Eyewitness accounts before and after the Vietnam War (3)

V. Tyranny and revenge

Since arriving in this strange tropical country, almost all Americans without exception have developed a wickedly perverted mind, especially those soldiers who have wandered through life-and-death situations.

This does not mean that in some cases we can be forgiven for the wrongs we have committed, nor does it mean that our consciences are still asleep years after the fact. Even though those who committed such mistakes in Vietnam were young men between the ages of 18 and 20, the shock of introspection as time passes does not bring peace to those once distorted souls.

When we arrived in Vietnam, none of us knew what the war was all about, none of us thought our purpose was to aid a brother, and none of us really reflected on our own behavior in that country, especially the atrocities committed against defenseless women.

Of course, in the years after the war began, our attitude toward civilians was impeccable. Since 1965, however, it has been the horrific terrorist activities carried out by the Viet Cong using civilians that have cost the lives of countless Americans that have fueled our strong desire for retaliation.

The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, said in his memorandum to President Johnson on February 7, 1965, Annex A, “Policy of Continuous Retaliation. Bundy, in Annex A of his memorandum of February 7, 1965, to President Johnson, entitled “Policy of Continued Retaliation,” said, “We should carry out our retaliation policy with as little publicity as possible.” At the same time, he added, “We may retaliate against them for the assassination of a governor, but not for the killing of the head of a village, and we may retaliate against them for throwing a hand grenade into a crowded cafe in Saigon, but not for shooting a gun in a small rural store.”

And Willie’s and my vindictiveness began when two American students named Judy and Stella were savagely murdered by Viet Cong terrorists in a small town called Nha Sampan, a few kilometers south of Saigon.

Nineteen-year-old Judy Bryan was a third-year student at the Houston College of Finance in the United States. Bryan, a third-year student at the Houston College of Finance, arrived in Saigon on August 24, 1964, from Singapore with six college students from the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia College of Arts and Sciences. As soon as they entered the country, Ambassador Taylor had given them a serious caution and asked them to be accompanied by U.S. military personnel even when sightseeing in the city. Willie was one of those designated as their guide and bodyguard.

Unfortunately, however, on the first day Judy had a heated argument with the meticulous black captain. Judy called Capt. Willie a “nigger with an out-of-control brain”. Willie warned her that if she left again, he would notify the embassy and have her deported. This heated argument leads to Judy and another girl, Stella, leaving quietly the next day after the tour of the Fetta and the Temple of Celebration and getting into a cab that is already behind them.

It was after 5:00 p.m. when Willie realized that Judy and the girls were missing, and he immediately called the embassy to inform them of the incident. Upon hearing the news, Ambassador Taylor immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. While notifying the Saigon Police Department, he ordered Willie and I to immediately split up and search along the Saigon Thi Bank in jeeps.

However, it was too late to act, as Judy and Stella had been transported out of Saigon in a car by the terrorists a few hours earlier. The two young American schoolgirls had been inhumanly mutilated and tortured before being murdered by the terrorists in an appalling manner.

Early in the morning of August 26, the Saigon Police Department received a call from the Nha Sampan Police Station saying that the bodies of two white women who had been killed had been found on the side of the road near a “strategic village” called Chuan Vinh.

We arrived in Nha Sang around 10:00 am. We were presented with a gruesome scene: the bodies of two American girls were hanging upside down from a tall betel palm tree on the side of the highway, swaying gently in the wind. They were stripped naked, with countless sharpened bamboo sticks tied to their bodies, their internal organs flowing out of their dissected abdomens and hanging outside, and their breasts cut in half. A rope was tied around each of their necks, and a large wooden sign was hanging from their necks, which read in Vietnamese: “Ha hutet nguoi My!” (The end of the Yankees!). From the scene and the autopsy, it was clear that they were brought here after being brutally tortured in another place, and that one of them, Stella, had already died before she was hung from the tree.

Willie was silent all the way back to Saigon. I guessed he was grieving over the murder of one of his compatriots?

Or are you glad that you got your anger out and saw the girl who called him a “nigger” get what was coming to her?

Since 1958, Ho Chi Minh has sent back tens of thousands of southern cadres trained in terrorist activities in North Vietnam to carry out assassination campaigns, and many government and local officials, as well as village chiefs, have been killed by them in the usual way. On February 6 of that year, at 1:30 Saigon time, Vietcong terrorists attacked the U.S. airport and barracks area in Po Lai Cu in the Central Highlands, killing eight Americans and injuring more than a hundred; on February 10, the Vietcong blew up a U.S. Army barracks in Quy Nhon; and two days before the presidential election, the Vietcong killed five Americans in Bien Hoa… In spite of all of this, the Tran Van Huong Cabinet was unable to do anything about it. We had endured long enough, and every American was filled with a strong desire for revenge, which was carried out at every opportunity.

After the tragic murders of Judy and Stella, Willie was disciplined for dereliction of duty and could be transferred to the Laotian border at any time, the black captain had an unquenchable thirst for revenge in his heart. When he heard that the Cabinet of Tran Van Huong was treating the murder as a general criminal case, Willie immediately consulted Station Commander Richardson and, together with Major Molnar, approached the powerful General Nguyen Van Thieu in the name of the Saigon Station of the CIA.

“The Americans should think about attacks beyond the bombing of the North, not just how to establish its influence in Saigon, otherwise nothing will be solved.” General Nguyen Van Thieu and General Nguyen Khanh, who was present at the time, said the same thing. They had a strong wave of resentment toward the Americans, especially Ambassador Taylor. Their memories of December 24, 1964, when Ambassador Taylor brutally prevented them from launching another attempt aimed at overthrowing Tran Van Huong’s Cabinet, following the coup d’état that overthrew General Duong Van Minh, were particularly fresh.

“If the U.S. is in an uproar over the killing of two schoolgirls by the Vietcong, hasn’t the killing of U.S. advisers, officers, and soldiers by the Vietcong at Bien Hoa, Po Lai Kuh, Qui Nhon, and the destruction of airfields and fighter planes by the Vietcong, made Ambassador Taylor feel that what he needs is not some bullshit civilian government, but a strong, stable government made up of military men and women? “

Willie knew their words were right, at least he personally thought so. But he didn’t agree with attributing the murder of Judy and Stella to a place very far away from him in North Vietnam. They had killed Judy and Stella here, so they had to be punished here, whether they were innocent or not!

On the morning of August 29th, the operation began, and we drove our jeeps around the University of Saigon. At that time, new students had begun to report to the University of Saigon, and there were many students coming and going inside and outside the university, and Major Molnar, in civilian clothes, mingled with the crowd. At first, he talked for a while with an international student from England, then went near the registration desk in the Academic Affairs Department. He soon found the target of the attack: two anxious Vietnamese girls.

“Can I help you guys with something?” Major Molnar walked over to him, deliberately speaking English a bit like a Frenchman would.

“I don’t have my enrollment letter.” One of the girls with glasses hesitated and told him in nervous but very fluent English. “There was a lot of disorder here just now, and I handed in my enrollment letter, but the people inside said they hadn’t received it.”

“Perhaps I can help you think of a way.” Major Molnar pretended to think of a way while keeping an eye on them.

The girl with the glasses looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, thin, and wearing a white blouse and a blue checkered skirt; the other girl was slightly taller and fuller than she was, about twenty years of age, and wore a perm in the style that was very fashionable in Saigon at that time Major Molnar had no difficulty in recognizing that they were sisters.

“Did you lose your notice too?” Major Molnar asked the girl with the perm, giving us a coded message on one side.

“I’m in second grade.” She replied a little shyly. “I accompanied my sister to report here today, and I didn’t realize I lost my notice.”

“Please wait here while I go inside and make inquiries.” Major Molnar said as he turned and walked into the enrollment house.

A few minutes later, Major Molnar returned.

“You must have lost the notice yourselves.” He said. “The school told me that if I lost my enrollment notice, I had to go to the original test center to match the number of my test card or I wouldn’t be allowed to check in.”

“What can we do about that?” The girl with glasses turned red with anxiety. “I’m at the Hsin-An exam center, it’s a long way from here. If I wait to pick up my exam number, the time for enrollment will be over.”

“You mustn’t be in a hurry.” Major Molnar was very happy to see that his purpose had been accomplished. “I’m familiar with Tan An, it’s only about forty kilometers from Saigon, and it just so happens that I have a boyfriend who works for the Military Advisory Corps, and I can make it back in a couple of hours in his car.”

The two girls talked in Vietnamese for a while and seemed uneasy. Finally, the girl with the glasses said, “I’m sorry we had to bother you.”

In this way, two innocent Vietnamese girls easily fell into our well-planned trap.

At noon, the jeep drove out of Saigon and headed south along the highway. Until then, the two girls did not know that they were on the road to death, but thanked us with gratitude.

During our conversation, we learned that they were the daughters of the owner of a rice mill in Tan An City. The girl with glasses, named Thu, 18, had enrolled in the Economics Department of the University of Saigon; the girl with a perm was her older sister, named Quynh, 22, already in her second year of study at the University of Saigon. They treated Major Molnar as an enthusiastic “young Frenchman” and introduced him to the villages and scenery along the way.

Willie kept driving in silence. Hatred welled up from the bottom of his heart every time he saw the two gibbering girls in the reflector. He seemed to see the bodies of Judy and Stella hanging upside down from a palm tree swaying in the wind, saw himself poked deep into the heart with a bayonet by a group of crazed Batlao soldiers at the Laos border, saw his body abandoned in a deserted forest with an elephant trampling it flat… “Willie.” I called him.

Willie’s thoughts were interrupted as he snapped out of it and realized he was in a jeep with two fallen prey around him.

“Why are you driving like you’re drunk at this hour?” Major Molnar, still imitating the French accent, reminded Willie beyond words. “The lives of two girls are insured.”

Willy wiped his hand off the beads of sweat on his forehead, “Don’t worry!” He said.

I was sitting in the back seat with the two girls, looking at their innocence, and a pity for them began to grow in me.

But weren’t Judy and Stella such naive girls? Did those cruel Vietcong have mercy on those two girls from across the Pacific when they gang-raped, tortured and killed them? Did they think of their innocence when they sliced open their young breasts?

War is about killing each other with hatred, and there is no such thing as “innocence”. If they could kill two American girls they had captured with such savagery, surely we could kill every Vietnamese girl we captured with even greater brutality, without regard for their innocence. And this retaliation was forced upon us.

After about half an hour, we passed through Bianli.

“Willie.” Major Molnar seemed to suddenly remember something as the jeep pulled out of the side leach, “Please turn right up ahead. Mr. Luke wants me to give a letter to Lieutenant Colonel Wickline.” He then turned to the two girls and explained, “I’m sorry, I don’t have much time. A friend asked me to bring a letter home from the United States to Lt. Col. Wickline, who is stationed in Bianli.”

“That’s okay.” The two girls replied, feeling very over the moon already.

The Jeep turned right about two kilometers or so after driving through the border leach and headed northwest along a dirt road along the Dongwigu River.

A military base situated near a swamp on the north bank of the Dongwekip River housed an Australian battalion of combat troops, which served as one of the barriers to the Saigon-Tykes, and in another camp, not far from it, was the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

It was past one o’clock in the afternoon when we arrived there, and the whole camp was silent; the heat had caused the soldiers to take refuge in their barracks, and there was a barbed-wire fence around the camp in a large open space, with a soldier dozing lazily on a high wooden post.

Our jeep pulled up in front of a very well camouflaged house.

“Go inside and get some rest.” Major Molnar told them.

After more than an hour of sitting in the sun-baked jeep, both Sook and Chin looked very tired as they got out of the car and walked into the house with us.

Major Wickline, a tall Australian Air Force officer, was lying in his hammock swatting house flies with a slingshot when we entered.

Major Molnar gave us a short introduction and then walked out with Major Vickering.

A few minutes later, Major Vickering and Major Molnar returned to the house. Major Wickline surveyed Sook and Chin, his eyes now leering.

“Chick,” he tugged off his shirt, revealing his hairy chest, then took a step toward Sook and Chin.

“Take your clothes off and let’s get you both comfortable here in Le Squeak for a while.”

The two girls immediately understood, and they cowered backward in horror, avoiding Major Wickline’s driving, evil-filled gaze.

Major Vickering had a sharp dagger in his hand and cornered them in a corner of the room.

“Take off your clothes!” Major Vickering waved his sharp dagger in front of their faces. “Or I’ll slaughter you!”

They didn’t dare move again, only sounds of utter terror emanated from their throats. Major Vickering walked over to the two terrified girls and stripped them naked, then rolled their clothes into a ball and threw them out the window.

“Lie down on the floor.” He ordered.

At about 3 p.m., more than two dozen Australian soldiers in uniform and civilian clothes dragged two shrill, hissing girls toward each of the two barracks.

“Let them have their fun.” Major Wickline stood in the doorway looking at the frantic soldiers and smiled. “I never treated them like civilians because the Viet Cong terrorists were mixed in with them, killing our men every minute of every day. Once, I saw a few Vietnamese soldiers walking towards us, thinking they were soldiers from a neighboring Vietnamese unit, but I didn’t expect them to suddenly take out their anti-tank rocket launchers and shoot at us, killing five soldiers from our unit on the spot. From then on, I decided to take firm retaliatory action against their attacks. For every one of us they killed, we killed ten or a hundred Vietnamese.”

Even though I was filled with hatred for those brutal Viet Cong terrorists at that time, it always made me feel uneasy to vent that hatred on two unarmed and weak Vietnamese girls.

“I dreamed several times that Judy and Stella were being tortured by those assholes.” Willie said. “The last thing Judy said to me that afternoon was: ‘Tomorrow you niggers are going to be killed by the VC!’ However, I didn’t realize that it was she herself who would be killed by the VC the next day.”

“So, what are you going to do with these two Vietnamese girls?” I asked, “You’re not going to kill them, are you?”

“Of course we’re going to kill them.” Willie said fiercely.

“Aren’t you a little soft!” Major Molnar asked me with a smile. “If you won’t do it, just go to bed yourself.”

The , my original strong thoughts of revenge faltered. No matter what, they were innocent after all, and it would be too cruel to kill them just like that. But I couldn’t stop them, I had no reason to do that.

In the evening, the soldiers carried back the two unconscious Vietnamese girls and placed them on the floor in the center of the room. They had been horribly gang-raped and abused by the soldiers in the barracks, and their naked bodies were bruised and purple, especially the girl named Sook, who had obviously had her period and whose neck and legs were covered with blood.

Willie brought up a bucket of cold water and poured it over the girls to revive them from their stupor, and then with Major Wickline and Major Molnar began to torture them in the cruel ways they had prepared.

At once, from that house came a burst of mournful screams from the two girls and the  snapping sound of belts as they whipped their bodies.

Sook was on her back, bound tightly with ropes to a table, and Willie was scalding her body with cigarette butts, leaving dense black burn marks under her armpits, breasts, stomach, thighs, and lower body where they had been burned. She screamed and pleaded in agony, but the burning butts still pressed into the most delicate areas of her body. There was not a trace of expression on Willie’s face, as if he were a skilled laborer concentrating on his job and repeating it.

Throwing away the butt, Willie pulled a pre-prepared bottle of iodine from his coat pocket, twisted off the cap, and then applied it to the areas of her body that had burned. He didn’t say a word as he listened to Sook’s voice, which had become hoarse, and seemed to appreciate the pain that hurt his skin and flesh like a Split.

On the other side of the room, Chin was hung upside down with two big toes bound with old electrical cords, and Major Molnar and Major Wickline stood in front of and behind her and beat her naked body with belts until she moaned and passed out.

The torture continued until 1:00 a.m., when the two girls fainted and woke up again with screams of pain and bruises all over their bodies. They were told that two young American schoolgirls had been captured and tortured to death by the Vietnamese in this way not long ago, and that as Vietnamese women they should be punished in the same way.

After the torture was over, they were tied backward to a tree trunk outside the house.

The next morning the brutal ordeal began again. The two girls dragged their bruised and battered bodies to the front of the line of soldiers, naked.

Willie and Major Molnar went over to them and pushed them over to two empty ammunition boxes and ordered them to lie on their backs. The soldiers brought buckets of water and rinsed their blood-stained bottoms with water, then used brushes to remove the stains there.

Shukwakin had made no resistance at all, and perhaps was powerless to do so, but simply lay woodenly on the ammunition box, at the mercy of the soldiers.

Major Wickline gave more than two hundred slips of paper to a captain, who distributed them to the soldiers in disordered order. Twenty of these notes had numbers written on them in order, and any soldier who received such a note could go to the front of the line and rape the two girls in the order of their numbers.

It was a scheme devised by Major Molnar and Willie to save the girls from dying in the gang-rape they had been subjected to by too many people. They wanted the two girls to live, not out of a sudden compassion for them, but out of the psychological dictates of prolonging their victims in retaliation, delaying their release from physical pain by death, so that they could finally punish them with their own hands in the most excruciating way possible.

Twenty soldiers split into two groups and began to rape the two girls lying on the ammunition crates.

By the time this group gang rape was over, the scorching August sun had scorched the ground. One by one the soldiers made their way to the barracks. Major Molnar and Willie had secured the two girls’ hands and feet to the ammunition crates so that they could not move except on their backs as the sun blazed down on them.

At noon they carried the two girls, who were unconscious from the sun, into the house, gave them some food when they awoke, took them outside to defecate once more, and then locked them in a small house where they kept their belongings.

“Spare us.” Sook begged bitterly, “My father can send you a lot of money.” Her voice was already very weak, and as soon as Willie let go of her hand, she crumpled to the ground.

“Get some rest, and we’ll get you back in the evening.”

Night had fallen and a cool breeze began to blow away the stifling air. Four dark figures appeared on the north bank of the East Weegee, the two girls in front of them being Sook and Chin, who were naked with their arms tied behind their backs. Major Molnar and Willie, with paratrooper knives and ropes in their hands, followed closely behind them and occasionally whipped them with the ropes.

Along the riverbank was a swampy area, and not far away was a banana grove where ripe bananas glowed golden-brown in the moonlight.

They walked into the banana grove and stopped under two banana trees. Major Molnar and Willie ordered the two girls to stand with their backs to the banana trees and then tied their hands and feet tightly backward to the trunks of the trees. They were told that since the Vietnamese had killed the two American girls in a brutal way, they would be executed in the same manner.

Without waiting for them to scream, Major Molnar and Willie gagged them. Before killing them, Major Molnar and Wiley cut the flesh from their bodies into strips with sharp paratrooper knives and then cut open their bellies. They writhed in agony, writhing in despair as their guts flowed out of the broken fissures. Major Molnar and Willie stood in front of them, gleefully admiring the two gutted girls until they gave out.

Major Molnar and Wiley packed their bodies in fertilizer bags, carried them to the jeep, and drove back to Saigon.

In the early hours of the morning, they hung the bodies of the two girls upside down in a V-font on a tall palm tree on the Saigon University campus, placed two lighted torches on it and left quietly. Early in the morning, a Saigon University cleaner saw the burning torches on the tree and immediately called the Saigon Police Department.

The student demonstrations began. Fifty thousand students and teachers from Saigon universities and high schools and more than 100,000 citizens took to the streets in a massive protest. The front page of the newspaper Le Nouvelle Vague published a protest article under the title “Another atrocity”, calling on Prime Minister Tran Van Huong to punish the culprits immediately.

In the afternoon of the same day, student leader Huang Yongxun submitted a protest letter to the Cabinet of Minister Tran Van Huong, questioning in a harsh tone the assurances given by Prime Minister Tran Van Huong regarding the rights and safety of citizens and stating that even if the murderer was a U.S. military personnel, the government should still punish him severely.

On the following day, students and citizens started the first powerful demonstration against Prime Minister Tran Van Huong’s cabinet in Saigon – Causeway.

As the first civilian cabinet of the Republic of Vietnam, Tran Van Huong was under pressure from all sides, especially from the young generals. Since the middle of the year, General Nguyen Khanh, Commander of the Armed Forces and Head of the Military Revolutionary Councilor, together with Major General Nguyen Cao, Commander of the Air Force, have been plotting the overthrow of this civilian government, constantly attacking Tran Van Huong’s Cabinet for the failure of the appeasement policy. This forced the Cabinet of Prime Minister Tran Van Huong to be very cautious in dealing with the issue of this murder on the university campus.

On the afternoon of September 1, Prime Minister Tran Van Huong summoned U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor to explain the seriousness of the situation. Taylor and explained to him the seriousness of the situation. He pointed out that two United States military personnel had been found on the Saigon University campus prior to the incident and hoped that Ambassador Taylor would be able to collaborate on the case.

After listening to Prime Minister Tran Van Huong, Ambassador Taylor stood up and said to him, “If your government had been able to achieve results in August with regard to the murders of Judy and Stella, perhaps nothing would have happened now. So please consider the U.S. proposal to strengthen the army and the police and, in due course, place U.S. advisers in the lowest level departments.”

Prime Minister Tran Van Huong understood that this was Ambassador Taylor’s last tentative talk to him before reporting to the White House, but he was humiliated by Ambassador Taylor’s insufferable arrogance. So he said to Ambassador Taylor in the same vein: “If any offer from the United States is intended to improve rather than exacerbate the deteriorating situation in the South, to provide all possible assistance to the Vietnamese people and government, and to support us in our efforts to counter insurgency and subversion, then my government would be happy to accept it. I cannot, however, at this time make an immediate judgment as to whether a particular proposal is consistent with this premise.”

Ambassador Taylor left the Supreme Council of State with a sulky look on his face.

Nevertheless, Ambassador Taylor did not change his determination to defend Prime Minister Tran Van Huong’s cabinet, although this determination ended in final failure. Ambassador Taylor believed that maintaining a stable and strong Vietnamese government would be beneficial to the United States both politically and militarily.

This possibility was shaken by successive murders, making the possibility of a permanent civilian cabinet increasingly remote, and on January 27, 1965, General Nguyen Khanh, the nominal commander of the Vietnamese Armed Forces, finally overthrew the civilian cabinet of Prime Minister Tran Van Huong. This was followed by less than a month of chaos. On February 23, Colonel Ngoc Cao staged an attempted “semi-coup” against General Nguyen Khanh.

Since the overthrow of Lieutenant General Duong Van Minh’s pro-French government, the Tran Van Huong Cabinet has in fact developed major strategies and plans in accordance with General Nguyen Khanh’s intentions. In eighteen months, the Saigon Government has undergone six major reorganizations.

On January 30, 1964, General Nguyen Khanh, the son of a bar owner, took over power, but his political blunders weakened him. In a conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Kress in April, he said, “The Vietnamese people are tired of the long, tedious, hard work of appeasement, and action in Vietnam is an indispensable guarantee of victory.”

He demanded immediate assurances from Kes to rid eastern Laos of communists and strongly advocated a military offensive in the north.

Chiang Kai-shek, U Thant and other Asian leaders opposed the use of nuclear weapons on racial grounds, because such weapons had been, and might still be, used against Asians rather than against Westerners. But General Nguyen Khanh’s response was that he had no problem with the use of nuclear weapons, and that people were bound to use the power he possessed. This kind of public assertion is clearly detrimental to his image as a leader of the Republic.

The Americans believed that General Nguyen Khanh was a very capable Vietnamese in terms of his personal experience, but that he did not yet have a broad appeal and did not yet have control of the army itself.On April 4, General Nguyen Khanh signed a mobilization decree in Saigon for the creation of a new Civil Guard, but the plan was not carried out due to opposition. However, the plan was not implemented due to opposition.

In February 1965, General Nguyen Van Thieu, General Nguyen Cao Chi and General Tran Thanh Khiem, all powerful “junior” generals, decided to oust General Nguyen Khanh and create a more Westernized government.

General Nguyen Khanh, after a futile effort to rally his supporters, left Saigon on a special plane to avoid having to resign as Commander-in-Chief, and shortly before dawn on the 21st, the plane landed in Nha Noi, having run out of gasoline. At this point, General Nguyen Khanh tendered his resignation, claiming that there was “foreign interference” behind the military coup.

It took another three days to completely end the coup, and on February 25, General Nguyen Khanh was finally exiled from Vietnam for good as an ambassador-at-large. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor was at Saigon Airport to see General Nguyen Khanh off. Ambassador Taylor went to Saigon Airport to see General Nguyen Khanh off.

General Nguyen Khanh boarded the plane in a “courteous” atmosphere.

As U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Maxwell B. Taylor sought to keep a government stable while ignoring whether that government could control the situation. Mr. Taylor sought to maintain the stability of a government while ignoring the ability of that government to control the situation. George Bundy disagreed with Ambassador Taylor. Bundy disagreed with Mr. Taylor. He argued that “a policy of continuous retaliation might bring a better government to Saigon.”

This proposition was embraced by most U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. We did not respond adequately to the escalating terrorist activities of the Viet Cong, resulting in the killing of more and more U.S. soldiers. After getting the hint of retaliation against the Viet Cong, the U.S. Army and the Vietnamese Army began an offensive against the Viet Cong.

On July 3, 1965, I led 30 U.S. Special Forces soldiers on a roving “revenge march” with 80 Vietnamese soldiers under Major Thieu Van Thanh as part of a sweep of the Mekong Delta.

The troops traveled towards the town of Binh Thanh in the western part of Tan An Province, near Cambodia. In the village of Thanh Rong in that town, a series of serious incidents occurred in which the mayor of the town and the head of the village were killed by the Viet Cong and four American soldiers were brutally murdered.

Despite the sound of marching troop footsteps, everything seemed so calm, serene and beautiful in the moonlight.

I looked at my watch and it was already 3:10 a.m., which meant that we had two hours from Saigon and needed about half that time more to set up to surround the outskirts of Thanh Yung village. Along the way, Ferranc’s figure appeared in my mind from time to time, as if he knew and told me who had killed them by brutal means.

The leaves of the pineapple, palm, and cottonwood trees were motionless, as if frozen by the moonlight, and there was no sign of a battle about to take place.

After the troops under the command of Major Xie Wenyun and I had surrounded Qingyong Village, we moved together towards the village, which had only 40 to 50 families. About a kilometer away from the village, Major Xie Wenyun signaled the troops to stop. The dark and blurry village in front of them seemed like an empty village with no one living in it, and like a dead, huge tomb. Why could the barking of the village dogs not be heard? After a moment of whispered study, the U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers continued to feel their way toward the village in two directions.

Suddenly, the silence of the night was broken by the sound of machine guns ringing out from the village. Bullets flew over our heads with a sharp, ear-splitting sound. At that moment, Colonel Carrier’s troops began to launch an intense fire attack in the direction that had stopped us, firing across the street from two angles at once. Just then, intense machine gun fire also rang out from the left side of the village, and I knew that it must be the troops deployed outside the village firing at the VC who were storming the village to stop their breakout.

Twenty minutes later, we gradually tightened the circle, then stormed the intersection and took over the small village.

The gunfire stopped and the surroundings became quiet again, not a soul in the village except a chorus of frogs. We noticed that there was no light coming out of the windows of every villager’s house, which seemed very unusual.

Just as Major Xie Wenyun ordered the villagers out, three soldiers came toward us in the moonlight with a man in a broad black cloth coat and pants.

The man’s name was Dinh, and according to him, he knew that the group of VC was in contact with a young widow from his village named Silver, and said that about seven more of the VC who had resisted just now had not escaped, and were presumably hiding somewhere in the village.

Led by the informant man, we soon arrived at Tertullian’s house. Without waiting for the soldier to knock on the door, out of the shack came a thin man wearing half-length pants that looked like pajama pants. He claimed to be from Silver Sang-ho, but we all suspected that he was a Viet Cong.

By this time, a group of about 300 villagers had been assembled in a clearing outside the village, and Major Xie Wenyun was addressing the stunned people, asking them to tell where the Vietcong who had not had time to escape were hiding. Dozens of torches were lit around the crowd, and people’s faces could be seen very clearly because of the firelight. The flashlight beams of patrolling soldiers bobbed around the villagers, shining in every suspiciously dark corner, and there were occasional gunshots.

The female Vietcong named Silver and her “lover” were being separated and interrogated nervously. Silver appeared to be about 35 years old, but according to her, she was only 31. By the glaring light of the gas lamp, I could tell what kind of Vietcong she was.

The dazzling gas lamps rattled. The interrogation was conducted by one of Major Tse Man Wan’s deputies. After marching all night, I felt tired as soon as I sat down. During the intervals between interrogation and questioning, the room became unusually silent, with only the occasional yell and a few gunshots coming from outside.

It was a typical Vietnamese villager’s shanty, extremely poorly furnished, mostly made of bamboo and wooden planks, with a straw mat on the bed, and a mosquito net that didn’t seem to have been cleaned for several years. From the look in her eyes, it was clear that Silver was not an easy VC. However, there was still a trace of a mature woman’s unique charm in her raw gaze.

From the interrogation alone, it was clear that Silver was trying to beat around the bush. As of this moment, more than 30 minutes had passed and she still denied knowing where the VC who had not escaped from the village were hiding. In addition, the other two interrogation points, which were located in neighboring villagers’ homes, also yielded no results.

Major Sherman’s second-in-command ordered Silver to get up from the bench, and then ordered three more soldiers to come forward and quickly strip her naked. She didn’t seem to put up much of a fight, just stared at us with hatred. When she saw me, she added a little more disgust to her hateful gaze. Now, as Silver stood naked on the ground only three feet or so away from us, her hateful, disgusted gaze strangely disappeared in the blink of an eye. She lowered her head as one of the soldiers stepped in front of her, grabbed a handful of her hair, and yanked it backward and downward, causing her face to turn toward us. What feelings could arise from watching a full-figured adult woman standing naked before us in such a setting?

Silver hair hung down over her bare shoulders, and her arms were crossed over her stomach to block a patch of thickly grown pubic hair. I noticed that her legs were clenched tightly, as only a virgin would be, and she must have been unusually shy due to nervousness, fear, or the fact that she was facing several men at once. The interrogation continued, but the tone slowed down and a lot of very obscene questions were added.

At the edge of the village, Major Xie Wenyun had been persuading the villagers. At that moment, he came towards me under the protection of two soldiers.

He told me that guard posts and patrols had been set up all over the village and that the VC would not be able to get away anyway.

We came to another villager’s low hut, those huts seemed to be all the same: damp, simple, dirty, and I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious as the watch on my wrist told me that the time was already 4:37.

We were about to make an evacuation, yet still nothing was found in that village! Suddenly, from the neighbor’s house came Silver’s hoarse wails, and it was clear that Major Luck’s deputy and the soldiers had begun to torture her.

After about half an hour, two Vietnamese soldiers came out of the house. Our eyes immediately turned to the two of them, and the interrogation yielded results.

I don’t know what kind of trickery a couple of soldiers pulled on the young widow to make her finally tell us what we were expecting.

Soon, all four remaining Viet Cong were captured and taken to the coconut tree by Major Xie Wenyun’s soldiers, who tied them up.

Silver also revealed that the person who claimed to be her “lover” was in fact a Vietcong, and that since she was a widow, both the American soldier and the Vietcong had been looking for her to have sex with her. She admitted that the death of the American soldier had been the work of the entire village at the behest of the Vietcong.

Major Luck ordered the children to be singled out and the other villagers to fan out in the square. I subconsciously glanced at the sky; it was pitch black there.

Shots rang out, and the standing crowd soon became a mass of bodies lying on the ground, and the screams cut through the silence of the night.

Suddenly, rockets and heavy gunfire rang out from outside the village, and VC reinforcements arrived. A few VC who had been hiding in the village and had not been captured used the opportunity to flee outside, and were hit by our soldiers and fell on the road.

The Viet Cong reinforcements, numbering about several hundred, bombarded the village with rocket fire and attacked simultaneously from three directions. We were clearly outnumbered by the enemy and I immediately ordered a telegram for help. I estimated that helicopters would soon be here to disperse the VC’s onslaught against us. Major Thieu Van Ngan and the soldiers did their best to resist the VC attacking the village.

Just as our situation was in extreme danger, the sound of helicopter motors rang out from the sky. I grabbed the radio operator’s microphone and directed the helicopter’s rapid combat unit to strafe the VC that surrounded us. Shortly afterward, the VC forces began to retreat toward the bushes at the edge of the village. Two banana helicopters landed and I ordered the soldiers on board to stay behind to reinforce us, then loaded the village children onto the planes and took them to safety.

After the helicopter took off, Major Xie Wenyun pointed at Yin, who was naked and had her hands tied behind her back, and asked, “What about this woman?” I looked at that brazen slut and wanted to kill her myself. This woman would do anything for money and lust. Today she can help us kill the VC, tomorrow she will stimulate the VC to kill us, and she has already helped a VC and hid him in her house.

But I don’t  intend for American soldiers to retaliate against her. Stripping a woman naked, ravaging and torturing them, and then killing them is a tactic that the Vietcong have always used to distort propaganda and is very confusing because people are extremely offended by the violence inflicted on a woman’s flesh (whether the woman is a civilian or a murderer).

“We don’t need to take her back anymore.” I said, “The soldiers can be ordered to dispose of her on the spot.”

Major Xie Wenyun broke into a smile. He was very  intent on taking on this kind of mission, and didn t have to hesitate at all to come up with all sorts of different ways to make the person who gave the order feel very satisfied, while satisfying his own desire for revenge.

The rout of the Viet Cong guerrillas allowed Major Luck more time, and he called over five men from the soldiers who were picking through the pile of corpses for the undead villagers and told them to take turns raping the woman in the clearing; later on, almost all of the U.S. and Viet Cong soldiers took part in the rapes until Silver fell into a coma.

As the day dawned and we were all covered in dew and our uniforms were damp, the soldiers took off their clothes and found some dry wood to bake on while they waited for the helicopters that had come to our aid to return. Silver, who was unconscious, was placed next to the fire. When she awoke, Major Luck forced her to kneel by the fire and answer every extremely obscene and dirty question the soldiers asked.

The firelight reddened Silver’s naked body, and from time to time a soldier would walk over to her and inflict some means of causing her to moan, and every now and then the soldiers would let out a loud roar of laughter. I noticed that her nipples and pussy were swollen, her eyelids and cheeks were blue, and some of her wounds were still bleeding.

Soon after, the soldiers poked a dagger halfway into the flesh of Silver’s back and forced her to talk about how she had engaged in sexual acts with the Vietcong. The soldiers tortured her with brutal interest. After hearing her story, several Vietnamese soldiers dragged two men’s bodies from the pile of villagers’ corpses, cut off their penises along with their testicles, shoved one penis into her lower body and the other into her mouth, and then ordered her to run around the fire.

Then she fell down in exhaustion, knocking her head on a rock and not moving. The soldiers turned her over and began to urinate on her face and body.

An hour passed and the sound of helicopters roaring in the sky came again.

The soldiers stopped torturing Silver, tied a rope around her arms, and before boarding the helicopter, the soldiers tied the rope to the helicopter’s landing gear. Silver was then hoisted into the air, wailing in terror and pleading with the soldiers not to kill her; however, the soldiers pulled the rope’s live knots, and Silver fell screaming from 500 meters in the air.

During that period, people fell into an almost frenzied state of mind about such things as killing, and often used the most brutal way possible to kill their enemies. In fact, this kind of perversion is very common in the conduct of war, and its latent factor is the fear of the possibility of being killed by the enemy and an unusually irritating outburst of emotion. At this point, people’s sinful nature is exposed, and then the flood that breaks through the embankment is uncontrollable.

On the surface, those who carry out murder are full of evil pleasure torturing and cutting those captured prey, and even put them to death in various ways in violation of human morality; if we analyze it carefully, it is not difficult to find that those who are crazy to kill are mostly ordinary people who abide by the ethics. It is the law of society that restrains the murderous desire of human nature, and once what restrains them disappears, then any person may become a murderer. Or be killed by others. And war is the best place to vent this desire to kill.

If a murderer who kills one person in peace, then one who kills dozens in war will be hailed as a valiant figure; and if they are capable of killing a thousand, then they will be generals in command of a large number of armies, and of considerable strength and majesty.

Every soldier during war wants to kill more. If civilians are on the side of the enemy in a war, they will also be killed by them without question, so that the hostile forces may be physically eliminated forever.

The soldier who kills in war is universally hated, and especially the soldier who kills an unarmed civilian is detested; but that soldier’s fellow soldiers will forgive him. In the sweep of the Vietnam War, not a single American officer blamed or punished a Vietnamese soldier for an unprovoked killing; on the contrary, American soldiers even participated in many indiscriminate massacres when Vietcong elements were mixed in with the civilian population, and they even joined with the Vietnamese soldiers in savagely brutalizing innocent, or even marginally hostile, women.

In early October 1967, Captain Robert Gneller led a group of 200 New Zealand soldiers in an attack on a Viet Cong infested area known as Goose Flat. In early October 1967, a special unit of 200 New Zealand soldiers led by Capt. Robert Gneller, in conjunction with the 4th Military Region, attacked a Vietcong-infested village called “Goose Flat” during a sweep along the Tien Giang River (the lower Mekong River), killed the elderly and children, and then took the 47 young women who had been captured to the riverside and raped them before taking them away on a boat and killing them all before reaching the beggar’s sampan. After killing the elderly and children, they took the 47 young women caught to the riverside, raped them and took them away on a boat, killing them all before they reached the Beggar Sampan.

On the eve of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year in 1968, there was a serious incident of the shooting of an American teacher in Binh Dinh City, the capital of Binh Dinh Province. As a result, U.S. soldiers took more than twenty suspected male and female students to the destroyer MSF 299 at Quy Nhon Naval Base for six days of torture. After the interrogation, the U.S. soldiers ordered ten of the arrested male students to perform sexual acts on deck with her eleven female students. When they refused, five of the male students and two of the female students were killed; another male student was put into a sack and thrown overboard. The rest of the spared students were kept in the bilge and subjected to various inhuman tortures on a daily basis until all of them were killed in a brutal manner when the destroyer MSF 299 was stationed at Da Nang, the central base.

All the massacres have numbed the nerves of the people, especially in the brutal battles fought in the central provinces of Quang Nam, Cheng Thien, Gia Lai and Kun Song, which have brought the death toll to an appalling level.

After February 1971, I arrived in southern Laos, at the joint base of Montsitai Lao, fourteen kilometers northeast of Pakse, as an advisor on counter-guerrilla strategy. At that time almost all training was done in the field. So, I was often with the Lao Special Forces fighting against the Vietcong-backed “Pathet Lao” (Lao Front Party) forces.

Capt. Khamsit is a man who knows the Vietnamese language. He was born in a small mountainous town called Nabi in central Laos and had been a member of the forces loyal to Phu Ma Khamma since 1965. Unlike the average Laotian, Capt. Khamsit was not a gentle and generous person. He led a commando unit of 54 Special Forces soldiers, which was a solid force in the battle against the Lao Front Party (LFP), and he once eliminated a battalion of LFP troops. He led a solid force of fifty-four Special Forces soldiers, which eliminated a battalion of Lao Front Party troops.

Prior to the rainy season, the Lao Special Forces, in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force, decided to conduct an air infiltration into the Xieng Khouang area of North Vietnam, where five battalions of Lt. Col. Wang Bao’s troops were under heavy siege from the “Lao Front Party” forces, and where the situation was critical. Captain Gonzalez and I left for Xieng Khouang in three HU-IA helicopters with fifty Special Forces commandos in spotted camouflage uniforms.

It was twilight when they arrived at the indicated landing site, and the helicopters spotted the landing indications appearing on the ground and began to land. This was part of a pre-agreed military operation with Lt. Col. Wong Po. From Xieng Khouang, we were to cross the Chal Plain to the north, enter the Phu Khoel Mountains, and cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Viet Cong’s supply line. But the plan was leaked, and we got off the helicopter and didn’t see any assistance. Capt. Gonzales told me that the situation might have changed. “We’d better return to Basse as soon as possible.” He looked very tense and whispered to me as he set up his commandos to search in all directions.

Before I could reply, one of the commandos standing in front of me fell, followed by gunfire on all sides, with bullets coming at us like locusts. We crawled into the bushes and began to strafe the woods on all sides while retreating toward the helicopter. At that moment, however, the Laotian Front Party’s B-40 anti-tank gun hit two of the three HU-IA helicopters, and the other took off in a hurry, and just as it was leaving the ground, a female guerrilla, dressed in white pants and a chequered headband, rushed out of the fence. female guerrilla broke out of the banana grove and strafed the helicopters with a U.S.-made AP15 submachine gun.

The commandos were so surprised by the sudden heroism of the female guerrilla that they didn’t even think of firing at her. It was only when she came at us with her submachine gun that the commandos opened fire on her at the same time. She was hit by dozens of “Skol” portable automatic guns and jumped. The commandos were so surprised by the sudden heroic action of the female guerrilla that they didn’t even think of shooting at her. It was only when she came at us with her submachine gun that the commandos opened fire on her at the same time. She was hit by dozens of Skol portable automatic guns, jumped up and fell heavily to the ground, taking at least dozens of bullets in her body.

At this point, we had lost our chance to evacuate and had to fight to the death on the spot against the group of guerrillas that had attacked us.

It wasn’t long before we discovered their weakness. They apparently had no more weapons than a B-40 anti-tank rocket launcher and two or three submachine guns, for during the gunfight many pikes were fired from all sides. After we had conferred with Capt. Gonsi, he led two dozen commandos in a flanking move up the futile hillside where guerrilla fire was concentrated and wild vines grew. Our action apparently caused the guerrillas to panic, and they prepared to flee while strafing us with their submachine guns.

Suddenly, the guerrilla gunfire stopped and they began to flee down the steep slope to the jungle below. At this point, all the commandos’ automatic guns were focused in the direction they had fled, knocking down several guerrillas.

“They’re probably out of bullets.” Lieutenant Gunthi said. He ordered a portion of the raiders to quickly go around the woods to cut off their retreat.

About half an hour later, from the other end of the woods came the sound of heavy gunfire, and it appeared that the guerrillas had broken out of the woods. Captain Gonzie immediately ordered the commandos to rush through the woods to meet them. However, just as the commandos entered the woods, hundreds of pikes were fired simultaneously from the opposite side, and many of the commandos fell after being shot through the throat or chest.

It was already completely dark and, unable to judge the direction in which the guerrillas had fled, we retreated to a cave in the bushes. At this time, the commandos in charge of encircling the woods brought back four captured guerrillas. To my surprise, the four captured guerrillas were young Laotian women.

After interrogation, we learned that the attackers were guerrillas organized by twenty-five Laotian girls. Among the four captured prisoners were Benmi, the twenty-four-year-old leader of the guerrillas, and three other female guerrillas.

The guerrilla leader, Bunmi, with an unloaded K-59 mini-pistol in her waistband, stood haughtily in front of Captain Gonzales and said nothing about the questions he posed. Suddenly, she jumped at a commando beside her and tried to take the Scott automatic gun out of his hand. She wrestled with the commando and rolled to the ground, biting him on the ear. Just as she raised the automatic gun she had grabbed and was about to pull the trigger, Captain Gonzales and two other commandos rushed forward and knocked her out with the butt of their rifles.

Captain Gonzie agreed that the soldier whose ear Penmie had bitten would execute her himself. So the member of the team dragged Penmi to a corner of the cave and tortured her furiously, kicking her in the face and stomach, gouging out her nipples and eyes with a dagger, and finally shooting her to death with a pike launcher of their own invention.

The pike launcher used by the guerrillas was a very lethal weapon, in which dozens of sharpened and poisoned pikes could be placed side by side on a stand made of hard teak wood, and once the trigger was pulled, the pikes would shoot out at the same time, almost equivalent to the sweeping fire of a submachine gun. Nineteen of the raiders who stormed into the woods were killed or wounded by these poisoned darts.

Captain Gunthi spoke to the commandos in Laotian about the next step in the plan, ordering the ground telegraph operator to make immediate contact with the Long Town Special Forces. Since we landed only twenty-five kilometers from the Special Forces base, we counted on being picked up by noon the next day.

After tying the three prisoners to the stalactites that hung from the roof of the cave to the ground with canes, a couple of commandos got torches made of pine boughs and stuck them in the rims of the holes in the cave walls, and then we sat down and started to eat our supper. Since we were originally scheduled to enter the Longzhen Special Forces base that night, we had not prepared drinking water when we left, so we had to drink the stagnant water in the mooring troughs where the water dripped from underneath the stalactites in the cave.

That cave was very wide, with many stalactites of different lengths hanging down from its roof. Through the mouth of the cave, we could see the starry night sky, and everything seemed so calm and peaceful, as if nothing had happened. Only when we saw the remaining dozen or so commandos and two wounded men did we suddenly realize that the danger was still not over, and that in a few minutes’ time I might have to fight fiercely with the guerrillas of the “Laotian Front Party”.

Therefore, although everyone was exhausted, they could not sleep. The commandos untied one of the female guerrillas, who was bound to a rock breast, and brought her to the cave to control the communion, talking to her in the Lao language. She seemed to continually refuse the commandos’ requests and her voice was very stern.

Capt. Khamsi told me that her name was Simang, she was 19 years old, and that the commandos had asked her to dance a folk dance called “Nang Vong”, which every Laotian knows, but that Simang refused to dance for her enemies, and even accused them of betraying Laos by pointing her finger at me.

The raiders began to whip her with their belts, grabbed her by the hair and knocked her against the stone breasts, and smashed her back with their guns until she agreed.

The “Mang Vong” dance is a very beautiful dance with the movement of throwing up a calf, the palm of the upward hand is held up and the other hand, which is hanging down, is clasped back, and the rounded calves of the Laotian girls are generally very charmingly developed.

Tin Mang’s wrists and ankles wore a number of silver rings and bracelets, and as she kicked up her calves, they rattled crisply, causing a succession of echoes in the cave.

Just as we were enjoying watching Symang dance, the commando whose ear was bitten by Penmi suddenly stood up and rushed to Symang, slapped her hard twice, and then ordered her to take off her skirt. “Maybe this guy is going to rape the girl.” I thought darkly.

Simeon staggered backward from the blow and kept begging the partisan. Finally the commando picked up his gun as if to warn her that he would shoot her if she didn’t do that. Simang gave in and slowly began to remove her skirt.

The commando stood over her in annoyance, pulling off the long cloth that she wore around her breasts as a bra, and removing the hairbrush she had made out of shell fragments.

When the nineteen-year-old Laotian girl stood naked before us, every one of us let out an involuntary gasp. In fact, Simang’s body was not well proportioned, with overripe and spread hips, and slightly shorter legs, with her navel positioned upwards; but all this was hidden by her rich, rounded skin and her long, dark hair that hung down to her calves, and by the fact that Simang’s body was clean and free of body hair, and that, although her two semi-globular breasts were well-developed, neither armpit nor pubic hair had yet sprouted. Later, I learned from a fellow Laotian that when a girl reaches the age of fourteen, she has to be strung up with silk thread to remove all her body hair. This ancient custom is still very common among the common people of Southeast Asia, and even now many girls engaged in erotic performances in Japan have begun to follow suit by removing their body hair by electrolysis.

Soon after, the commandos brought two other female partisans who had been captured, stripped them naked and forced them to dance the “mumblefon” for them with Simão. The commandos did this with the consent of Captain Gonsi, and they even tried to arouse my curiosity in this way.

In Vietnam, Laos and other Asian countries, there are no real prisoners of war. They usually resort to all kinds of cruelty and physical destruction of prisoners who have just shot at them, as if this could only increase bravery and combat effectiveness. Under the influence of this idea, it is difficult to maintain strict discipline at the moment of engagement, because, in the first place, it is not so easy to distinguish the army from the civilian population as in Europe; and, owing to geographical position and custom, the operations are usually carried on in a dispersed manner. The Government’s army was so large that it was impossible to control each soldier as their leaders did; indeed, when casualties were heavy, the desire to retaliate and kill grew exponentially.

The Vietcong mastered this Achilles’ heel of the Government’s forces by intermingling with the civilian population and using them as a bulletproof wall, making it impossible for the Government to distinguish between the Vietcong and the civilian population. This created an antagonistic situation between the civilian population at large and the Government. In the cities of Viet Nam, it was not uncommon for Vietcong terrorist organizations to shoot or throw grenades at government officials and United States military personnel and then mingle with the civilian population, with the Vietcong taking advantage of the inability of the police to harm all the civilians and getting away with it.

If the police arrested someone because they were searching for a murderer, the Vietcong used the incident to distort the propaganda, saying how brutal the police were and how they could not even guarantee the personal safety of civilians. As a result, mutual suspicion between the Government and the civilians became more and more serious, thus achieving the objective of isolating the Government.

Looking at the three naked dancing Laotian girls, I, like the other American military personnel who participated in the battle, felt disgust and hatred for them. They had been hiding in the bushes a few hours before, shooting at us, and now they were our prisoners. That is to say, the enemy, who could have killed us a moment before, had in a moment become the prey of our hands, and I had no doubt, by the look of pain and the gasp of exhaustion with which they were insulted, how cruelly they would have dealt with us captive enemies if they had hung on to their weapons now that we had become captives.

As I stood there in silence, watching the scene of them being roughly raped in turn, one by one, by the raiders, a monstrous sense of relief and pleasure arose in me, a mood often shared by many who have struggled through life and death in war.

After torturing their captured prey, the raiders tightened them to the cold stalactites with rattan canes and then laid them down to rest on the dry ground. The torches burned and cracked with a “ snap”.

The chirping of insects and frogs came from outside the cave. I looked at my watch, it was already 4 o’clock in the morning, the assisting troops still had not arrived, and the two commandos who had been hit by the poisoned pikes had groaned and broken off.

At that point, the radio operator received a message from the “Special Forces Center” in Long Town. The telegram said that the three battalions of special forces that had come to our aid had encountered a large number of Laos Front Party (LFP) troops and guerrillas who were searching for us in a village called Mang Sok, shortly after they had left Long Thanh.

Upon hearing this report, the commandos were very nervous because it would be very difficult for the fewer than 20 remaining men to break through the tight defense line set up by the “Lao Front Party” troops and guerrillas in the Chal Plain and enter the town of Long.

I did some research with Capt. Goncie and decided that instead of going through the Chal Plain, where the war was being fought, we would go south along the tributaries of the Mekong River into the Bia Mountains and then try to flank north to reach Long Town, or get in touch with the Laotian NDU and the Thai PARU special police unit in Banbajang to request that they send out helicopters to pick us up and take us out of the Laotian border.

We all agreed that it was very dangerous to remain in the eastern part of Xieng Khouang, and that at any time the “Laos Front Party” army and guerrillas could conduct a full-scale search of the area, and at that point we would be in a dangerous situation where we would be surrounded by enemies on all sides.

So we set off in the light of morning. Since the area where we landed was already under the control of the “Lao Front Party”, we had to rely on a compass and a map as we traveled south through the bush. Four commandos were in the front, eight of us in the center, and five others behind with prisoners whose hands were tied behind their backs with rattan. Such a march was quite slow, and it was not until noon that we reached the vicinity of a village isi ten kilometers from the Bia Mountains.

It seemed unlikely that we would enter the mountains during the day. We walked back some distance and found a depression far from that village, full of vines and trees, to rest and wait for the night to fall.

Just about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the commandos resting under a tall cattail tree suddenly screamed. Thinking that we had been ambushed by guerrillas, we hastily grabbed the automatic gun at our side. However, what we saw was not any partisan, but a huge python. It had wrapped itself around the body of the commando, was about a dozen meters long, had a head the size of a military kettle, and was trying to stick its head into the commando’s face.

Captain Gonzie rushed forward, cushioned the barrel of his pistol with a towel, and approached the head of the python and fired a single shot, which relaxed dismally, dropped to the ground, and died after a few heavy lashes of its tail. But because of the close proximity, Captain Gonzales’ bullet passed through the python’s head and through the commando’s left eye to the back of his head, resulting in the commando’s agonizing death.

We all sat up in silence, our minds almost paralyzed with frustration.

The three prisoners then offered to defecate. Captain Gonsi refused to untie them and ordered the commandos to strip them of their skirts and force them to defecate in front of the commandos. The three girls squatted on the ground in humiliation, shyly turning sideways to us. But by now the commandos were no longer interested in teasing them.

Night was falling, and the mountains showed themselves in a dark blur. Led by a local commando of local origin, we tied the cuffs of our sleeves and the corners of our pants securely with stalks of hemp grass, and wrapped the legs of three of our captives in strips of cloth to protect them from the bites of venomous snakes and mosquitoes, and then began to make our way to the forests of the Biya mountains.

Soon we followed a trail into the mountains.

It was an unexploited virgin forest, with large trees up to 10 meters high growing very densely, with vines wrapped around them, and the ground was a very thick layer of sticky, slippery leaves, emitting a very strong musty smell, making it stiflingly hot and breathless. Due to the hilly terrain, we sometimes even had to crawl on the ground. When walking through shrubs or wisps of grass more than a meter high, several commandos had to hit them with wooden sticks to drive away poisonous snakes and wild animals.

According to the raider, who was of local origin, the forest was infested with wild boars, mongrel cows, and leopards, and the local people never entered this part of the forest. However, we walked for a long time without encountering any wild animals, except for a monkey that suddenly darted past us into a chestnut tree.

In spite of this, we were beset with bites from a large, gigantic mosquito half an inch long, so we had to repel them by waving a towel continually, with both hands alternately, and the faces and necks of the three prisoners were covered with blue and purple lumps from the bites of that mosquito.

At about 10:30 p.m. we reached a crag sticking out of the virgin forest, where there was an open, flat clearing of about five hundred square meters. However, as we had no hammocks or other equipment with us for camping, swarms of large mosquitoes obviously became a major headache. It was only when the commando picked a mosquito repellent vine from a forest fly and set it on fire, placing it in a windy area, that the ferocious mosquitoes left us.

After nightfall, the temperature plummeted, and the uniforms were soaked with dew that every man shivered with cold. All the trees were also too wet to light. At last we were obliged to get up and keep walking as a means of driving away the cold air. We could so well anticipate the more cruel conditions of the following five days that we feared that our confidence in returning to Padang would have been boosted by that time.

We had run out of cookies due to the lack of contact with the PAUR special police unit and the delay in the arrival of assistance from Long Thanh, and we were disturbed by hunger and distress, while venturing out of the valley risked being wiped out by the “Lao Front Party” forces and guerrillas.

At dusk on the third day, a few raiders who had tried to hunt some wild beasts to feed their hunger walked back with their guns in frustration, having searched the forest all afternoon without seeing any animals. It turned out that the beasts of the Bia Mountains had long been frightened by the successive years of gunfire and hid in the forests farther away. At this point, extreme hunger finally made people lose their humanity, the commandos were ready to eat the only food they could find: one of the three prisoners.

After consulting Captain Gong Xi, they singled out a screaming, diminutive Laotian girl, stripped her naked, hung her upside down on a rattan cane ten centimeters in diameter hanging between two large trees, and then cut her throat with a dagger; blood spurted out of the cut throat of the Laotian girl, who was writhing fiercely and waving her arms up and down in a backward motion. Gradually her movements slowed, her body jerking from time to time.

Before the Laotian girl could fully breathe, several commandos began to dismember her. Within half an hour the girl’s body had been dismembered into five major parts, her ears cut off, and her head thrown into the dense forest. Captain Gonzie distributed the limbs, leaving the buttocks and thigh muscles to me and the other two, and dividing the rest among the sixteen raiders according to how much and how good the flesh was. Finally, the two breasts that had been cut off and the uterus, labia, and other organs that had been removed from the abdomen were reserved for the two captives.

The campfire was lit, and the raiders each picked at the flesh with their knives and roasted it over the fire before putting it in their mouths to chew. My stomach lurched as I took the pinkish-white, oil-beaded gluteus muscle that Captain Gonzales had roasted for me.

“I don’t want to eat it.” I returned the human meat that smelled like boiled lard to Captain Gunshi, who was intently picking at it.

Captain Gunthi raised his head and looked at me with his characteristic Laotian, godless gaze, then slowly said to me in Vietnamese, “So, there’s nothing to eat. You can’t starve to death like this, can you?”

All the people, including Captain Gonzales, ignored me and concentrated on roasting the flesh cut from the girl’s body, which gave off a very strong odor. It was not until two days later that extreme hunger made me feel how appetizing the smell was and how much I could not resist the desire to chew it.

Captain Gonzie brought the two breasts, baked translucent and dripping downward with fat, to the two captive girls. They cowered, their lips trembling, and uttered sounds of utter terror from their throats. They had witnessed the murderous scene and were already scared out of their wits.

“You can’t just starve to death, can you?” That was the only advice Captain Gonzales gave me that night at the “human banquet”.

All went on in silence, each one eagerly waiting for the food to come to be cooked as quickly as possible to fill their desperate bowels.

Siamang steadfastly refused to consume her companion’s flesh. Though she had been so hungry that she had slumped over the rocky edge. The reason why Captain Gonsi and the other commandos had left Simang behind was apparently because they were enamored of the nineteen-year-old girl’s calf-length hair and hairless body, and hoped that reinforcements would arrive before they despaired.

However, on the fifth day, at noon, there were screams from Simang, and several commandos had her pinned to the ground and were stripping her naked. I realized that the end of Simang had finally come.

Starved and exhausted, Simang passed out in the struggle. The raiders stripped Simang naked, removed the silver bracelets from her wrists and ankles, dragged her to hang upside down under the thick vines that had been used for slaughter for several days, Simang’s hair hanging to the ground, her young, naked body swaying, soon to be dismembered into bloody parts and put on the bonfire to roast to a burnt red color, her thick lips to be kissed not passionately, but to be her thick lips would get not a passionate kiss, but a greedy chewing and biting.

Suddenly, just as the commando was about to thrust the dagger hard into Symone’s belly, Symone opened her eyes. She realized in an instant what was about to happen, and let out a long, terrified shriek.

She was shouting something in Laotian, her eyes wide, her arms, bound back by thick rattan strips, snapping outward, her body twisting violently as she tried to avoid the dagger that the commando was holding as he jabbed it into the small of her back.

Hearing Symang shout, Captain Gonthi stood up and walked over to him, talking to Symang in rapid Laotian.

Soon the raiders untied Simang from the cane, and one of the raiders took her dress and went to put it on her, and I was bewildered by all these sudden and sudden changes, and for a moment every one seemed to have recovered the sanity of civilization; and then Simang, surrounded by the raiders, made her way down the rocky hills into the thick primeval forest.

“They went off to find food.” Capt. Gunthi told me.

At the end of her life, Simang finally spoke of a way to find food. She told Capt. Gonsi that there was a stream at the densely forested end of the rocky mountain, and that if a grenade was thrown in to kill the fish in the river, and then the fish that floated to the surface of the river were fished out, it would be a long-lasting solution to the problem of food deprivation. According to customs and beliefs, the local population, who are Buddhists and worshippers, do not eat fish.

Ximang later said that for several days she had been waiting for us to kill her, and even after the two companions had been eaten did not want to tell us about these enemies, but preferred  to die with us. But when she was hanged upside down to the cane, she awoke from her stupor and saw the commandos holding daggers about to cut open her stomach, she suddenly felt a never before felt attachment to life, and finally saved both herself and us.

At 9:40 a.m. on the ninth day, the sound of motors rumbled through the air and five H-21 helicopters began circling above us. Capt. Gonsi immediately ordered the commandos to immediately light the three campfires that had been prepared and report our position to the incoming rescue helicopters.

To show our gratitude for saving a dozen of our lives, we decided to release Siamang when we arrived at the Late Kan military base in Thailand, however, she hung her head woodenly and said she was no  longer interested in going back to Laos.

The raid that cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail was my first and last foray into Laos. Since then, the Special Forces Force Base at Long Town and the Mauhan Mongan Helicopter Base had fallen, and thirty battalions of Prime Minister Phouma’s forces had been forced to concentrate in the area south of Kham Mong Province. On the surface, those thirty battalions, along with the twenty-four battalions of special forces from the original Basse special forces power base, were equipped with the finest weapons and equipment. However, the quality of those troops is so bad that the United States, the Republic of Viet Nam and Thailand have had to send their armed forces to fight directly against the “Lao Front Party” and the guerrillas.

However, the compromising nature of the Laotian people and the civilian policies advocated by the Communists made the government forces vulnerable. Finally, on February 22, 1973, a ceasefire agreement was signed between the Lao government and the Lao Front Party.

After the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, King Sisavang Vardhana was overthrown by the forces of the Lao Front Party on November 3 of the same year, ending 622 years of royal rule. On November 3, 1975, King Sisavang Vardhana was overthrown by the forces of the “Lao Front Party”, thus ending 622 years of royal rule. The Communist Party created the “Lao People’s Democratic Republic” in Laos, with the former Prince Souphanouvong becoming the first President of the new country, and the first Prime Minister being the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Laos (CPL), Khe Sanh Phong Vieng Hanh, who was in control of the real power. The first Prime Minister was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Laos, Khe Sanh Phong Viharn.

In the spring of 1976, the new Communist Party of Laos (CPL) arrested a large number of former government leaders and former military and political personnel in a purge known as the “Cultural Revolution”. In March of that year, 500 political prisoners escaped from Vientiane, most of them to Thailand, just across the border.

In order to increase the population significantly, the new Lao Government announced a decree in 1976 that abortion would be strictly prohibited and violators would be punished by law; parents who had more than five children would be given generous allowances by the new Government; and the Government had also relaxed the ban on polygamy.

However, the results of this attempt were not significant and the threat of depopulation was exacerbated by the mass exodus of Lao refugees that took place between 1975 and 1978. As a result, the new Lao government decreed capital punishment for those who fled. The population crisis was temporarily alleviated when the Lao army assisted Viet Cong government forces in occupying Cambodia, bringing thousands of Khmer women back to Laos, and when large numbers of people from North Vietnam settled in Laos.

The 69-year-old former King of Laos, Savang Vadhana, and his queen and children were arrested by the new government in 1977 and sent to a “re-education center” modeled after the Vietnamese government. Vardhana, his queen and their children were arrested by the new government in 1977 and sent to a “re-education center” modeled on the one created by the Vietcong government. In that camp in the dense forest, the former King and his family are still being forced by the guards to learn Marxism-Leninism and how to grow vegetables.

VI. Saigon International Crime Transfer Station

In the fall of 1977, just as the past of the Vietnam War was fading in people’s minds, I unexpectedly met two Vietnamese girls from Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) in Istanbul, Tochigi.

It was a day in mid-August when I traveled with LifeWeek photojournalist Felix Griffiths to Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), the capital of the ancient Byzantine Empire, the fourth stop on our twenty-two day vacation swim. Griffiths were in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), the capital of the ancient Byzantine Empire, the fourth stop on our twenty-two day vacation swim.

Feeling a bit tired and intending to get some rest at the Hotel Divan Ottery, I told Felix that I was canceling my agreed-upon plans for an evening outing to do some sightseeing.

“Ha, you do get old.” Felli said disappointed, picking up his camera and walking out.

Two hours later, just as I was lying sound asleep in my air-conditioned, cool Divan Ottley hotel room, the ringing of the bedside telephone woke me up. Thinking it was the hotel desk, I picked up the receiver with a weary mind.

The caller was Ferris Bueller. Griffiths. He hurriedly told me that he had spotted two Vietnamese girls in a nightclub called Aizwal and asked me to get there immediately with my tape recorder.

I was in the process of writing a memoir about the Vietnam War, so I was very happy to hear the news, and after taking down the name and address of the nightclub, I immediately asked for a cab and set off.

The Aizwal nightclub was located on a street along the riverfront at the north end of the Galata Bridge over the Harwich River, and it was after 10 p.m. when I got there, where I met two Vietnamese dancers named Nguyen Thi Giau and Phan Thi Huynh, who had traveled from Saigon before the fall of South Vietnam.

Like any nightclub in Istanbul, the dancers at the Ezvar nightclub also work as prostitutes. To learn more about the experiences of the two Vietnamese girls, Felli and I decided to spend the night there.

At first, the fat waiter was surprised that we shared a room, but then smiled knowingly at us and, after showing us to our room, suggested to me “another bitchy Turkish chick.”

Compared to the dancers I’d seen in Saigon, these two Vietnamese girls were neither younger nor prettier, which is probably why we paid only four hundred Turkish pounds (about thirty-six U.S. dollars) apiece; a Turkish girl, the maitre d’ told us, would cost seven hundred and fifty Turkish pounds (about eighty-three U.S. dollars).

That night, in the room provided for us by the Aizawl nightclub, I told the two girls in Vietnamese about my own experiences in Vietnam and the purpose of their visit, and then asked them how they had come to this faraway country and what they could tell us about it.

At first, they were surprised to hear me speak Vietnamese with a strong southern flavor. It was not until I finished my speech that they dispelled the suspicion of our uninvited guests carrying tape recorders and photographic equipment and, out of their trust in me, began to talk to us about their experiences without any inhibitions or reservations.

The Story of Nguyen Thi Giao

On March 15, 1949, Nguyen Thi Giao was born in the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong. After the signing of the Geneva Accords, her father came to Saigon City from Hai Phong with his family on a plane carrying refugees and worked as a tailor in the Adam’s Fashion Shop, which was owned by French nationals, and then as the store closed down, he went to work in the Saifa Match Factory. Nguyen Thi Giau’s mother died of a lung disease in 1959; two of her three brothers served in the Republic of Vietnam Army, and another was killed in a car accident; she also has a younger brother and two younger sisters living with her, and as the eldest daughter, Nguyen Thi Giau began to share the burden of the family’s life with her father at a very young age, until disaster struck her.

In the spring of 1966, at the age of 17, Nguyen Thi Giau started working as a female laborer in the packaging workshop of the Bai Xue cotton wool factory in Saigon. As an apprentice, Nguyen Thi Giau’s salary was only VND1,800, which, together with her father’s salary of VND2,500, could only buy four quintals of rice at that time’s price. The extreme poverty forced her to do odd jobs such as laundry after work in the evenings to support the family.

One day, after being introduced by a female worker named Duc Thuy at the Kam Woong factory, Nguyen Thi Giao went to work as a night hostess at the Texaco Bar on Le Van Duyet Street. This way, she could earn a regular extra income after work.

However, Nguyen Thi Giao didn’t know at the time that from that day on she was doomed to become a prostitute who sold her flesh.

The owner of the Texaco Bar, Gong, is the head of the Greenwood Gang, a Saigon triad organization that specializes in drug and women trafficking, while the waitresses at the Texaco Bar actually work as open prostitutes. The day after Nguyen Thi Giau arrived at the Texaco bar, she was raped by her husband, who took her into a storeroom.

The next day, she approached the woman worker named Dock Snow and said she had decided to quit that job.

She shook her head and simply said that she had to look after her siblings and that she had no time to work at night. She remembered what Gong had threatened her in the storeroom: if she got into trouble, he would catch her wherever she went, put her in a sack and throw her into the sea, and she was sure Gong would do it. This kind of thing had been common in Saigon for a long time. Once, at Pier Park, she had witnessed a body that people had fished out, white and puffy from the sea. Perhaps, she thought, Gong would soon forget her.

However, the male didn’t let the pretty young girl go.

One night a few days later, Nguyen Thi Giau was on her way from work when she was kidnapped by two men armed with sharp blades, put into a car and taken to the Texaco bar.

She was taken to the storeroom where she had been raped. There the male told her that if she wanted to prostitute herself to earn money, he had already found a patron for her, and if she didn’t then she would be shoved into a barrel and thrown away immediately.

The eerie storeroom and the male’s grim face deterred her from resisting. Ten minutes later, she was taken to a room above the Dracos bar where two American soldiers had been waiting.

She later learns that Woo-Sue, who introduced her to the Texaco bar, was also working as a prostitute; for every girl she brought to the Texaco, the public paid her two hundred dollars (about fifteen U.S. dollars).

From there, Nguyen Thi Giau began her career as a prostitute in Texaco, and was later sold to a Chinese-run brothel called Yichun on the Long Gia Pier in Saigon. There, prostitutes often went out to the streets to find customers and sometimes to American warships. The owner of the Ichon brothel, who was also a member of the triads, required the prostitutes to return 300 South Vietnamese dollars per day and then gave them a “cut”. Due to the sharp rise in prices and unemployment from 1959 onwards, more and more women engaged in prostitution, which made the “pay” they received from their clients lower and lower, and some women even received only 20 or 30 dollars. This means that they must receive ten clients a day in order to fulfill the required amount. For those prostitutes who did not fulfill the required amount, the owners of the brothels in Ichon not only did not pay them, but also punished them by sending them to the American warships and subjecting them to the rape of dozens of American soldiers. From 19667 to April 1967, Nguyen Thi Giau was “punished” three times by being sent to American warships.

One day in mid-April 1967, the owner of a brothel in Ichon gathered twenty prostitutes from the store and told them that a foreign nightclub had come to Saigon to recruit prostitutes, and that those who were chosen would leave Viet Nam by boat in the afternoon. He said they would be paid by the hour in the foreign country. Two of the prostitutes expressed their unwillingness to leave Vietnam and were beaten, tied up and put into black-and-white striped sacks, a symbol of the Saigon Triad’s murderous ways: the victims were thrown into the sea and drowned. This technique forced ten other prostitutes to agree to be chosen by the Frenchman.

That afternoon, Nguyen Thi Giao and six other selected girls boarded a cargo ship docked at the Saigon wharf. They were loaded into a container, with no one knowing which country they were traveling to or what fate awaited them. The ship was at sea for more than half a month, during which time some of the girls wondered if they would indeed be paid by the hour, as the owner of the Ichon brothel said.

However, it is not until they set foot on the docks of Istanbul that they realize they have been transported to an incredibly dark hell on earth.

Nguyen Thi Giao said the Turks at the Aizwal nightclub treated the Vietnamese girls as the lowest slaves, often making them live and die, and even being abused by several Turks at the same time. They were also forced to learn lewd dances. Every day at 6 p.m., when customers were scarce, Sami’s boss had them perform half-naked on a square stage above the ground at the entrance to the Aizwal nightclub in order to attract business.

“Whenever we were tired and lethargic, we would be severely beaten.” Nguyen Thi Giao said sadly: “Sometimes when we just couldn’t hold on and fell off the stage, Boss Sami would take us to the cellar in the basement to be whipped. He specially prepared two long whips made of leather strips twisted specifically for beating us, the beaters in beating us, but also intentionally whip marks on our bodies to form a square grid like a fishnet, and then let us go back to the stage naked to dance.”

This brutal physical torture made them struggle between life and death every moment. Once, after being beaten and gang-raped, the Vietnamese girl who stayed with Nguyen Thi Giau at the Aizawl nightclub felt that she could not bear it any longer, so she killed herself with a rope. Before she could die, however, Nguyen Thi Giau woke up from a sound sleep and called out for help. The girl named “Tangerine” was revived, but an even more tragic fate befell her, as Sami’s boss locked her up in the basement and sent his thugs to guard her, while some Turks tortured her constantly.

A few days later, Boss Sami resold the already dying girl to Gaziantep, a city in the interior of Turkey near the Syrian border.

Despite the fact that Nguyen Thi Giao stayed in Istanbul for ten years, she still did not understand the local language. The Turks treated her like a slave like an animal and kept ordering her around with gestures and yells, which made the possibility of her escaping slim to none.

When we met Nguyen Thi Giao in 1977, she was twenty-eight years old. She was very worried about her future fate, for she feared that Boss Sammy would one day kick the lifeless Vietnamese girl out of the Aizawl nightclub when he couldn’t squeeze any more profit out of her flesh.

“Maybe then Boss Sami will sell me to a Turkish peasant.” She said sadly, “It would be worse if that happened, and I would die a most worthless slave for them.”

Finally, Nguyen Thi Giau expressed the hope of returning to Saigon someday, although that hope was very faint.

Pam’s willfulness.

The daughter of a former government official of the Republic of Vietnam was trafficked to Istanbul when she was just sixteen years old and spent eight long years there.

Phan Thi Huong was born in 1953 when Vietnam was still a colony of the French Republic. His father, Phan Yen Yi, was the only Vietnamese director of the French-run Concordia Sugar Factory. After Ngo Dinh Yen came to power, the Vietnamese national capitalist managed to promote the nationalization of the shares of the factory and became a personal advisor to Nguyen Ngoc Thi, then Minister of Economy of the Republic of Vietnam, and after President Ngo Dinh Yen was shot by the coup d’état led by Lieutenant General Duong Minh Minh, Phan Yen Ei left the government and became deputy editor-in-chief of Saigon Business Weekly, a mouthpiece of Saigon’s industrial and business community.

Phan Thi Huynh is the youngest of Phan Yen Ei’s three daughters. She has loved dancing since she was a child, and when she was seven years old, she participated in a performance at Saigon’s Orebao Theater. Phan Thi Huynh hired a French choreographer for her. However, even though she was born into a family of government officials, her living conditions were not generous. She remembers that her father’s salary was around 7,500 South Vietnamese dollars a month. This was a very small sum to support a wife and three daughters in Saigon, where prices were soaring.

After 1959, Saigon was in a state of chaos, with a large number of assassinations carried out by terrorists sent back from North Vietnam, and many high-ranking local officials were killed within a few months. As a result, Phan Thi Huy severely forbade his three daughters to go out alone. But even so, Phan Thi Huynh was unable to escape the onslaught of bad luck.

One afternoon in March 1969, when Pan, who was still in the third grade of junior high school at Cheung Wing Kee School, was on her way from school to Yuk Ying Power Station on Fat Yan Road, she was abducted by several triad members.

“A refrigerated truck suddenly stopped by the side of the road, and four men jumped out of the truck and jumped at me.” Recalling her abduction, Poon said, “I was so scared that I threw down my bag and ran, but they caught up with me and caught me. One man gagged me with a cloth and then dragged me into the refrigerated truck with three other men. There was a man in a police uniform looking around, but he had no intention of coming to my rescue.”

Phan Thi Huynh was taken to a basement and locked up. The bandits called her father, Phan Yen Nghiem, and demanded a ransom of 500,000 South Vietnamese dollars, or they would kill his daughter. In a fit of rage, Phan Yen Yai reported the incident to the Saigon Police Department. When two of the bandits went to get the money, they were shot and killed by the police. As a result, the bandits beat Phan Thi Huynh severely, and then a dozen of them took turns raping her together. To get back at Pan Yanyi, they took her to a telephone and stabbed her nipples with needles while making her hang up the phone to her father. Pan’s daughter moaned in agony, begging her father to hurry up and get half a million dollars in ransom money and send it to her, or else the bandits would torture her to death. Hearing her daughter’s screams over the phone, Pan Yanyi was so distraught that he had to borrow money from all over the world, and only a few days later was able to gather half a million dollars.

However, the bandits received the ransom but did not release Phan Thi Huynh. While setting up an assassination attempt on Phan Thi Huynh, the bandits transported Phan Thi Huynh in a refrigerated truck to the Saigon pier and sold her to a man who runs a massage parlor in Thonburi, Thailand.

Phan was transported to Thonburi as a masseuse on a Vietnamese fisherman’s motorboat by the Thai man named Thana Shinyong. Shinjung, a Thai man, was transported to Thonburi on a Vietnamese fisherman’s motorized boat to work as a masseuse.

Shinjon was the foreman of a French factory in Rochville, Causeway Bay, and returned to Thonburi, Thailand, in 1959 to open the massage parlor. Not only did Phan work more than 10 hours a day at Shinjon’s parlor, but she was also subjected to Shinjon’s brutality at night. “By June, I was feeling nauseous, vomiting uncontrollably, and my period stopped coming. I went to Shinjon and told him I was pregnant, but he looked at me with disdain and walked away cursing under his breath.”

Speaking of this, Pam rigorously sobs. She said that after she became pregnant, Shinjon still treated her as he had before. Even when she was four months pregnant, he forced her to kneel on the bed and let him have his way with her. When Pan’s belly grew so large that she could no longer work in the store, Shinjon became furious and claimed he would sell her.

One day in late November 1969, Shinjung’s brother brought in an Arab businessman. After discussing the matter together, they sold Phan Thi Huynh, who was more than five months pregnant at the time, to the Arab for 5,200 baht (approximately US$250). Shinjung took Phan Thi Huynh to a massage room, forced her to strip naked and stand in front of a bed, where the Arab businessman fondled her protruding stomach and breasts, spread her legs as if inspecting livestock, and rubbed his fingers on the skin of her lower body and thighs.

“After the examination,” said Phan, “the Arab merchant patted me on the head and seemed satisfied. That afternoon, he took me to Bangkok, from where he boarded another merchant ship. When he passed Malacca, he got off the ship and brought back two Indian girls and a Malay girl he had bought there.”

“We traveled in a very fancy charter cabin. On the way, the Arab merchant made all four of us strip naked and kneel in front of him, then one by one he fondled us or poked us around with a brass-headed cane. At night, he played a seven-stringed zither and had two Indian girls dance naked for his pleasure. The sound of the lyre attracted the Arabs who were with him on the ship, and he invited them to sit in the cabin to drink, and allowed them to touch our bodies. The Arabs got drunk and talked with the merchant in their language, and finally gave him some money, whereupon he allowed them to lead the two Indian girls to their cabin.”

“After five days or so, a short, fat Arab came to our cabin and pointed me out to talk to the merchant. At first, I saw the merchant waving his hands uncontrollably, then he produced a wad of money and the merchant agreed.”

“When I was taken by the Arab to his cabin, I knew there was no way I could escape this torture. He savagely stripped me naked and then pinned me down on the bed. The pressure of his heavy body on my stomach caused me to cry out in pain, and my sweat soaked the cloth on the bed. I didn’t realize until I went into labor in Istanbul a few months later that the baby had been crushed by him at that point.”

In Istanbul, Pan is sold to the Ezvar nightclub. The owner, Sami Duran, saw that she had a bulging belly. Duran see her belly bulging, let her every night only wide left a very small triangular pants and transparent bra made of tulle, foot a pair of high-heeled leather standing in the Aizwal nightclub entrance to the high platform to attract customers. This method attracted many Turks, who gathered around Pan’s body, touching her body with their hands at will and letting out a grotesque cry. Some of the Turks paid Boss Sami one hundred and twenty-seven pounds for the privilege of taking her to his room and playing with her once. Even when she was about to give birth, she was forced to receive customers for the night.

One day in April 1970, Pam’s rigorous stomach convulsed. Knowing that she was in labor, she approached Boss Sami and pointed to her stomach and told him with gestures. Boss Sami happily patted Pan and led her into the ballroom, where he shouted something in Turkish to the johns. At once, many johns took out money and gave it to Boss Sami, picked up the screaming Pan Thi Chun, and poured into a larger room, led by a waiter.

They stripped Pan Thi Chun of her clothes and laid her on her back on the bed, dragged her arms over her head and tied them to the bed frame, and two men spread her legs, while the others pressed her stomach or squeezed her breasts with their hands, and even put their hands into her lower body, which had already begun to open its mouth. These brutal Turks made Pan’s voice scream miserably as she was being tortured to death. This torture lasted for more than half an hour before the rampaging men pulled the fetus out of Pan’s body, which had already fainted.

“Then at night I really thought I was going to get killed by those Turks.” Pam said respectfully, a look of fear sweeping across her face. “By the time I awoke, I learned that the baby was long dead. At first, I thought that this would be a good time for Boss Sami to let me rest for a few days, but I didn’t realize that the day after I had given birth to my children, he brought two very large wolfdogs and forced me to feed them with my milk. Those two wolf dogs crouched menacingly at my side and I was so frightened that I cried. Boss Sami grabbed me by the hair and slapped me hard, then ordered me to kneel on the ground while he trained the two wolfdogs to drink milk. As he was leaving he threatened me with a pistol and told me to milk his wolfdogs on time or he would kill me.”

“Boss Sammy keeps me in the room with the dogs inside the office. So that the wolf-dogs could burrow out when they felt hungry. Since Boss Sami purposely didn’t feed the wolf dogs after that day, he always sucked my milk dry and then chewed my nipples; later on, they simply stayed by my side and sucked my nipples in their mouths once after a while. In this way, I was locked up with the wolf dogs for more than half a year.”

Pan’s honor let out a loud cry. She said that for eight years she had missed her parents and asked if I could send a letter to her home so that her father could find a way to take her back.

I told her that Saigon had been occupied by the Vietcong three years ago and had now been renamed “Ho Chi Minh City”.

It was not easy to find out where her parents were. However, I reassured her that I would soon be going to Vietnam to deal with the matter of the missing American POWs, and at that time I would try to find out where they lived and tell them what she had suffered all these years; and, if possible, I would help them to come here as soon as possible to take her back to Vietnam.

Pan’s honor said nothing more, but only looked at us pitifully with eyes hung with tears.

“Maybe we’ll be dead by then.” As we parted, I heard Nguyen Thi Thuy whisper.

It was early the next morning when we left the Aizwal Nightclub. The same waiter from last night led Sammy Duran, the owner of the Aizwal Nightclub, to us. Duran came to us. Sammy’s dark and shiny face was filled with smiles. He greeted us with a good morning greeting and then, in a mysterious and hopeful tone, revealed that there were two more twelve year old Danish girls that he had just purchased and asked if we were interested. Apparently, he thought of us as sexually perverted johns. We politely declined. He then asked if we had had a good time that night.

“Sammy,” I said to him, “I would have found it very pleasant if you’d let two wolfhounds hold both of your wife’s nipples.”

Without waiting for him to get a chance to answer, we walked out the door of the Aizawl nightclub.

Outside, the sun is rising, the ox horn shaped Golden Horn Bay River estuary reflecting the glittering golden luster. In the distance, the sound of sirens broke the silence of the morning; looking at the other side of the river, indoor shopping malls and ancient temples round roofs, in the sunrise looks a little strange and bizarre perhaps, only at this moment I really see these strange and bizarre world it!

And yet, why? Haven’t I been hearing the moans of those poor Vietnamese women for over a decade?

Hadn’t I been watching them being loaded onto ships or automobiles, one by one, and shipped all over the world? Didn’t the newspapers in Saigon at that time repeatedly report the disappearance of young girls? And even in the brothels, dance floors and bars there, weren’t there always many women of different colors? Wasn’t the Kismi nightclub near Pier Park famous for its “Beauties of All Nations”?

attract thousands of Americans and foreign tourists? Why is it that what has been familiar for over a decade stirs me to reflect on it today?

In fact, there is only one explanation for such a seemingly irrational phenomenon that is, on the contrary, precisely “rational”: because of the concepts of time, region, and race, Americans have never felt abnormalized by the traffic in women, which is so different from international law; only in a peaceful and rational situation is it possible for us to rethink the past, even though most of us are still very confused and bewildered. past, although most of us are still very confused and bewildered.

Every veteran of the Vietnam War should remember the “human market” on the Saigon Causeway, or the Kismet nightclub, known as the “Belle of the Nations,” and be able to easily recall the moments they spent there and the carnal, evil thoughts they saw, heard and felt. They can easily recall the moments they spent there and the carnal and sinister situations they saw, heard and felt. The most convincing thing about the two typical but different women’s transfer stations was that the former gathered the poor women of the lower class from Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and China who had been displaced to Saigon and were struggling for their lives, while the latter, as a result of the exchange trade, offered the pleasure-seeking, sex-crazed men “fried” women of various colors, black, white, brown and yellow. The latter, as a result of this exchange trade, provided pleasure-seeking men with “mixed fruit steaks” of black, white, brown, and yellow skin colors. If the economic policies of the South Vietnamese government led to poverty, the owners of bars, brothels and nightclubs in the sex industry made a fortune, especially in Saigon, the world’s most favored free-trade port.

“Man, I can give you a good time tonight.”

It was the sound of black belly dancers with dark, glistening skin from the Gismet nightclub. Their skin was like shaved rubber, full of elastic flesh. Yet treating the black soldiers of the U.S. Marine Corps, they either scowl or shake their heads as if insulted. In contrast, the Malay and Indian girls were not so optimistic, and although their flattering smiles pleased the black and Korean soldiers, they would never go as far as the black dancers did in making a fuss over jealousy. For, while the former are compelled to engage in skin and flesh for a living, the latter contain a million points for indulgence and pleasure. This is my analysis of them.

The international name “kismet”, which can be found all over the social world, undoubtedly appeals to every man who wants to have his way with women’s flesh. The common feature is that all the dancers wear breast-baring or topless skirts. Of course, there is no limit to further transactions; Saigon’s Gismet nightclubs are different from those located in the United States, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Turkey, etc.: you can put forward your requests for what they will dance for you, and you can even tell the owner on the phone, as if you were booking a product, the race, age, height and circumference size of the girl who receives you, You can even call the owner and tell her your race, age, height, and measurements as if you were booking a commodity, so even if you are whimsical enough to book a virgin and don’t care about money or time, you will never be disappointed.

One of the most talked about scandals at the Gismet nightclub in Saigon was the case of Quoc Cong Duc, the director of Ngo Dinh Yen’s government office, who exchanged ten Vietnamese girls for two Greek girls and ended up getting himself killed. At that time, it was clear that corruption within the Vietnamese government was no longer the work of a few, but had long been commonplace, from senior officials such as President Ngo Dinh Yen’s brother, Ngo Dinh Ru, down to ordinary policemen and soldiers. As the Catholic Monitor of December 14, 1961, said, “It [the Ngo Dinh Yen regime] is itself a condition for public outrage.”

In terms of both age and status, Guo Congde belonged to the powerhouse or patriarchal faction in Wu Tingyan’s regime.

After he became the director of the government office, he established his position with his measures such as “field reform”, “reclaimed land area program”, and “silk area pilot project”. I met this short, thin-cheeked, middle-aged man at a central deployment meeting for the Reclamation District. He described the desolate area as a paradise with fertile soil, beautiful scenery, and pleasant climate, and enticed the poor to leave the city to cultivate the land there. President U Tin Yan immediately agreed that this would give a big boost to agricultural production and declared the plan a “national policy.”

“Der was a crazy guy.” said Alfredo Caldino, who was then the “Settlement Advisor” to the South Vietnamese government. Alfredo Caldino, then “Settlement Advisor” to the South Vietnamese government, said. He objected to Quoc Thong Duc’s use of enticements to get the poor out of the cities, because that would cause (and it was soon confirmed) those who had been tricked to try to escape from the “Settlement Zone” and return to the cities with a strong sense of indignation and mistrust.

Not long after, Guo Congde added: “The peasants living in the poor countryside must be placed under the law of the regime.

The location of the ‘Silk Muster Zone’ must be set up in a zone conducive to the security of the zone and the surrounding area, i.e., in a maneuverable area that is easily accessible by land and water.”

In early 1959, Can Tho Lon Mai County, “Silk Mileage Zone” pilot, the South Vietnamese government troops, three battalions of the security forces of Vinh Thuan Dong, Phong Binh, Lon Chieu, She Phan, etc.; in May of the same year and Lon Mai Lon Binh, Vinh Xang, etc., and launched a sweep, killing eighty-eight people in only six years. This coercive program of his made some progress in governance, yet the already impoverished Vietnamese peasants could not help but side with the Viet Cong.

There is a common thought among them: why produce more food? There was not enough to eat anyway, and they might have to go to jail someday. All of this contributed to the total disinterest of the South Vietnamese peasants in land production. Peasants near the Saigon embankment flooded into the city to beg, forcing the Ngo Dinh Yen government to set up an “Anti-Begging Committee”.

Nevertheless, a large number of peasants continue to infiltrate into the cities, which adds to the instability of the lives of the 300,000 small traders and the poor in Saigon, Causeway Bay, and Hiep Dinh. Under these social conditions, even strong men are forced to join the ranks of beggars, bandits and drug traffickers. The women, especially the young and beautiful girls, have no choice but to flock to the “human flesh market”.

It was under such conditions that the Kismet Nightclub in Pier Park was born. Compared with the dusty and trashy downtown Saigon, Kismet Nightclub is a completely different world. At dusk, authentic dance music emanates from the glittering building, and hordes of soldiers from the United States, South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan flock here to have fun.