The Form of Money :: Main Page

See, I'd just like to point out some of the intelligence and modern interrogation methods used by the modern and sophisticated war machine. This first one will just give you an idea of how we go into a village and get information on enemy movements and things like this. This is our Special Forces. You can't see it too well, but that big guy there, the guy on the far side of the picture there, he's a Special Forces officer or probably an enlisted man, a sergeant, and first of all we go into the village and ask people who they think are Viet Cong.

(Next Slide) So we were given two people that we were told were Viet Cong. See, what we do, is we took these two guys out in the field and we strung one of 'em up in a tree by his arms, tied his hands behind him, and then hung him in the tree.

(Next Slide) There you can clearly see the prisoner being strung up into the tree. Somebody point out that Special Forces man on the far side of the picture, the big guy. That's him right there. That's a Special Forces man. He's running the whole show, and this is all under their command and everything, and it's not the Vietnamese. Now what we did to this man when we strung him up is that he was stripped of all his clothes, and then they tied a string around his testicles and a man backed up about ten feet and told him what would happen if he didn't answer any questions the way they saw fit. Now all we had to go by was that we were told that he was a suspect by other villagers. Now the other villagers weren't going to point out themselves, and somebody had to be pointed out. So they'd ask a guy a question: "Do you know of any enemy units in this area?" and if he said, "No," the guy that was holding that string would just yank on it as hard as he could about ten times, and this guy would be just flying all over the place in pain. And this is what they used--I mean anybody's just going to say anything in a situation like this to get answers out of him. And then when they were done, when the guy was just limp and hanging there, the South Vietnamese indigenous troops who worked with the Special Forces, went up there and then to get kicks, would run their knife through his ear and carve little superficial wounds on his body, not deep ones, but just you know, trickle it down his body to make fun of the guy.

We took a guy to the other end of the village, and all we did was burn his penis with a cigarette to get answers out of him. And if--I'm sure people understand what that would be like if it was done to yourself or to your children. Like I said, this is just one of the things I saw. I could just go on all day. All of us could. And every GI in this room could say the same thing. But it's not just us. Everybody knows this. It isn't just Lieutenant Calley. I was involved, I know there are so many other people involved in all this American policy in Vietnam.