Bertrand
Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal - Contents
9. PETER MARTINSEN
Testimony and Questioning
Gisele Halimi: Mr
Martinsen, please tell to the Tribunal your role in the army: your
grade, your branch of service, the date of your enlistment - I believe
you were a volunteer
- and afterwards we will speak about Vietnam.
I enlisted in the army in June 1963 and was trained initially as a
cook. However, I was then sent to a foreign language school, where I
learned Italian, and from there I was sent to the US Army Intelligence
School in Fort Holabird, Maryland, where I was trained as a
prisoner-of-war interrogator. The Vietnam build-up began, and I was
assigned to a unit, the 541st Military Intelligence Detachment, which
was to go to Vietnam. The 541st Military Intelligence Detachment was
attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. We left for Vietnam in
the middle of August 1966 and arrived in September. I was in Vietnam
from September 1966 to June 1967, as a prisoner-of-war interrogator.
Halimi: Did you, in 1965, go to a training school, called USAINTS, and
could you please indicate to the Tribunal what you learned there?
The USAINTS, or ‘U-saints’ as it is called in the
army, is the {249} US army’s intelligence school. There were
several curricula there, and I was trained to interrogate prisoners of
war. This training involves certain classified things, which are not
really relevant, and a mass of techniques taught at the school which
are not in any way illegal.
Halimi: Did you receive any decorations?
Yes, I have several decorations. Should I present them?
Halimi: No. No, just specify which ones you have got.
I have the Vietnam Service Medal, the Vietnam Expeditionary Medal, the
Army Commendation Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, the National Defense
Medal and several marksmanship medals.
Halimi: Mr Martinsen, you are here to testify about two series of
facts. I am well aware that it must be very difficult for you to say
exactly what you yourself did while interrogating prisoners. But you
understand that we need to get your direct testimony. You told me
(because you remembered this particularly) that the first time you had
interrogated and tortured a Vietnamese was in Lon Giao camp. It was on
your arrival in Vietnam in November 1966. I wish you to please repeat
to the Tribunal the account you already gave me.
This was some time after I arrived in Vietnam. We established our base
camp in Lon Giao, which is in Long Kien, twelve kilometres south of
Xuan Loc, and during this time we were receiving quite a few prisoners.
The troops were very nervous and arresting just about everyone in
sight, and we were interrogating these prisoners. While we were moving
our base camp to this area, one of the men of the detachment was killed
in an ambush. Later on, we received a group of prisoners, eight or nine
I believe, I don’t remember exactly. I interrogated one and I
had no data on where he was captured or what he was doing. He was just
presented to me. I started to question him and he kept saying that he
was not a Viet Cong, that he didn’t know where the Viet Cong
was, etc. I was quite sure that he was lying. I was not certain if he
belonged to the Viet Cong, but I was quite sure he was lying about not
knowing where they were. I decided to beat him. This did not help. I
struck him with my hand. This did not produce anything except a long
string of ‘I don’t knows’ ... and then -
as was often the case - another interrogator took my place, an
interrogation officer. I told the {250} officer, a lieutenant, that I
couldn’t get anything out of the prisoner. The lieutenant
proceeded to do the same thing as I had been doing, finally beating the
prisoner, and this did not work. The lieutenant had an Army field
telephone, which runs on batteries and generator. You crank it and it
gives a nasty shock, a very nasty shock, quite painful. The
interrogation commenced with the prisoner being tortured by field
telephone. The telephones were first placed on his hands and then the
field telephone wires were placed on his sexual organs. I left, I could
not watch it.
Halimi: Later on, you witnessed torture done by an American lieutenant
on a captain from the Viet Cong - particularly electrical tortures and
torture consisting of inserting bamboo splinters under his nails. Could
you please explain this to the Tribunal?
Yes. This particular case occurred on Operation Cedar Falls. This was a
very big allied operation in the so-called ‘Iron
Triangle’ to the north of Saigon. A North Vietnamese army
captain was captured. He admitted he belonged to the North Vietnamese
army. He was not a Viet Cong. I was to interrogate him and they kept
telling me: ‘You must get information now. Now.’
While I interrogated him, my section leader, who was another enlisted
man, was torturing him with a field telephone. When I could not get
anything out of the prisoner they replaced me by another lieutenant.
The lieutenant kept interrogating him with the field telephones.
Finally he became quite frustrated; he then inserted bamboo splinters
under the man’s fingernails.
This produced some criticism
on the part of the commander of our unit, because the prisoner had been
scarred. The electrical torture generally does not leave scars, and
beating generally does not leave scars, but the use of bamboo was
forbidden, because it left marks and there was blood. After that, the
use of extreme forms of electrical torture became less frequent. But it
was understood that, if we did not leave scars, we could do exactly as
we pleased.
We had absolute power over our
prisoners - absolute power. We had the power of life and death over the
prisoners. I never did this, but it is quite possible that a prisoner
could be killed in anger or out of carelessness or for a special reason
- perhaps to intimidate other prisoners. On the other hand, it was
possible that {251} nothing might ever happen to them.
Halimi: Mr Martinsen, you told me that one day you saw a Vietnamese die
after torture. You said that you were not yourself present during the
torturing, but that you saw the Vietnamese enter the neighbouring tent,
where he was interrogated by an American captain. I should like you to
indicate to the Tribunal who did the interrogation, and that afterwards
the American captain came out of the tent saying: ‘He is
dead.’ You also told me that you saw yourself the dead body
of this man in the same place where he had been tortured. Could you add
other details to the Tribunal in order to complete this declaration?
Yes. The case referred to occurred during Operation Cedar Falls, when I
witnessed more torture than I had seen on any special operation in
Vietnam. We were cooperating with the 172nd Military Intelligence
Detachment, which is attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. We
received a large group of prisoners, and we had a ‘Chieu
Hoi’. A Chieu Hoi is a deserter from the Viet Cong. He is
generally used as an informer to give information about his former
comrades. A certain prisoner was pointed out by the Chieu Hoi as being
some sort of local cadre in the Iron Triangle - and this also goes for
Ben Suc by the way; this was during the same operation that included
Ben Suc. The prisoner was taken into the tent in the afternoon. Our
unit stopped interrogation in the evenings because our tents were so
full of holes from bullets and other things that our light seeped out
and attracted enemy fire. Anyway, another unit continued to interrogate
at night and all of a sudden an enlisted man from that unit came over
and said: ‘We just lost a prisoner.’ I said,
‘What?’ I couldn’t believe it. And he
said, ‘We have. The captain was wiring him, and he just fell
over and died.’ The captain came over a little later and
said: ‘Yes, I was wiring him. He was about to break. He was
just on the verge of telling me something when he died.’
There are certain papers which
must be kept in regard to the prisoners. It is a very informal thing
but you have to fill in the disposition of the prisoner. In this case
the prisoner was dead, so a doctor was called, a brigade surgeon, as I
recall, in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He diagnosed the cause of death
of the prisoner as being heart failure, which is logical. The man had
been electrically tortured to death. He probably bad a weak heart. {252}
Halimi: Could you indicate whether the man in charge of the
interrogation was an American captain? And that South Vietnamese
translators were present?
In 100 per cent of the interrogations performed in our unit and in
other units I watched, there was always a Vietnamese interpreter
present, because Americans do not speak the language well enough to
conduct a complicated interrogation. This creates much difficulty and a
lot of misinterpretation during the interrogations. It probably
provokes the use of torture, because one becomes angry with the
interpreter and the prisoner. Yes, there was a Vietnamese interpreter
present. There had to be and there always is. The captain
couldn’t speak Vietnamese. I can say that I did not
personally see which interpreting sergeant was there but I know that
one was there. The captain was, I believe, a section leader of either
the counter-intelligence section or of the interrogation section of the
172nd Military Intelligence Detachment. I don’t recall who he
was. The captain said he had ‘wired’ the prisoner
and we were waiting for information from the prisoner that would
implicate other prisoners. There were more prisoners - and this was
documented by press reports - taken during Operation Cedar Falls than
in any other, literally thousands of people.
Halimi: After the death of this prisoner, did the officer give a report?
There was no formal report concerning the death except for an informal
log kept by the military police who guard the prisoners. The
disposition of a prisoner can involve one of several things. For
example, he can be recommended for further interrogation. In that case
you go on to another unit, a higher unit in the echelon - at that time
it was the 1st Infantry Division. A prisoner can also be recommended to
be a civil defendant, meaning he is guilty of a civil crime and that
you don’t believe him to be a Viet Cong. A civil crime can be
not having an ID card or travelling without travel papers, or anything
you want. He can be an innocent civilian which is not often the case or
his can be a doubtful case. In the latter event, he is interrogated
further, and the doubtfulness of his case is marked under
‘disposition’ in the record book. In this case,
disposition was ‘death due to heart failure’ - and
very simple! No one ever reviews it. No one cares. The International
Red Cross is not there. I don’t know where they are, in fact.
They were {253} not on any operation except for their recreational
girls. They were not present at any operation I was on, and I was on
every major operation in III Corps Tactical Zone during that time that
I was there.
Halimi: You also told me about an interrogation which you conducted
yourself a few kilometres from a Michelin plantation, when you were
given a prisoner who you took to be a Viet Cong cadre. Would you please
tell me, repeat for the Tribunal, the methods you used to make him talk?
That was during Operation Manhattan which was in May of this year. We
were carrying out a village ‘sweep’. The village
was surrounded, all the people were herded into one area and screened.
The people we thought should be interrogated were interrogated. A
certain prisoner had been found hiding in a drainage ditch with a
weapon, so immediately I knew he was a Viet Cong. There was still the
question of determining his rank; second, if he was important or not.
We were about four kilometres south of the Michelin plantation of Yan
Tieng. I started the interrogation. My interpreter was beating this man
with a wooden mallet that he had found in the house we were working in.
He beat the man on the kneecaps and the shoulder blades and I did not
stop the interpreter. This didn’t yield much information. We
were being watched by my commanding officer and I got very frustrated.
I decided to try out a new idea.
I had the man dig his own
grave with a gun at his head, and he dug his grave until I counted off
the minutes that he had to live. I counted them off in Vietnamese so
that he knew I wasn’t kidding. He broke down and cried. This
is the absolute power the interrogator has. The prisoner was quite
certain he was going to die. I described what death he was going to
have. He had a rifle or an M-79 grenade launcher being pointed at him
the whole time. The interpreter occasionally beat him while he was
digging his grave. He was quite certain he was going to die. This is
what is known as ‘breaking the prisoner’. After he
was ‘broken’, to keep him broken I just kept
reminding him, in Vietnamese, that he was not yet dead.
I have read the 1949 Geneva
Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Coercion is quite
illegal. It is a war crime. It is specifically stated that prisoners
must not be harassed or coerced. {254}
Halimi: Mr Martinsen, in the brief time that we spoke together, you
enumerated a number of cases of torture in which you and other
Americans participated. I also remember that you declared,
‘If I am going to be questioned seriously and for a long time
I could speak of many cases, many hundreds of cases, of
torture.’ Would you confirm it?
This is quite true. Electrical torture was very common for a while in
Vietnam but was not common towards the end of our assignment. Beatings
were extremely common. An interrogator came to me and said,
‘My hands are getting tired from hitting this man in the
mouth.’ It was something that occurred in almost every
interrogation and it was tacitly condoned by the officers. The
commanding officer of the unit stated for the record that there must be
no torturing or the use of force during an interrogation. However, he
allowed it to continue and watched it. He knew of it. The commanding
officer, the section commander, knew of it.
Halimi: I would like to ask you to give some details concerning that
young girl of seventeen who was not tortured but who was gassed. You
remember that you said to me that the Americans threw tear gas into a
tunnel ten kilometres long that you believe was occupied by the Viet
Con g. You said that there were many wounded, including several young
girls. You said you were a witness to the case of a young girl of
seventeen who was badly wounded and who was not given medical aid in
time because they wanted to get information from her. You said her
condition worsened and the doctor was called. She died while you were
there. Would you please confirm this for the Tribunal?
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This was a particularly odious thing. I heard that it involved several
girls. I was not there when the people were captured but there are
‘capture circumstances’ tags that each prisoner
has. There were some people in a tunnel, and the Americans found the
tunnel entrance. They looked inside the tunnel and found it was
occupied. They immediately gassed the tunnel with tear gas. It might
have been ‘antiriot’ gas. Then they proceeded to
chase the people from the tunnel. The tunnel was so long they chased
the people for twenty-four hours, until the people came out the other
end of the tunnel very badly gassed and coughing. All of them sounded
as if they had serious damage to their lungs. The prisoners {255} were
brought into us, and I only looked once. Four or five of the prisoners
were girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty. They were nurses and
labourers. The girls were brought to us in very bad physical condition.
They were coughing, wheezing and gasping, as if they had bad - very bad
- asthmatic attacks. I took one look and called the doctor. The doctor
gave them all injections and dosages of adrenalin. The prisoner
compound was nothing but a tent with barbed wire around it. The
prisoners were not segregated by sex as the Geneva Convention calls
for. The prisoners were not given proper bedding. The girls were lying
on the ground, which was rather damp, and one girl grew more ill. It
was the policy that all prisoners must be interrogated. I kept calling
the doctor to say ‘Doctor, she has pneumonia.’ I
knew that because I have had pneumonia. The doctor kept saying:
‘No, No. She’ll get better,’ and she kept
getting worse. She was finally evacuated to Lai Khe, to the 3rd
Brigade, 1st Division field hospital, where I hear she died. I
denounced the stupidity of the doctors and the stupidity of the
commanders for trying to keep her there to interrogate her, and I
almost got court-martialled for it. That was one of the most odious
things I saw there.
Halimi: Mr President, I have finished asking my questions about the
torture. You can ask Mr Martinsen directly about the use of weapons
such as white phosphorus, the M-16 rifle, tear gas and anti-personnel
weapons like canister and beehive, which are fragmentation weapons. I
think it would be better now to ask the witness questions directly
concerned with the question of torture.
Vladimir Dedijer: Thank you very much. In accordance with our rules the
questions posed by the President will come last. Members of the
Tribunal are invited to present their questions to Mr Martinsen.
Peter Weiss: Mr Martinsen, you said during your experiences in Vietnam
you became acquainted with the Geneva Conventions about the treatment
of prisoners of war. When you went through your military schooling, did
the officers speak to you and to your comrades about the Geneva laws?
Yes, it was stressed in the school that torture was not permitted in
the army but that was before the Vietnam war got very large. That was
in July and August of 1965, I forget exactly when {256} Johnson made
his speech for the escalation but it was at that time. Our troops did
not arrive until after large amounts of interrogations had been
completed. After I went to school, they may have changed policy, but I
doubt it. They didn’t teach us about the Geneva Conventions.
They taught that war crimes must not be committed, that prisoners must
not be tortured nor mishandled, nor harassed, coerced or forced into
doing anything. The instructors say privately, ‘Yes, I know
they do it in Vietnam, but we don’t officially admit
it.’
Weiss: When you came to Vietnam, is it true you found that in practice
the prisoners were tortured? Was it a sort of rule? Was it quite common
that the prisoners went through this procedure?
It was a pattern of the interrogations. The army had classified field
manuals on interrogation. Several different techniques are discussed
but, without saying anything classified, I would say you begin by being
nice to the prisoner. If you start out by torturing the prisoner where
do you go from there? It’s only logical. You must start out
by being nice to the prisoner. Afterwards it depends upon the
information that you get. I cannot think of an interrogation that I saw
in Vietnam during which a war crime, as defined by the Geneva
Conventions, was not committed. I cannot think of one without
harassment or coercion. Even where force was not used, coercion, such
as beating, torturing and harassment (such as screaming and yelling),
was used. This was coercion, and it was specifically stated that one
ought not to do this. The army has a field manual called The Law of
Land Warfare, I forget the number, and it’s the entire 1949
Geneva Convention. This field manual is easily obtained but no one ever
reads it. I read parts of it, but it was not required that it be read.
Weiss: Mr Martinsen, I think you must have gone through a tremendous
moral development when you came to Vietnam. When you changed your
views, you went through a lot of experiences and you have a different
view on these experiences now, to when you came to Vietnam?
When I went to Vietnam, I was for the Vietnam war. I thought it was an
open case of Communist aggression and that the majority of the
Vietnamese people wanted us in Vietnam. I received a short course in
the Vietnamese language before I went. Then I always tried to speak to
my interpreters as much as possible, and I {257} speak to the people as
much as possible. I developed a small knowledge of Vietnamese, and I
understood that the government in Vietnam, which states that it
supports the Vietnamese people, does not really. If this government
wants us there, the people don’t. I know this and the
Vietnamese people have told me this. This is the major absurdity of the
war, not the fact that the war crimes are committed. War crimes are
committed in every war. War has war crimes, by definition.
Weiss: Were you taught that the Vietnamese people were of less value
than the Americans, for example, or the people of Western nations?
The general viewpoint of the American troops was that the Vietnamese
were apathetic, ignorant, dirty and were really not worthy of our
efforts to be there. That was the general feeling, and the general
feeling was, ‘Well, we might as well be here and show them
the right way, clean them up, build them suburbia houses, and put two
cars in every garage.’ That’s the American dream
for Vietnam.
Weiss: Mr Martinsen, could you tell a little about the development you
went through? How did it happen that you changed your attitude?
My development came about with a number of things. It has partly to do
with seeing all the little things in a war. If you’ve read
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, you think it is pure fiction, but
that such things don’t really happen. Then you see things
happen constantly. If you encounter a man who likes to shoot water
buffaloes, you may ask him, ‘Why do you like to shoot water
buffaloes?’ and he says, ‘Because I like to shoot
water buffaloes.’ It’s so absurd. I remember a man
who was a helicopter door-gunner and he likes to kill people on the
ground, but only after playing with them like a cat plays with a mouse
with his machine gun, chasing them around, etc. I saw rice captured
from the Viet Cong, in American bags, and you don’t really
know if the rice is American rice but the bags are American bags. They
have ‘US NATO rice’ written on them. It’s
all these ten thousand things. It’s also the torture, the
torture that shouldn’t really happen. Then you realize,
because everybody participates in the torture - unless we have a
special group of sadists working as interrogators, which I
don’t believe; I believe they are just normal people - you
realize {258} that there is an innate capability to do harm to your
fellow-man in proper circumstances, and these circumstances are
provided by the war in Vietnam. It’s so horrifying to recall
an interrogation where you beat the fellow to get an effect, and then
you beat him out of anger, and then you beat him out of pleasure. That
is what is horrible to say.
Weiss: Have there been others of your comrades who had the same
experience as you did?
I don’t think they talk about it. A lot of the men are still
in the army and if there is ever any kind of trial they’ll be
subpoenaed of course. This would affect their careers. So I
won’t name any names. I will not ruin careers, but someone
has to say that Americans believe that an American doesn’t
commit any war crimes, simply because he is an American. They must
understand that it does not take a Nazi to commit a war crime, it does
not take a Nazi to kill six million Jews. They must understand this and
no one is willing to speak because there is quite a bit of pressure. In
my case it was mainly family pressure, dragging the family name through
the mud or losing my inheritance, etc. - and the fact there probably is
going to be a lot of pressure on my family from the press, etc. But
even they don’t think Americans do wrong. Even they
misunderstood what is happening. Even they say, ‘My country
right or wrong.’ In this case it’s wrong, and I
can’t accept it if it’s wrong, and they still say,
‘My country right or wrong.’ That’s the
way they think and this manner of thinking must be changed.
Weiss: One final question. You mentioned an expression used by an
officer who tortured a prisoner, the prisoner who was killed. He said,
‘I was “wiring” him.’ Later on
it was stated that the cause of death was heart failure. If one has
studied the German concentration camps, there were methods of killing
people by phenol, by gas and other means, and the death certificate
used the same phrases. I suppose you were too young to remember what
happened during the Second World War, but did you, before you left the
States or perhaps when you returned and were more concerned with this
problem, did you know anything about the Germans? About the killings by
the Nazis during the Second World War?
Yes, I came across some of it while doing research. But I
don’t {259} see what inference you’re trying to
draw. I’m quite aware of what the Nazis did.
Weiss: I am referring to the terminology: ‘I was wiring
him’, and then: ‘death by heart failure’.
This phrase I was wiring him’ was exactly the same term the
Germans used, ‘Ich hab ihn eingespritst.’
This is true. The common term is ‘wiring’ or
‘phoning him up’, one or the other - and at least
the Germans used a death certificate. This man, no one knows he died.
No one even knows if he was ever alive. He probably didn’t
have a birth certificate and he certainly didn’t have a death
certificate.
Dave Dellinger: As you’ll probably be able to tell from my
accent, I’m an American too. And even before you mentioned
the pressures that your family was subjected to, I just wanted to
congratulate you for your courage. Although I know there will be many
pressures I think the day will come when not only many Americans, who
will do it today, but all of the American people will hail you as a
hero and thank you for helping their country to get its better self
back. Now on this question of pressures, you mentioned that after the
girl was not given medical treatment, and after several girls were
brought in coughing and gasping and put into interrogation, you
considered this odious and you complained about it, and almost got
court-martialled. Could you tell us a little bit about the
circumstances of that? What kinds of pressure were brought on you? What
makes you say that you almost got court-martialled?
Well, you see, I was being insubordinate. It doesn’t matter
what you’re being insubordinate about. If you’re
insubordinate, you’re insubordinate. I called it foolish. I
called it stupid. It was so obvious to me that the girl was very ill,
that there was no reason for her to die. When I heard that she died,
the evening that she died, I just got so angry that I went around
telling every officer in the place what I thought of him, what I
thought of his personal stupidity for keeping the girl there while
there was a possibility of her dying.
Dellinger: Did you file a complaint, or did you simply mention it?
Would that I had had the courage to file a complaint or to go to jail
for my beliefs then. {260}
Dellinger: I believe that in all the instances you talked about, or at
least the majority of them, the American was either doing the torturing
or the beating or supervising the interrogation. in the United States,
when instances of torture have been revealed, the explanation usually
given is that it is the Vietnamese committing it and that the Americans
either couldn’t stop them or weren’t even there.
You mentioned there is always a Vietnamese present. Is it possible
that, in these reported instances, the Vietnamese acted as the
interpreter and the American was conducting the torture?
It could very well be. At every interrogation there has to be an
interpreter and there are many hundreds of interrogators in the country.
Dellinger: Many hundreds of American interrogators?
Yes, and each one of the American interrogators has a
‘pool’ of interpreters to choose from. All of our
interrogators had participated in actual torture.
Dellinger: They had all participated?
They had all participated at one time or another. It is foolishness and
lies to say that only the Vietnamese torture. I never saw an
interrogation conducted by Vietnamese. I don’t know what they
do when they interrogate. I assume they do exactly what we do, but I
don’t think they have any compunctions about leaving marks.
Dellinger: Did you hear of any cases, among the hundreds of
interrogators, where people insisted on interrogating without beating
or torture? Did you hear of cases where people refused to do this, and
if so do you know what happened to these people?
No, I don’t know of
a single case. I almost refused, but unfortunately I was too cowardly
to actually refuse. I don’t know any percentages, but what is
torture? Is torture electrical torture or is torture beating? I
don’t know. Personally, I had a lot of success when I learned
to speak Vietnamese. I had a lot of success with pure coercion, because
I’m a fairly large person. I was able to intimidate the
rather small Vietnamese, specially when I learned to speak their
language. I was able to tell them ‘I know you’re
lying’, and in their language.
Dellinger: I want to ask another question. One of the soldiers from
Fort Hood, Texas, who refused to go to Vietnam and who is now serving a
sentence in the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, {261} testified at
his court martial that in his training in the United States he was told
that it was his duty ‘to kill the little brown
Asians’. According to Gisele Halimi’s summary
report this morning, one of the people who has testified, I think on
tape, said that he was told, ‘You can kill anyone with
slanted eyes.’ Concerning this whole question of
interrogation, were there any instructions or indoctrination or common
talk that would have implied that to use torture wasn’t so
serious because of race, because of Asian qualities?
The common American GI term for a Vietnamese was either a
‘gook’ or a ‘slant’. Our unit
was not a typical unit; it was a military intelligence unit. The people
were more intelligent, and the unit was small. It was more or less a
family, and I spent most of my time with the unit. Concerning the line
troops, during Operation Cedar Falls, I was in the Iron Triangle. I had
a prisoner who had volunteered to lead us to tunnels. I had to use
force on him: I didn’t beat him but I interrogated him for
eighteen hours. I finally broke his resistance. We took him to find the
tunnels in the 173rd Airborne’s territory, and we found them.
The men there told me they weren’t taking prisoners. They
said, ‘We aren’t taking prisoners because one of
our platoon leaders was killed three days before.’ One
fellow, eighteen years old, I think he was, said to me with a grin,
‘You should’ve seen the girl I shot
yesterday.’ This is the absurdity of war: an
eighteen-year-old telling me about killing a girl. They wired the dead
with explosives so when the Viet Cong came to get their dead, they were
blown up.
Dellinger: As I understand it, the Vietnamese place a particular
significance upon a proper burial and keeping the graves of their
ancestors. Is that common knowledge among those who wire the bodies
with explosives?
I don’t think so. Normally the soldiers going over there are
given a short orientation on things you should and shouldn’t
do in Vietnam. You know, don’t pat people on the back and
things like that. But the soldiers generally ignore this, because to
the soldiers the Vietnamese people are whores to sleep with, servants
to supply the cold beer and the Coca-Cola. They’re the people
who make the beds and sweep the floors and shine the boots. But they
aren’t thought of as real people. Their status is that of a
Negro in the United States in, say, 1850. {262}
Dellinger: Did you find that the Vietnamese in the American-occupied
areas did not like the Americans much?
You can only say an area is American-occupied if the Americans have
placed a barbed-wire fence around it. But in areas where the American
control is more strong, you can say that the Vietnamese don’t
like us for several reasons. First of all is the indiscriminate
shooting and bombing. The Americans have a policy of
‘free-fire zones’, where the Vietnamese provincial
chief sets off an area and says it’s a free-fire zone. Then
he tries to tell all his people not to go into that area - then of
course the logic being that he’ll tell the people on the
right side not to go in there. But, invariably, innocent people do get
killed. I heard this in a report. Two peasants were riding in an ox
cart, it was spotted in a free-fire zone and they called for permission
to fire on an ox cart loaded with rice, as they later found out. They
fired and killed the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese hate us also because
the whole thing is turning into a big brothel. Fulbright was right.
Saigon is a large whorehouse. It is. I was there. I saw it. Bien Hoa
is, too. Xuan Loc is, too. You can still see the French heritage there
in Vietnam where, I understand, the French used Sudanese soldiers, so
you can see mixed Negro-Oriental babies - no longer babies now, but
children, and, in another three or four years you’re going to
see a tremendous amount of mixed Caucasians with the Vietnamese. A
tremendous amount. We’re corrupting the whole country. The
money a prostitute in Vietnam can make is $300 a day, whereas the
average wage I believe is $30-40 a month. How would you feel if your
daughters or your sister became a prostitute?
Dellinger: I visited both Saigon and Hanoi and it was my impression, my
experience, that the Vietnamese in Saigon felt more hostility to the
Americans than the Vietnamese in Hanoi, because they experienced the
unconscious arrogance that we Americans too often display, and the race
prejudice and the things of that kind, directly and personally.
Well, it’s not only the race prejudice. There’s
nothing more obnoxious than a drunk GI. And there are thousands of
drunk GIs in that country, whistling at the pretty schoolgirls - and
the Vietnamese women are really pretty. And the students, the
high-school students, wearing an ao-dai, are really a very charming
{263} sight. An American GI when he arrives there, and probably even
when he leaves there, thinks that the woman is a prostitute.
He’ll proposition her, lay his hands on her, and expect the
Vietnamese to like it.
Mahmud Ali Kasuri: Mr Martinsen, please forgive me for asking some
questions which may appear to you to be very ordinary but I want some
basic facts. May I know if you were in many camps, or only in one camp?
We had a base camp which was in Lon Giao.... . This is where the unit
was headquartered, but every time they had a major operation the unit
was attached to a larger unit - one of the infantry divisions - for
support. You see, we were an armoured unit. We had tanks and armoured
ears - armoured personnel carriers actually. And these were excellent
weapons for shock value - tremendous fire-power, etc. So we were
attached to an infantry unit to provide convoy support, to spearhead
attacks, etc. If you’re in any way familiar with the
operation there - Operation Attleboro and Operation Cedar Falls,
Operation Junction City and Operation Manhattan - all very big
operations involving forty, fifty, sixty thousand troops in the III
Tactical Corps Area, Second Field Force Area. And these were all over
the area. I was in Bien Hoa, I believe it is, where they just had that
recent battle. Loc Ninh - I was very close to Loc Ninh. I was
throughout. I was every place in the III Corps Zone where you could
take a tank.
Kasuri: ... What were the names of the four major operations you were
in?
Operation Attleboro, Operation Cedar Falls, Operation Junction City,
Operation Manhattan - which carried on into early June of this year.
Kasuri: And apart from these four major operations, you were in a
number of smaller operations?
Yes.
Kasuri: Smaller. And would it be right to understand that what you have
testified about in a number of cases was the common practice in all the
places you were in?
It was the common practice in every operation except Junction City. In
Junction City we did no interrogation. We had no prisoners. We were
there, but there were no prisoners in Junction {264} City, in our area.
There were prisoners in other areas, but in the area that we were in,
we had no prisoners. And from what I observed and from the other units
that I worked with, the 172nd Military Detachment - I worked with them
- the 4th Military Intelligence Detachment, which is attached to the
4th Infantry Division (I worked with them on Operation Manhattan, and I
know they torture, well ... they said they did ... I’d have
to say it’s hearsay). . . . They said, ‘Why
don’t you wire him up a little?’ They had a special
field-phone apparatus, as a matter of fact, that they showed me, for
placing wires on.
Kasuri: What about Operation Cedar Falls?
During that operation we were just outside Ben Cat. We were working
closely with the 173rd Airborne Division. It was during that operation
that the Iron Triangle was taken. Thousands of people were moved out of
the Iron Triangle. Thousands upon thousands. My task was to
‘screen’ people, to select individuals for
questioning from among the refugees. This is a tremendous power to be
given one man. The Iron Triangle is bordered by the Saigon River and
another river whose name I forget. It has been a VC area for years and
it is heavily fortified by the VC. They even have concrete bunkers. The
population was ‘evacuated’. We had helicopters and
psychological warfare specialists. We took some Chieu Hois, that is
deserters from the Viet Cong, and they flew over the villages, and we
said, ‘Come out. Lay down your arms and come over to our
side.’ This was quite effective. We got quite a number of
Chieu Hois during Operation Cedar Falls. There were also several
hundred people running around who didn’t want to leave the
Iron Triangle. These people were shot on sight.
Kasuri: You said that during Operation Attleboro there were not many
people captured by your unit. Were there many people captured by other
units?
Both Time and Newsweek reported that a tremendous number of prisoners
were taken during that operation. Reports of interrogations are not
always made if it is unimportant and we decide to release the prisoner,
but during Operation Cedar Falls our detachment made over 100 reports
of interrogations. There were also hundreds and hundreds of
‘screenings’ which took place. Sometimes, during
‘screening’ you just look at a person and you say,
‘You, come with me.’ The refugees were kept in a
{265} barbed-wire enclosure and they were passed in front of me, an
interpreter, maybe a few interpreters. The Vietnamese national police
were there. Anyone could be selected for interrogation. The thousands
of refugees had their belongings with them, their oxen, chickens, pigs
and all they could carry. The people were sent on army flat-bed trucks
to Phu Loi. Afterwards, according to Life, they were placed in a
refugee camp, which was just another concentration camp, with
barbed-wire fences and guards.
I was in the battle zone in
the Triangle on two occasions. At the time there was little fighting.
Many of the domestic animals - livestock like water buffaloes, oxen, as
well as chickens - were running around free. The villages were being
demolished. I watched Ben Sue being demolished. I saw the remains of
the villages. The bulldozers just came through and tore everything
down. Livestock and personal possessions were left behind. There may
have been people in tunnels beneath the houses.
‘Tankdozers’ - a tank with a bulldozer blade - were
also used. On both sides of the road crossing the Iron Triangle, army
engineers cleared the area back to 400 metres off the road, to decrease
the chances of ambush. The area was pockmarked with bombs. A
thousand-pound bomb makes a huge crater up to fifty feet across and
forty feet deep. You can hear a B-52 raid from a distance of twenty or
thirty miles. It sounds like distant thunder. You wonder what the hell
they were bombing.
Our unit had something called
a ‘Zippo’, named after the American lighter. It was
a flame-throwing armoured personnel carrier. We used it to burn away
the foliage. I don’t know if it was ever used in combat but
it was a very destructive machine. It can fire napalm for a distance of
almost 100 metres. It fires a thick spray of napalm, which clings to
everything and burns rapidly. I saw napalm being dropped from planes. I
saw it at a distance, and I don’t know what it was being used
against.
Kasuri: Were you also in Operation Junction City?
Yes, I was there during phase two, but not during the first phase.
Kasuri: In that operation did the unit you were operating with capture
many prisoners?
This time we were again assigned to road reconnaissance security. I and
an interpreter worked as an interrogation team. In Vietnam,
interrogators do not exhibit their ranks, as they normally {266} should
on their arms. If the prisoner has a higher rank than the interrogator,
it is harder to interrogate him. We wore the ‘US’
collar insignia which has no rank significance and represents quite a
bit of power of intimidation. For example, I might be a captain. I had
complete freedom and I conducted the interrogation as I wanted to. They
arrested seven rubber workers for not having identification, but I
released them very quickly. It was obvious that they knew something,
but it wasn’t worth going after.
There were no regiments where
we were, about ten kilometres from the Cambodian border, at a small
plantation called Xa Cat. We had seen some action in War Zone C, but at
Xa Cat there was no action at all. There was no sniping and there were
no mortar attacks. The captain who had rounded up the prisoners said he
had just become bored and threw them in the tank and delivered them to
me. It was obvious they were rubber-plantation workers. If they were
also Viet Cong I could not determine. You never can know that. So I
just released them. They had been brought to me for interrogation
because they didn’t have ID cards, and many people were
arrested for that reason. In Operation Junction City there were many
prisoners, but not many in our area. In Operation Manhattan, there were
again many prisoners. This time our unit, because of increasing
experience, also took many prisoners. Many of them had been classified
Viet Cong and admitted to being Viet Cong. This was when I had the
prisoner dig his own grave. There was no ‘wiring’
done on this operation, but there was quite a lot of beating. It was
then that I heard the remark, ‘My hand is getting tired from
beating this prisoner.’ We had perhaps fifty or sixty
interrogations.
Kasuri: This was during Operation Manhattan?
Yes. I am just speaking about our unit, of course. Our unit was the
smallest unit on a low combat echelon, and I had a great amount of
freedom. I could do anything I wanted to do. I knew that if a prisoner
happened to die, then there would be no formal report and nothing would
ever happen to me. There would be perhaps an explanation such as,
‘shot trying to escape’ or ‘died of heart
failure’. My unit never killed a prisoner under torture, but
if it had happened, there would have been no official action.
Kasuri: Were there any superior officers higher than captain {267}
present who performed interrogation?
Perhaps. I don’t know. Our unit had a major as a commanding
officer and a captain as section leader. The other officers performed
some of the most brutal interrogations I witnessed. The only time I saw
electrical torture applied to the sex organs it was an officer who was
doing the torturing. The only time I saw bamboo placed under
fingernails was by an officer.
Kasuri: Would it be correct to say that the superior officers are
cognizant of what occurs during interrogation?
No.
Kasuri: Why do you say no?
They aren’t. The interrogator’s job is to obtain
information. The superior officers do not care how the information is
obtained. I don’t know if the command in Saigon knows about
the torture, but the commanding officers of lower echelon units do know
and they condone it tacitly. It is not expressly forbidden. General
Westmoreland might have gotten a hint that torture was being used to
get information, because he sent out a directive reaffirming the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. So in
Vietnam they know it, this is at MACV level. But I don’t know
if the officers in the Pentagon know about it and that is why
I’m here.
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Kasuri: I was not concerned with the officers in the Pentagon. I wanted
to know if officers with a rank much higher than captain or major know
that torture is used during interrogation.
Lieutenant-colonels know about it.
Kasuri: Do they know about it for sure?
They know about it because they are the squadron commanders, and
occasionally they witnessed interrogations in which beatings occurred.
I can’t speak for our regimental commander. I don’t
remember him ever witnessing an interrogation. Interrogations are
private affairs. You don’t have officers looking over your
shoulder. You have complete control and you don’t want people
distracting you.
Kasuri: Do you know any officer or soldier of the United States who has
been punished for using torture?
No.
Carl Oglesby: Were you selected for training as an interrogator {268}
or did you volunteer?
I volunteered for the language school, and after I finished my language
training I was sent to the intelligence school. I wanted to get into
counter-intelligence training, which is not exactly like James Bond.
Instead I was placed in interrogation training; after that I was not
used because I had a useless training. I was trained to interrogate
prisoners of war, and at that time there wasn’t a big war. I
was also trained to speak Italian and the army has very few persons in
Italy. So I was not used.
Oglesby: Did the army direct you into interrogation training?
Yes.
Oglesby: Was this training generalized or was it intended for
interrogation in Vietnam?
While I was there they were changing the curriculum to include
Vietnamese-style interrogation. The training had formerly concentrated
on Soviet interrogation; we had to memorize Soviet
terminology’ and so on.
Oglesby: When they began to train you for Vietnamese interrogation did
you notice whether or not any new attitudes appeared? Was there any
kind of racialist cast to the training for Vietnamese interrogation?
I can’t say: I believe that there were four hours devoted to
Vietnamese interrogation and that was all.
Oglesby: What kind of person, generally speaking, found himself in this
sort of school? Was it a more-than-average intelligent soldier?
Yes. Military intelligence is correlated with tested intelligence. In
the army tests you have to have a score of 110 with 100 being the
average, to get into the intelligence school.
Oglesby: Do most of the people have college education?
The officers did. But most of the people did not have a college
education; I think 100 per cent had high school education. Some, like
me, had some college education; but I can’t think of anybody
in interrogation training with a college degree. In
counter-intelligence training there were many people with college
educations.
Oglesby: So far as you know, how many Negroes were doing interrogation
work in Vietnam?
None.
Oglesby: You never saw any Negroes interrogating? {269}
No.
Oglesby: Do you know of any Negroes doing that kind of work?
I have to change what I just said. A Negro captain in the 172nd
Military Intelligence Detachment was working as an interrogation
officer, although I never saw him interrogate. I believe we also had a
Negro in our interrogation class; I don’t know if he went to
Vietnam or not.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Have you come here to be a witness for your
conscience’s sake or because you think it is in the interest
of your country and in accordance with the principles of your
country’s constitution?
By coming here I want to show several things. But the main thing I want
to do is to show that an American isn’t necessarily good
because he’s an American. If I told the average American that
I committed war crimes, he would say it was horrible; but it
doesn’t reach any level of consciousness. To the average
American a war crime is something incomprehensible. To him, it is
inconceivable that Americans commit war crimes. Frankly, I’m
the stereotype of an American college student; I want to show that
it’s not perhaps some long-haired freak from Berkeley campus
with a beard who commits war crimes, but it’s perhaps Mrs
Jones’s son down the street. I’m hoping to develop
that consciousness. I’m hoping to get someone to honestly
consider that war causes war crimes and that all wars are bad because
they cause war crimes.
Halimi: I would like to supplement what Mr Martinsen has said by
explaining the circumstances in which he agreed to come. He wanted to
know about the Tribunal and its orientation. He indicated that he did
not wish to serve any political line, and more particularly he said
that he did not want to serve the Communist line. I told him that he
would be able to speak quite freely and that he would be able to
express any opinion he held. I said that we would only question him on
the facts. I would like Mr Martinsen to confirm this.
This is quite true. Everything you have said is true. You see,
Americans try to find Communists under every rock they pick up. Of
course, the Tribunal will be used for Communist propaganda. Personally,
I do not embrace Communism as an ideology. I don’t like
Communism and what it does. But neither do I like war. But {270} this
is an anti-war issue that may be used for Communist propaganda. That it
is anti-war is the important thing. It’s not necessarily
important that it may be used for Communist propaganda.
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