:38:00
They were instructed
to remove the eyes of the individual...
:38:05
and place them in a hole
in the middle of the back,
:38:08
and that would say to the Vietnamese,
you have to understand,
:38:11
uh, that whoever did that
was ubiquitous.
:38:14
In other words,
the eye being the symbol of ubiquity,
:38:17
uh, or of all-present, all-powerfulness
on the part of the Saigon government.
:38:20
Which is an easy message
for the local villagers to get.
:38:25
In fact, the American advisors didn't
have that much of a stomach for it.
:38:28
So they used to use CBS logos.
:38:31
You know, the eye of CBS?
:38:34
And they would kill the individual
and then they would leave him...
:38:36
with kind of a calling card on him.
:38:38
At one point, I was invited to go along
on an airborne interrogation...
:38:42
in a helicopter with the marines
northwest of Da Nang.
:38:45
And they took along
two Vietnamese.
:38:48
And one was already reduced
by beatings with a rubber hose...
:38:52
and some other methods
of, uh, beating and torture...
:38:55
to the point where he couldn"t talk,
he couldn"t respond.
:38:57
As an example to the one
they wanted to question, they"d say,
:39:02
"If you don't tell us
what we want to know,
:39:04
we're gonna throw you
out of the helicopter.''
:39:06
And, uh, he couldn't respond.
He didn't understand.
:39:09
They were using, uh, pigeon Vietnamese,
which he didn't understand.
:39:12
It was more English
than Vietnamese.
:39:14
They'd run him up to the helicopter--
two hefty E.M. were along--
:39:17
they'd take him by each elbow and run
him up to the door of the helicopter.
:39:22
They'd do this three or four times.
He was reduced to whimpering and crying.
:39:25
And they finally, um,
uh, told him that this was the last run.
:39:30
He still responded the same way, and
they winged him out of the helicopter.
:39:34
The second fellow
immediately started to babble.
:39:38
Anything he could tell them.
:39:40
Any kind of information
he could give them for one goal.
:39:43
And that was to reach the ground
alive again.
:39:46
I just can't see in my mind somebody
throwing somebody out of a helicopter.
:39:49
I don't believe this kind of stuff
happened. Maybe it did. I don't know.
:39:53
I never saw it, put it that way.
:39:57
I've seen G.I.'s get mad and, uh, uh,
rather than shoot one of these dinks,