Moderator. Steve, could you now relate to treatment of prisoners at a specific A Team Camp or in the Delta?

Noetzel. Right. This occurred at one particular camp, this was an A Team at a place called Tan Phu which is in the Caman Peninsula, deep in the Mekong Delta, the southernmost A Team. It was in a completely isolated area. It was completely VC controlled (around the A Team camp). In January or February of 1964. I'm not sure exactly which month, I witnessed an almost public, or not almost, a public display of electrical torture of Vietnamese prisoners.

Moderator. Excuse me, Steve, when you say public, who was present or who was witness to this specific one?

Noetzel. Well, the way the camp was situated, it had about four or five foot walls around the compound, maybe even a little higher than that. There were at least 100 or 150 ARVN strike forces watching from inside the compound, all of the American A Team that was there watching, and also there was a little bridge at a canal right next to the camp, a little camel-back bridge, and if you stood at the middle of the bridge, on the highest part of it. you could see down into the camp. And the torture was done outside at a place in the camp where anyone standing on the bridge could watch it. It was done for a psychological effect, I suppose, to show off a now invention, or a new kind of lie detector that they had conjured up. A captain there, the commander of the A Team, had conjured up a system of electrical torture, whereby they took a Sony tape recorder, a plain tape recorder with the w-meters on it, and hooked that up with some field telephone batteries (hooked up in series) and a toggle switch that was held under the table by a Special Forces Sergeant.

Then the captain asked questions of a prisoner, who was stripped naked, and electrodes from these field telephones were attached to the back of his neck to his armpits, to his genitals, and his feet. He was told that this apparatus was a lie detector, that he would be interrogated, and that every time he didn't tell the truth, the machine would give him a shock. He didn't know the difference between a lie detector, or had never seen a tape recorder, I guess. In truth, the captain, simply asked questions and the interpreter asked them in Vietnamese, when the captain didn't like the answer, he gave some kind of signal to the sergeant who gave him an electrical charge and the fellow would jump and scream. Everyone was very impressed with this new lie detector except, I guess, the fellow who was being questioned and couldn't understand why the lie detector was working so badly. He may or may not have been telling the truth. At any rate, they got information. Whether it was valid or not, I don't know. [This technique is commonly referred to by soldiers as "The Bell Telephone Hour."-Ed.]

Moderator. In your testimony on your sheet here, you mention something about snakes?

Noetzel. Right. At the B Team in Can Tho, this was the headquarters for the Four Corps, they had an eight foot python snake which was kept at the camp in a cage, supposedly for rat control. When we had prisoners or detainees who were brought to the B Team, they were immediately questioned, and if they balked at all or sounded like they weren't going to be cooperative, they were simply placed in a room overnight. This was like a detention room; the door was locked, and this snake was thrown in there with them. Now the python is a constrictor, similar to a boa. It's not poisonous, and it probably can't kill a full-grown American or a large male, but it sure terrified the Vietnamese. Two of them usually in a room overnight with the python snake, struggling with it most the night, I guess, and we could hear them screaming. In fact on one instance, they had to go in there and gag the prisoners, so they wouldn't keep everyone awake all night. In the morning they were usually more cooperative.

Moderator. Steve, traveling around through the Delta as you did, just in two words or less, how would you summarize the general treatment of prisoners throughout the A Team camps in the Delta during that period of time?

Noetzel. I didn't see any humane treatment of prisoners, but I didn't see that many prisoners. However, every time I did see them, they were mistreated in one way or another. If wasn't electrical torture, it was the snake torture. If it wasn't the snake torture, it was barbed wire cages, which are also used in Tan Phu. This was a coffin-like cage made of barbed wire, about the shape of a coffin-barbed wire strung around stakes. A prisoner was stripped naked and put into this cage for about a 24-hour period. In the daytime he would bake in the sun, and in the night the mosquitoes would eat him all night I guess. If the mosquitoes weren't particularly attracted to the Orientals, which they're not. they were sprayed with some kind of a mosquito attracting liquid, and they'd be full of bites in the morning. Finally, it wasn't that, at the B Team at Can Tho, there was another form of torture, a water torture. Prisoners were taken, usually two in a small canoe, out behind the compound in a small rice paddy. They were bound, their hands behind their back. They were blindfolded and were put on this little canoe. An American Special Forces sergeant was there, another Vietnamese soldier was there, and they poled the boat around in circles in the rice paddy. Except that it wasn't a rice paddy anymore, it had been a rice paddy. Now it was used as a latrine really. That's where the drainage from the B Team latrines went, into his rice paddy. It was filled with urine and feces, and it stank to high heaven. The prisoners were rowed around in that water and were asked questions. And if they balked, the fellow who was poling the boat simply took the pole and knocked them out of the boat into this water where they sputtered around for a few minutes. It was about four feet deep or so. They were blindfolded with hands tied behind their back. Finally they surfaced somehow, after drinking half of it, I guess, and were dragged back into the canoe. That was about the only kind of treatment of prisoners I saw.

Larry Craig, 29, SP/4, Public Information Office, 25th Infantry Division (1966 to 1967).

I was in Cu Chi, Vietnam... and generally, I think what I have to talk about is what I perceived my job to be over there and what it actually turned

out to be. It was an over-all cover up of what was actually going on in the division operation.

During the time that I was there with the 25th Division every news release that came out of our information office-this was at Brigade level and at Headquarters level with the division-made it appear that we were really winning the war; that we were doing a fantastic job.

So while people like Dave with the 3/4 Cavalry were out getting their tracks blown up by one or two Viet Cong, we would write stories about these glorious victories which didn't take place. And generally, what I saw, were how the figures were turnes around on body counts. One particular time I was with the 3/4 Cavalry, where three of our men got killed.

Our men killed one young Vietnamese who was actually a prisoner at the time that he was killed laving in the grass in front of us. We counted graves in an old cemetery that day so the story came out of our office was 17 Viet Cong killed. What actual had happened was two or three Vietnamese had killed three of our men and if there had been a large force there, they left. But it was just contact with two or three.