July 1970.
Two American Congressmen are among a delegation that is visiting Côn Sơn Prison in South
Vietnam.
They are getting the guided tour when one of the Americans pulls out a hand-drawn map
a former prisoner had given him.
The map shows a secret part of the prison.
That’s where they want to go.
As they open a door, they begin to hear a chorus of moans.
People are crying out for what the Americans are told is water.
As they walk farther into the room, what they see they can’t believe.
Women and men trapped in cages.
Some are beaten, mutilated, their bodies covered in sores.
The translator looks at one of the congressmen and says, “Tiger Cage.”
The two congressmen were Augustus Hawkins and William Anderson.
They were accompanied by the USAID Office of Public Safety Director Frank Walton, as
well as Tom Harkin, who would later serve on the United States Senate.
Their translator and assistant for the day was Don Luce, a man that would soon relinquish
his support for the American war effort.
He has a controversial story to tell, but we’ll save that until the end.
The Vietnam War was in full swing.
That’s why in those cages were people considered the enemy of the US and the Republic of Vietnam.
The delegation didn’t fully understand the ongoing atrocities committed in the prison,
and as you’ll see soon, other prisons.
That day, Tom Harkin took the photos, which were later published in a Life magazine article
titled, “The Tiger Cages of Con Son.”
The article appalled many people in the US, folks who had no idea that such inhumane treatment
of prisoners was happening in South Vietnam.
They became even more appalled later when released prisoners talked about what had happened
to them.
But first, let’s talk more about what the delegation saw that day.
This part of the prison that was not on the guided tour was the punishment block.
It was a room with about 120 cells.
These weren’t ordinary cells, though.
They were basically pits in the ground, each with an iron grid for a ceiling.
That made it possible for guards to walk over the cells and look inside, perhaps now and
again, throw some food down there...or worse.
Many of them were open to the sunlight all day, and in Vietnam, that sun can be pretty
damn strong.
These cells were mockingly nicknamed the “sunbathe” cells.
Anyone who’s ever been foolish enough to sit under the tropical sun from dawn until
dusk will know what damage that can cause.
We should say here that these cells weren’t the creation of the Vietnamese.
The French first made the “Tiger cells” when they were in Vietnam, doing all the terrible
things colonists tend to do from time to time.
The Americans described the cells as being around five feet wide, six feet long, and
six feet deep.
That wasn’t much space when there were usually six or seven prisoners wallowing down there.
We don’t need to tell you that the cells weren’t fitted with modern conveniences,
so the stench from human waste was unbearable.
As for who was down there, it included anyone accused of being Communists.
Sometimes families were imprisoned; other times student activists were rounded up and
sent to the prison, sometimes spending years down there without ever having a trial.
Let’s now talk about torture.
The tiger cells, as we said, were a punishment block.
But they weren’t always just punishment in themselves; rather they were a holding
house.
One former prisoner said he was “beaten and tortured on and off for a whole year.”
He said, at times, he’d have soapy water forced into his mouth and eyes.
He said other times he was electrocuted.
On other occasions, he was beaten with sticks until, he said, he “vomited blood or until
the blood came out of my eyes or ears.”
Another former inmate described having his hands handcuffed behind his back and then
being suspended with his arms from the ceiling.
That caused incredible pain and usually resulted in him blacking out.
In his own words, he said, “There they chained our feet and attached the chains to a pole.
There were between 50 and 100 prisoners.
We had nothing to lie on, and it was filthy and dirty and cold.
Every day they would open the door and send in a bunch of common criminals who would beat
us with sticks and kick us.”
He said he saw several people die in the tiger cages.
Others lost the use of their limbs, with one man saying he and many others were disabled
after the beatings.
He said, “We were still sick and needed more time to recover.
We told them many of us still could not walk and many were still very sick.”
He then dropped this bombshell.
He said the old tiger cages were being replaced by new ones, with the new torture cells paid
for by the US and built by an American contractor.
That contractor we discovered after some research was the construction consortium, Raymond.
Morrison, Knudsen, Brown, Root, and Jones.
The deal was worth $400,000 and was paid for by the US military.
That’s about $2.7 million in today’s money, a mere speck in the vast and costly tapestry
of war.
These new cages were smaller, so only one prisoner stayed in them at a time.
But this created another kind of evil.
The guards would open the iron grills and jump in with the prisoner, beating him senseless.
The prisoners were so weak they couldn’t fight.
Each day they were only given enough water to barely survive.
Food-wise, they were given two spoons of rice.
That is hardly enough calories to sustain human life.
That same prisoner said they received more beatings “because we asked for more food
and more water.”
He said a man named Le Van An was beaten to death, and so was a Buddhist monk.
When investigations into the torture and deaths happened later, all the prisoners told the
same story.
One of them said, “Each of us went through a similar ordeal.”
It’s hard to say just how many political prisoners were held on both sides of the war.
The Saigon government said the number was 5,000, but the New York Times in1973 said
it was more like 20-30,000, with some estimates being as high as 200,000.
These were secretive times indeed, but those released from those prisons stood up later
and described in horrific detail what had happened to them.
The Times published an article on July 11, 1970, with the headline, “Saigon Is Investigating
‘Tiger Cage’ Cells at a Prison.”
Partway down the story is this paragraph, “The Government has already confirmed that
the small, crowded ‘tiger cage’ cells exist and that they contain about 400 prisoners
who refuse to obey the prison authorities.”
It said the prisoners were shackled, beaten, and did not receive enough food or water to
sustain anything near good health.
When the South Vietnamese government was asked about this, it responded by saying prisoners
in those cages had not saluted the national flag.
But from what we can see, there was some amount of sadism going on in those wretched punishment
blocks.
Indeed, after three students from Saigon University were released from prison, they said the government
had not been “telling the truth”.
They said they believed the number of prisoners was way higher than the government had said,
stating the number was 11,200.
Speaking on behalf of those students was a man named Cao Nguyen Loi.
He said he’d spent 13 months in a tiger cage for nothing more than joining a peace
protest.
Women got the same treatment as men.
Here is one testimony from a former female prisoner:
“In prison, sometimes they made my sister or me witness the torture of the other.
When I saw them beat my sister, it was very painful.
They put us in the Tiger Cages, and when I came to my senses I thought I fell into Hell
because the cage was the shape of a coffin.”
There’s a kind of happy ending to her story, though.
She also said she was released.
She wrote, “The happiness made tears pour down.
I couldn’t walk.
I was paralyzed.
I was cured in months after, but at the time of my liberation, my legs were still very
weak.”
As for other kinds of tiger cages, you can look no further than Phu Quoc Prison.
It housed mostly Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers, some of whom held a high rank.
Today, the prison is a museum that shows how conditions were back then, replete with tiger
cages.
These cages were no hole in the ground, and they certainly weren’t large enough for
a bunch of guards to get in there and commit themselves to an orgy of violence.
They must, however, have been an awful way to spend time.
Under the sun all day, at the mercy of guard’s sticks, biting ants, snakes, and likely the
occasional giant centipede.
Today, you can visit the prison website, which shows one man-like doll in a tiger cage who
looks like he’s supposed to be dead.
If he’s not, he’s missing half a leg and is covered in cuts and bruises.
Below the photo is the text, “At that time, thousands of prisoners died in the prison
because they couldn’t stand tortures.”
In quite disturbing detail, the website talks about punishments that happened outside of
the tiger cages.
It shows one prisoner being blinded by high-powered lights.
Another picture shows a guard popping out a man’s teeth with a stick.
If that isn’t bad enough, another prisoner is wrapped in a sack and is being placed on
a large, heated pan.
This kind of thing never happened in the US, or at least we don’t think it did.
But listen to what an academic wrote about those days in Vietnam.
In a paper published by the University of California Press, he wrote:
“The Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, operated this prison under close advisement
of the United States.
In fact, this prison was part of the mass incarceration system that Vietnam built in
the 1960s, with the help of U.S. law-enforcement experts and funding from the CIA.”
The writer also says guards would walk above the cages and throw quick lime over everyone.
Prolonged exposure to quick lime causes burns, and the people in the cells had no water to
wash with.
The academic also adds something to the story regarding when the US delegation went there.
He said that everyone who’d arrived from the US was appalled by what they saw.
Nevertheless, he said, the delegation “minimized” the conditions in their official report.
As some of you know, much of the USA was against the war in Vietnam.
Photos of inhumane conditions in prisons only supported their cause and turned more people
off the war.
That’s why the officials kept most of the horrors hush, hush.
The writer said that Tom Harkin wasn’t supposed to publish those photos, but he leaked them
to Life magazine.
After that leak, protests in the US exploded.
In Boston, activists made mock tiger cages and stayed in them all week.
Even in London, people made cages and sat in them outside of the offices of a contractor
that built detention facilities.
We told you we’d come back to that translator named Don Luce.
Many years later, he wrote that he had a friend who had been tortured to death, but he said
the torture happened under the eyes of American soldiers.
He said, “The US paid the salaries of the torturers, taught them new methods, and turned
suspects over to the police.
The US authorities were all aware of the torture.”
After he turned against the war effort, he lost his press pass.
He became a pariah to the US and the South Vietnamese.
One day a friend of his from military intelligence said, “Don, you’ve got to be more careful.
They’re out to get you.”
This became reality when he discovered a deadly “two-step” snake had been planted in his
bed one day.
He was eventually expelled from Vietnam and had to return to the US.
A female prisoner named Thieu Thi Tao later wrote that she actually got to speak with
the delegation that day.
She was a 16-year old student at the time.
This is what she said about her experience: “I still remember the strange foreign voices.
In the cages, we wondered what new indignities were to be visited upon us.
But a foreigner myself who spoke Vietnamese with a heavy accent told us it was a US congressional
investigation.
We had prayed for such an inquiry and took the chance to speak of the tortures.
We begged for water and food.
We were dying, you know.”
After the Life magazine exposé, Congressman Philip Crane went to the prison to see what
was up.
His remarks have since been called racist, and he obviously either lied or wasn’t shown
something similar to what had been happening before.
He said, “The tiger cages are cleaner than the average Vietnamese home.”
This didn’t convince the activists, of course.
We’ll finish with a quote that Don Luce liked to say at times, in reference to the
war.
It’s from the poetry of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh:
“Remember, brother, remember.
Man is not our enemy.”
Now you need to watch, “50 Insane Facts About Vietnam War You Didn't Know.”
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