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And in a couple of seconds, after
everyone practically falls in love with it -- not falls in love with it,
but they're humane -- he cracks its neck, skins it, disembowels
it, just like I testified that this happened to the woman.
He does this to a rabbit, and they
throw the guts out into the audience. And you can get anything out
of that you want, but that's your last lesson you catch in the United
States before you leave for Vietnam.
MODERATOR: You have some
testimony here on the burning of villages, cutting off of ears, cutting
off of heads, calling artillery on villages for games, women raped,
napalm on villages. Could you go into just a few of these to let the
people know how you treat the Vietnamese civilians.
SCOTT CAMILE: All right. The calling in of
artillery for games, the way it was worked would be the mortar forward
observers would pick out certain houses in villages, friendly villages,
and the mortar forward observers would call in mortars until they
destroyed that house. And then the artillery forward observer would call
in artillery until he destroyed another house. And whoever used the least
amount of artillery, they won. And when we got back, someone would have
to buy someone else beers. The cutting off of heads -- on Operation
Stone -- there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads
cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we
were notified that there was press covering the operation and that we
couldn't do that anymore. Before we went out on the operation, we were
told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the
villages because we were going to destroy all the villages. And we didn't
give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and
burned them, and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we
didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went.
MODERATOR: Why did you use the heat
tabs? Did you just light off the villages with matches or just throw the
heat tabs in so it would keep burning?
SCOTT CAMILE: We'd throw the heat tabs in because it was quicker and they'd
keep burning. They couldn't put the heat tabs out. We'd throw them on
top of the houses. People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off
of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out. And like for every
ear you cut off, someone would buy you two beers. So people cut off ears.
The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings, and I saw one case
where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the
ground, and he was cut open while he was alive, and part of his insides
were cut out. And they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them
what they wanted to know, they would kill him. And I don't know what he
said because he spoke in Vietnamese, but then they killed him after that
anyway.
MODERATOR: Were these primarily
civilians, or do you believe that they were, or do you know that they
were actual NVA?
SCOTT CAMILE: The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, the VC had weapons, and civilians
didn't. And anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed
someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply
would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient. When we went through the
villages and searched people, the women would have all their clothes
taken off, and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure
they didn't have anything hidden anywhere. And this was raping but it was
done as searching.
RUSTY SACHS: The general attitude of
the officers was (I was a Lieutenant at the time) "Well, there's somebody
senior to me here, and I guess if this wasn't SOP he'd be doing something
to stop it." And since nobody senior ever did anything to stop it, the
policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was what was
right.
We'd never had any instructions in the
Geneva Convention. When we were given our Geneva Convention cards, the
lecture consisted of, "If you're taken prisoner, all you gotta do is give
'em your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. Here's your
Geneva Convention cards. Go get 'em, Marines." We were never told
anything about the way to treat prisoners if we were the capturers
rather than the captee, and this was very standard.
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