Prisoners: Part I

This is Part One of a two part post on prisoners of war in Vietnam. While the poor conditions and treatment of American prisoners of war are well known, the treatment of North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese POWs is much less covered.

By almost all accounts, internment in South Vietnamese prisons could be just as bad and were often as bad as internment in North Vietnamese prisons.

All PAVN and NLF prisoners of war that were captured by the United States and Allied forces during the Vietnam War were turned over to South Vietnamese and ultimately the ARVN, for internment. By 1973, the ARVN held 37,540 POWs, including 9,971 PAVN soldiers and 26,927 NLF fighters.

Although the US retained an advisory role in the South Vietnamese military prison system, it did not and could not dictate policy in terms of interrogation methods, prison structure and layout, etc. As a result, adherence to the 1949 Geneva Convention by the South Vietnamese was not guaranteed and not necessarily common. The Red Cross commonly lodged complaints which were generally not timely addressed by the South Vietnamese.

Furthermore, the nature of the war affected how prisoners were treated. The North Vietnamese refused to admit that any troops from the North were in fact captured, although the majority of troops captured throughout the war were indeed NLF fighters anyway. This complicated the POW exchange process greatly—the North Vietnamese in general did not lodge formal complaints as to the treatment of their captured troops because "they had no captured troops." The South Vietnamese preferred to treat captured NLF fighters as domestic insurgents, as they obviously did not recognize the NLF as a legitimate party to the war. To further complicate matters, many NLF fighters were also under the age of 18. To the credit of the South Vietnamese, they did try to create a standardized process by which to separate professional soldiers from guerrillas from civilians, and that standard went through several revisions.

As a result, torture, both physical and psychological, was common for captured Communist fighters. For most of the war, the majority of captured soldiers were held at Phu Quoc prison, though some were also held at Con Son Island. Con Son, which held many of the most dangerous prisoners, became well-known for its "Tiger Cages," which were essentially cramped boxes. In addition, many were held in civilian prisons throughout South Vietnam as well. Due to the lack of resources and lack of interest in improving the internment system, the ARVN focused little of their efforts on improving their system. In particular, the prison at Phu Quoc was notorious for its terrible conditions, lack of any real logistics, and overall poor standards. ARVN military police received little training on POW handling, and the prison itself received little resources from the ARVN to improve its infrastructure. Lack of adequate nutrition was also a problem that plagued prisoners in South Vietnam.

Overall North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters could expect similarly dismal conditions, regular beatings and torture, and little to no rations when interned by the South Vietnamese, just as Americans and South Vietnamese would expect in North Vietnam. Interestingly enough, after the war, Phu Quoc became a temporary internment facility for ARVN troops, and Con Son became an internment center for captured Boat People as well.