating reported that the officer “really worked him over.” After the beating, the prisoner was forced to remain standing against the wall for several hours. Most of the ARVN interrogations took place in a one-room hut behind the school where the Americans were carrying on their interrogations. The suspects, bound and blindfolded, were led one by one into the hut. A group of ten or twelve fatherless families sitting under the shade of a tree nearby heard the sound of bodies being struck, but there were no cries from the prisoners.

  As one young man was being led by one arm toward the dark doorway of the interrogation hut, a small boy who was watching intently burst into loud crying. I went inside after the suspect, and found that three tall, slender, boyish Vietnamese lieutenants, wearing crisp, clean American-style uniforms crisscrossed with ammunition belts, and carrying heavy new black pistols at their hips, had sat the young man against the wall, removed his blindfold, and spread a map on the floor in front of him. Pointing to the map, they asked about Vietcong troop movements in the area. When he replied that he didn’t have the answers they wanted, one lieutenant beat him in the face with a rolled-up sheet of vinyl that had covered the map, then jabbed him hard in the ribs. The prisoner sat wooden and silent. A very fat American with a red face and an expression of perfect boredom sat in a tiny chair at a tiny table near the door, looking dully at his hands. The three lieutenants laughed and joked among themselves, clearly enjoying what seemed to them an amusing contest of will and wits between them and the silent, unmoving figure on the floor in front of them. Looking at the prisoner with a challenging smile, the lieutenant with the map cover struck him again, then asked him more questions. The prisoner again said he couldn’t answer. Suddenly noticing my presence, all three lieutenants turned to me with the wide, self-deprecating grins that are perhaps the Vietnamese soldiers’ most common response to the appearance of an American in any situation. Realizing that I could not speak Vietnamese, they called in an American Intelligence officer—Captain Ted L. Shipman, who was their adviser, and who could speak Vietnamese fluently. The
y asked him who I was, and, upon learning that I was not a soldier but a reporter, they looked at each other knowingly, saluted me, and continued their interrogation, this time without beatings. A few minutes later, however, Captain Shipman, who had been standing beside me, said that he was extremely sorry but they wanted me to leave. When we were outside, Captain Shipman, a short man with small, worried eyes behind pale-rimmed glasses, drew me aside and, shaking his head, spoke with considerable agitation. “You see, they do have some—well, methods and practices that we are not accustomed to, that we wouldn’t use if we were doing it, but the thing you’ve got to understand is that this is an Asian country, and their first impulse is force,” he said. “Only the fear of force gets results. It’s the Asian mind. It’s completely different from what we know as the Western mind, and it’s hard for us to understand. Look—they’re a thousand years behind us in this place, and we’re trying to educate them up to our level. We can’t just do everything for them ourselves. Now, take the Koreans—they’ve got the Asian mind, and they really get excellent results here. Of course, we believe that that’s not the best way to operate, so we try to introduce some changes, but it’s very slow. You see, we know that the kind of information you get with these techniques isn’t always accurate. Recently, we’ve been trying to get them to use some lie detectors we’ve just got. But we’re only advisers. We can tell them how we think they should do it, but they can just tell us to shove off if they want to. I’m only an adviser, and I’ve made suggestions until I’m blue in the face! Actually, though, we’ve seen some improvement over the last year. This is a lot better than what we used to have.”

  I asked if the day’s interrogations had so far turned up any important information.

  “Not much today,” he answered. “They’re not telling us much. Sometimes they’ll just tell you, ‘Hey, I’m a V.C., I’m a V.C.’ You know—proud. Today, we had one old man who told us his son was in the V.C. He was proud of it.” Then, shaking his head again, he said with emphasis, as though he were finally putting his finger on the real cause of the difficulty, “You know, they’re not friendly to us at this place, that’s the problem. If you build up some kind of trust, then, once some of them come over to your side, they’ll tell you anything. Their brother will be standing near them and they’ll tell you, ‘Him? He’s my brother. He’s a V.C.’ It’s hard for us to understand their mentality. They’ll tell you the names of their whole family, and their best friends thrown in.” Of the Front soldiers he said, “They don’t know what they’re doing half the time. Outside of the hard-core leaders, it’s just like those juvenile delinquents back home, or those draft-card burners. They’re just kids, and they want excitement. You give those kids a gun and they get excited. Half of the V.C.s are just deluded kids. They don’t know what they’re doing or why. But the V.C. operates through terror. Take this village. Maybe everybody doesn’t want to be a V.C., but they get forced into it with terror. The V.C. organizes an association for everyone—the Farmers’ Association, the Fishers’ Association, the Old Grandmothers’ Association. They’ve got one for everybody. It’s so mixed up with the population you can’t tell who’s a V.C. Our job is to separate the V.C. from the people.”

  At that moment, a helicopter came in sight five hundred yards away, cruising low over the woods and emitting a steady chattering sound that was too loud to be the engine alone. Breaking off his explanation to look up, Captain Shipman said, “Now, there’s a new technique they’ve developed. That sound you hear is the 7.62-calibre automatic weapon on the side. They have a hell of a time finding the V.C. from the air, so now when they hear that there’s a V.C. in the area they’ll come in and spray a whole field with fire. Then, you see, any V.C.s hiding below will get up and run, and you can go after them.”

  Captain Shipman went off to attend to other business, and I walked back to the interrogation hut. The fat American in the tiny chair was still looking at his hands, and the prisoner was still sitting stiff-spined on the floor, his lips tightly compressed and his gaze fixed in front of him. The young lieutenant with the map cover held it above the suspect’s face and stared intently down at him. All three lieutenants were wholly engrossed in their work, excited by their power over the prisoner and challenged by the task of drawing information out of him. After twenty seconds or so, the American looked up and said to me, “They been usin’ a little water torture.” In the water torture, a sopping rag is held over the prisoner’s nose and mouth to suffocate him, or his head is pushed back and water is poured directly down his nostrils to choke him. Again the lieutenants had not noticed me when I entered, and when the American spoke one of them looked up with a start. The tension and excitement in his expression were immediately replaced by a mischievous, slightly sheepish grin. Then all three lieutenants smiled at me with their self-deprecating grins, inviting me to smile along with them.

  Captain Shipman came in, looking even more harried than before. One of the lieutenants spoke to him in a sugary, pleading tone, and Captain Shipman turned to me with a fatalistic shrug and said, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I get it in the neck if I don’t take you away.” Glancing over my shoulder as I left, I saw that the lieutenants were already crouching around their prisoner again and were all watching my exit closely. Outside again, Captain Shipman explained that this was only a preliminary interrogation—that a more extensive session, by the Province Police, would be held later. He pointed out that American advisers, like him, would be present at the police interrogation.

  At the end of an interrogation, the questioner, whether American or Vietnamese, tied an eight-inch cardboard tag around the neck of the bound prisoner. At the top were the words “Captive Card,” in both Vietnamese and English, and below were listed the prisoner’s name, address, age, occupation, and the kind of weapon, if any, he was carrying when caught. None of the captive cards on the first day listed any weapons.

  At one o’clock, the official count of “V.C.s killed” stood at twenty-four, with no friendly casualties reported. Soldiers on the spot told me of six shootings. I learned that three men had crawled out of a tunnel when they were told that the tunnel was about to be blown up. “One of them made a break for it, and they got him on the run,” the soldier said. An officer told me that a man and a woman were machine-gunned from a helicopter while they were “having a picnic.” I asked him what he meant by a picnic, and he answered, “You know, a picnic. They had a cloth on the ground, and food—rice and stuff—set out on it. When they saw the chopper, they ran for it. They were both V.C.s. She was a nurse—she was carrying medical supplies with her, and had on a kind of V.C. uniform—and he was, you know, sitting right there with her, and he ran for it, too, when the chopper came overhead.” A soldier told me that down near the river three men with packs had been shot from a distance. Inspection of their packs revealed a large quantity of medical supplies, including a surgical kit, anti-malaria pills, a wide assortment of drugs, and a medical diary, with entries in a small, firm hand, that showed the men to have been doctors. (The Stars and Stripes of January 12th gave an account of seven additional shootings: “UPI reported that Brigadier General John R. Hollingsworth’s helicopter accounted for seven of the Vietcong dead as the operation began. The door gunner, personally directed by the colorful assistant commander of the 1st. Inf. Div., shot three V.C. on a raft crossing the Saigon River, another as he tried to sneak across camouflaged by lily-pads, and three more hiding in a creek nearby.”)

  I asked the officer tabulating the day’s achievements how the Army disposed of enemy corpses. He said, “We leave the bodies where they are and let the people themselves take care of them.” It occurred to me that this was going to be difficult, with only women and children left in the area. Later in the afternoon, I heard the following exchange on the field radio:

  “Tell me, how should we dispose of the bodies, sir? Over.”

  “Why don’t you throw them in the river? Over.”

  “We can’t do that, sir. We have to
drink out of that river, sir.”

  The captured-weapons count stood at forty-nine—forty booby traps, six rifle grenades, two Russian-made rifles, and one American submachine gun. All were captured in caches in tunnels.

  In the early afternoon, I went over to the field where the Americans were resting to ask them about the attack in the morning and what their feelings were concerning it. When I told one soldier that I was interested in finding out what weapons, if any, the Vietnamese dead had been carrying, he stiffened with pride, stared me straight in the eye, and announced, “What do you mean, ‘Were they carrying weapons?’ Of course they were carrying weapons! Look. I want to tell you one thing. Anyone killed by this outfit was carrying a weapon. In this outfit, no one shoots unless the guy is carrying a weapon. You’ve got to honor the civilian, that’s all.” With that, he terminated our conversation. Later, he and I walked over to a small tent where several men sat on the ground eating Spam and turkey from canned rations. They ate in silence, and, in fact, most of the men preferred to be alone rather than talk over the morning’s attack. The men who did say anything about it laconically restricted themselves to short statements—such as “C Company had some light contact in the woods over there. Snipers mainly”—usually brought out in an almost weary tone, as though it were overdramatic or boastful to appear ruffled by the day’s events. Nor did they kid around and enjoy themselves, like the ARVN soldiers. One young soldier, who looked to be not out of his teens, did come riding by on a small bicycle he had found near one of the houses in the village and cried out, with a big, goofy smile, “Hey! Look at this!,” but the other men ignored him coldly, almost contemptuously.

  I entered into conversation with Major Charles A. Malloy. “We’re not a bunch of movie heroes out here,” he said. “I think you’ll find very few guys here who really hate the V.C. There’s none of that stuff. I’ll tell you what every soldier was thinking about when he stepped out of the helicopter this morning: Survival. Am I going to make it through? Am I going to see my wife and kids again? O.K., so some people without weapons get killed. What’re you going to do when you spot a guy with black pajamas? Wait for him to get out his automatic weapon and start shooting? I’ll tell you I’m not. Anyway, sometimes they throw away their weapon. They’ll throw it into the bushes. You go and look at the body, and fifty yards away there’s the weapon in the bushes. You can’t always tell if they were carrying a weapon. Now, this man here has just heard that his wife had his first kid, a baby girl.” He indicated a short, young-looking soldier with bright-red hair. “Now, if I told any one of these men they could go home tomorrow, they’d be off like a shot.” The men listened with quiet faces, looking at the ground. “No, there’s very little fanatic stuff here,” he went on. At that moment, a middle-aged Vietnamese wearing the customary black floppy clothing was led by, his arms bound behind his back. Major Malloy looked over his shoulder at the prisoner and remarked, “There’s a V.C. Look at those black clothes. They’re no good for working in the fields. Black absorbs heat. This is a hot country. It doesn’t make any sense. And look at his feet.” The prisoner had bare feet, like many of the villagers. “They’re all muddy from being down in those holes.” In a burst of candor, he added, “What’re you going to do? We’ve got people in the kitchen at the base wearing those black pajamas.”