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How did you encourage information from
your detainees, or from the prisoners that you captured in the field?
MURPHY LLOYD: Well, first of all we
would ask them. And if we didn't get the information, or if they
said they didn't know anything, and we figured they were lying, well,
we'd go to torture.
And by torture I mean, the first time I
ever saw it used, the first time was on Operation Junction City One.
We were over by the Cambodian border in Warzone C. We had just
walked into an ambush, and out of this ambush we took, we had
approximately 15 casualties. Out of that we had about five killed
out of those 15.
We picked up five or six prisoners, and
while flying them back, going to our fire support base, we had a
lieutenant who had been in country about five days. And he said he
was going to conduct the interrogation. So we were explaining to
him that we had qualified people in the rear to do this, but he told us
to shut up, he was a lieutenant. So, boom, that ended that.
So he asked two or three questions, and
all of them kept saying, "No Bik," or "Mullah" or something, [which
means] "I don't know." Either "I'm not going to tell you, or I don't
know," I believe it's "I don't know." Then he ordered for the door
to be opened in the middle, and just without another word he just pushed
one out. And then he started asking, he said, "Are you going to
tell me now?," and he started putting his gun on him.
So all this time we're looking at
it, we're kind of mad, too, because we'd been out there and some of our
friends had been killed and wounded. At the time, it didn't really
mean anything to us. He pushed out another one. And the
third one he came to he started saying something in Vietnamese, and he
pointed to one of them on the end, and as we found out after searching
this fellow that he was a lieutenant in the North Vietnamese army.
And on the way in after this he said if
anything was said about this, he would make it harder on us.
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