1971 Winter Soldier Hearings: 1st Marine Division Panel

AlterNet. Posted March 11, 2008.

Iraq Veterans Against the War is holding a new round of "Winter Soldier" hearings in Washington, DC, March 13-16. Selections from the original hearings, held in Detroit in 1971, are published here for interested readers.

1ST MARINE DIVISION

MODERATOR. I'd like to welcome you all. This is the First Marine Division. It landed in South Vietnam in 1965 and is still there. You've probably all heard the quotation "Ask a Marine." So after these gentlemen have finished their testimony, you'll be allowed to ask a Marine and find out what really went on over there.

[The panelists' introductions can be read in full here.]

MODERATOR. We'd like to ask a few questions of the gentlemen up here. Mr. Craig, ... you saw a convoy run down an old man -- it was an old woman -- okay, who is the, or did the convoy commander-- what was his rank and did he do anything about it? Did he try and slow the convoy down or did they just run right over her?

CRAIG. The convoy was moving pretty slow and the old woman, like, most of the civilians over there sort of ignore the military people going down the road. And it didn't seem--like he didn't beep the horn or like do anything -- like, he just moved up to the old woman and started nudging her and then I saw her fall out of the way. When the convoy had completely passed, like she was on the road, really like squashed.

MODERATOR. How many -- was it a large convoy?

CRAIG. No, it was about five trucks, maybe six.

MODERATOR. Five or six trucks. Did anybody stop from the convoy and see…

CRAIG. No, they kept moving. They were loaded.

MODERATOR. They kept moving. Also, did you ever see the mistreatment of prisoners that we had taken? Viet Cong suspects or NVA?

CRAIG. Yes, I did. These people were only suspects taken from a village after we had a mine sweep team that was wiped out and I guess people more or less went out to pick up these suspects on a grudge basis. When they brought them back in they were loading them on a truck to take them to [unintelligible] and they were making a game out of it by grabbing their feet and their hands and swinging them up in the air to see how high they could throw them and land in the back of a duce-and-a-half truck which had a steel bed.

MODERATOR. Okay. Were there any senior NCOs present?

CRAIG. There was a Staff Sergeant present.

MODERATOR. Staff Sergeant--that's a staff NCO?

CRAIG. Yes, sir.

MODERATOR. Okay, Mr. Olimpieri, I wish you could… there's some testimony here…you witnessed a 70-year-old man wounded about 20 miles southwest of Da Nang. Could you elaborate on this, please?

OLIMPIERI. Yeah. We were in a sweep in a rice paddy and the flank man spotted somebody and told him to halt and he started running and I fired an M79 over the trees. It went off and the man went down and our Lt. told us to go over there and check and see if he had an ID and find out if he was dead or what was happening with him. We went over there and he was still alive. He was about 70 years old. I believe he was some sort of religious, like a monk or something like that, from his dress. He had an ID card and he was in pretty bad shape so they didn't want to call in a MEDIVAC chopper so they told us to kill him. And the person who did the killing fired about six rounds in him and I had to tell him to stop. Right after that we told the Lt. what the situation was and he called in and said "Get rid of the…". He told us to get rid of the ID card before we killed him. He called in one VC body count.

MODERATOR. So this man who was killed wasn't even a suspect. He was civilian.

OLIMPIERI. Right. He didn't halt when he was told so they shot him.

MODERATOR. Mr. Nienke, I understand you were in the same unit with Mr. Olimpieri. Were you present when this happened?

NIENKE. Yes. Paul Olimpieri was my squad leader and I was in the same squad.

MODERATOR. So you can in fact substantiate this. He did tell the person who did the shooting to stop afterwards.

NIENKE. Correct.

MODERATOR. When you did take POWs were they tortured or what was the procedure or if you did take prisoners?

NIENKE. We took a lot of prisoners. Some of them were suspected VC, NVA, and they were usually brought to the compound, when we took prisoners, and turned over to an interpreter usually a South Vietnamese or Korean interpreter, and if the information couldn't be extracted from them they were tortured and sent back to the CP, the Command Post.

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