Pat Hostetter Martin, author of this article, went to Vietnam first in 1966 as a volunteer for the Mennonite Central Committee. She and her husband, Earl, returned to Vietnam in 1974. An account of their personal experiences up to and after the fall of the Thieu government appeared in Sojourners January 1976 interview with them.
On the morning of October 20, 1973, a young Vietnamese woman Dang Thi Hien, left her Saigon home to shop at a nearby market. As she was buying a bouquet of flowers for the ceremony of remembrance (the 100th day since her father’s death), a casual acquaintance stopped to greet her. As they stood chatting, four men in civilian clothes approached them and asked for Hien’s identification papers. Upon examining them, the men grabbed her wrists and started to drag her out of the market, claiming that her papers were counterfeit. Hien was taken by taxi to the local police station where she was searched. Then, without further explanation, she was taken to the interrogation center of a province west of Saigon.
At the interrogation center Hien was charged with acting as a liaison agent for the National Liberation Front. Hien replied, “I am not a cadre, I’m an ordinary citizen. I have nothing to declare.”
She was informed that her friend, the woman decoy who had spoken to her in the market that morning, had implicated her in a “Viet Cong communications ring,” and they demanded that she reveal her contacts and her activities. Hien declined to confess to anything. To reinforce the earnestness of their demands, five or six men started beating Hien with their fists and with wooden clubs. After violently beating and kicking her face, back, chest and stomach, they again demanded a confession. When Hien again declared her innocence, they attached electrodes to her fingers and gave her repeated electric shocks of higher and higher voltage.
Hien continued to deny all guilt. Her very stubbornness infuriated her interrogators. Hien was tied down, and her nose was tightly closed while soapy water was poured over her cloth-covered face, forcing her to inhale the soapy solution into her stomach and lungs. Then they kicked her bloated stomach until the water squirted back out through her nose and mouth. After several buckets of such treatment, Hien lost consciousness.
When she came to the next morning, Hien found herself in the emergency room of the province hospital still belching soapy water and unable to move her legs. For the next ten days, she was shuttled back and forth between the hospital, where she was being fed intravenously, and the interrogation center, where she was repeatedly prodded for an admission of guilt. Even though she had severe vaginal bleeding and was completely paralyzed from her waist down, Hien maintained her innocence.
It was in a Saigon hospital to which the prison doctor had sent her that I first met Hien. Because of my greater fluency in Vietnamese, a fellow American therapist working in Hien’s ward asked if I would talk with Hien. The therapist wanted to find out the cause of her abnormal spasticity and why she was handcuffed to the stretcher -- which made treatment impossible.
Hien related her story to me during several visits together. Because she thought that publicity might help her cause, I introduced Hien to a New York Times reporter who was interested in doing an extensive report on political prisoners in South Vietnam. In the middle of the interview, the reporter and I were accosted by a plainclothes man, taken out of the hospital and into a local police station where we were detained and questioned for nearly an hour. One week after the interview, Hien was suddenly taken from the hospital in an unmarked truck to an undisclosed destination.
By this time we had met Hien’s mother, who begged my husband, Earl, and me to help her find her daughter. After establishing that she had been returned to the small prison where she had been held previously, Earl and Hien’s mother made several attempts to see her. During these attempts we came into contact with a man from the “security committee” of the province where Hien was being held. He was curious about our interest in Hien and after repeated visits, he became quite frank with us about her case. He admitted they had no hard evidence that Hien was guilty and that she had confessed to nothing. He confided that Hien’s harsh sentence of two years’ imprisonment subject to renewal -- essentially an open-ended sentence -- was the result of Hien’s refusal to confess. He went on to say that the principle that the interrogators often work under is, “If innocent, beat until guilty; if guilty, beat until terror-stricken,” a slogan which other prisoners had told us was often posted on the walls of interrogation centers.
After yet another prison transfer and a four-month detention, Hien was released. The next day, two police officers, one claiming to be a doctor, came to her house. The doctor did sensory tests on her legs and promised to provide further treatment. The other officer assured Hien that she would be given new identification papers shortly -- papers which she never received -- and instructed her that if anyone asked how her legs got paralyzed, she was to tell them she had been in an automobile accident.
During the next two months, Hien lived with our family in Quang Ngai province while she received physical therapy for her legs at the Quaker Rehabilitation Center in the town. After two months of intensive therapy, Hien was able to walk again.
Hien returned to Saigon, haunted by the constant fear of rearrest. In January 1975, during the time that a U.S. Congressional delegation was in Vietnam to ascertain whether Congress should allocate additional funds to the faltering Saigon regime, police visited Hien’s home several times offering a large sum of money if she would promise not to tell her story to any of the U.S. delegation. After the second or third unsuccessful visit, the police left part of the money on the table and threatened Hien’s mother. Following this incident, Hien seldom felt free to visit her home but slept at the home of a different friend every night.
On April 30, 1975, the Saigon regime surrendered to the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Several months later, she wrote in a letter to me, “Today my country is completely liberated. I feel liberated too.” She also wrote, “I think I can honestly say that I do not want revenge against the men who captured and tortured me. They treated me viciously, but they are people too. I think that it is time for all Vietnamese to lay aside the grudges and hatreds which the foreigners stirred up.”
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