The Interrogation: No Water-Boarding Here
(to “honor” the publication of George Bush’s memoir, a tissue of lies: a moment of truth)
One of those large eight-man tents, not far from the smaller tent where I was staying for a few weeks. Beautiful Dak To: high hills ringing the small base camp—Some of the hills with names: Ngok Ring Rua, Ngok Rao. I didn’t know what the names meant. They were in the local montagnard dialect and I didn’t speak the language. No one could tell me what the words meant except for the one word “ngok”—mountain. But the landscape as landscape was beautiful—thick triple canopied jungle covered the highest of the hills though sometimes there was a bald spot at the very top. And there were clear spaces, places where our bombs had fallen, places where napalm had cleared the underbrush, places that looked as pock-marked as an adolescent’s face. Other than that, the whole area was lovely.
This isn’t about the Battle of Dak To, nor is it about the death of a scout/spy named Bao: enough has been written about the battle and I've written more than enough about Bao. Army historians wrote a detailed account of everything that happened at Dak To and published it in a full-length, book-sized government document. The Battle of Dak To was the first of the three major battles that divide the whole 1967-1968 war year, like Gaul, into three major parts: Dak To, the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh. Those names are now, for better or worse, a part of our cultural memory though it is doubtful that, a hundred years from now, anyone will remember what happened near the small town of Dak To.
But I believe that was the crucial year on the war, the year that marked a turning point in the history of the war, the climax of the war. The rest, from after Tet 1968 to the Fall of Saigon, those long eight years, were merely denoument.
What I want to talk about today, though, is what happened in that tent I mentioned back in the first sentence. When I read about the extreme interrogation techniques we used in the Bush era of the Iraq/Afghanistan War, I am always, aways thrust back to Dak To in November of 1967: the only time I participated, if only for one day, in an interrogation. Some MI guys from the 4th Infantry Division had a prisoner: a Viet Cong, not a North Vietnamese Army soldier, Jim and I got a chance to meet with the prisoner the day before we were scheduled to leave Dak To.
It was always hard for me to determine the age of some youngish Vietnamese men. This particular prisoner looked no more than fifteen, but could easily have been in his young twenties. He had a bandage on his head, some blood showing through. When I first saw him I got flashes of Henry Fleming from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: the bloody bandage, the false bravado, but all bravado is, by definition, false in some way.
I confess that I felt some sympathy for the man/boy. He was on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by men who were much larger than he was, unable to speak their language even when they shouted at him in slower and slower English or tried rudimentary Vietnamese…so rudimentary and wrong that he could not understand a word of it. All of the tones were wrong and if you don’t get the tones right in Vietnamese you aren’t using the right words.
I will say this up front: no one was mistreating him. There was no torture. No one was hitting him. No one used extreme interrogation techniques. But just being there in the tent, lying on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by big men who did not speak his language and who must have wanted some kind of vengeance, must have felt to him like some light form of torture. I suspect the sense of certainty that some form of torture is going to happen is a kind of self-inflicted torture in and of itself.
The prisoner was asking for water, but none of the men around him could understand what he wanted. I told them he was thirsty and one of them brought a canteen. No torture, just a failure to communicate. I handed him the canteen and he drank thirstily. If this were fiction, the canteen with its water might seem like some symbol of communion: take, drink…this is my blood. But this is not fiction and the water was simply…water. No conversion, no spontaneous belief in all things red, white and blue. Merely thirst quenched. He looked better after drinking.
Jim and I were there because we had some use of the language after more than a year of language school: like being able to tell the VC was thirsty, for example. The 4th Infantry Division guys wanted the prisoner to answer questions and they did not know how to ask the questions or comprehend the answers. They had had twelve weeks of Vietnamese language familiarization. That obviously had accomplished nothing.
The boy, because he was not old enough to be called a man, though his wounds might have made up for his age, was perfectly willing to talk, seemed almost eager to do so. I do not remember all the questions, all the answers, but he did tell us which unit he was with and confessed that he did not know much about the area. He was not an officer, not in on any plans that might help the 4th ID succeed in its mission. So, he spilled everything he knew but knew nothing. I remember one of the questions. I was told to ask him if his unit had helmets. I shrugged and asked. His answer: “If we had helmets, I would not be here.”
So, that’s it. I suppose if they had had helmets we would have lost the war even sooner. Or, maybe if we had taken a colonel or general prisoner, we would have gotten more important information from him. You know, plans, major intelligence, but we were stuck with the equivalent of a buck private and like E-1s everywhere, he didn’t really know anything of value. I mean he knew that he was hungry and thirsty and that he was in a shit load of trouble. But that’s about it. And we already knew that. We would have known that without asking him anything. He also told us his unit numbers and designations, but we already knew that unit was in the area. We had known it for some time.
That all happened a long time ago, back in 1967, but I still remember it well: remember the sight of the high hills around the base camp, remember the smell of the camp, the filth, the dead-tired grunts who had recently been fighting for their lives, and, yes, one small prisoner huddled on a blanket on the dirt floor of an eight-man tent surrounded by large men who must have terrified him though they did no physical harm to him.
I don’t know what happened to him after I left the camp and, really, I would prefer not to know. That’s the only prisoner interrogation I was ever a part of and it was fairly mild. I have no doubt that most such interrogations were less friendly than this one, though I'm also fairly certain American soldiers did not torture captured enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War. Whether the ARVN did or not might make us somehow complicit, but I don't know what happened after he was turned over to them. What I do know is that we had a prisoner who obviously could give us very little information. And I also know that we were not unkind though he could not have sensed much kindness from any of us.
I suspect that, right now, he is an aging farmer somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and sometimes tells a story about the time he was held prisoner in a little out of the way American camp in Kontum Province. He might even mention the American soldier who spoke enough of his language that that soldier was able to know to give him a canteen of water.
Sometimes, that's enough.
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