Prisoners of War

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From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman. And a heads up, this story contains some strong language. It's been half a century since the end of the Vietnam War. In honor of this anniversary, we're revisiting a story we produced a few years ago about a notorious prison run by the US military during the war.

When I first heard about this military prison, I assumed it was for captured enemy fighters. But Longbin Jail, also known as LBJ, on the outskirts of Saigon, was actually for American soldiers. These were men who had broken military law. And there were a lot of them. As the unpopular war dragged on, discipline frayed and soldiers started to rebel.

The single toughest problem faced by the military police is the apprehension of deserters and soldiers absent without leave. Most soldiers go AWOL to get away from army routine, some to avoid combat. Some even to protest the war. By the summer of 1968, over half the men in Longbin jail were locked up on AWOL charges. Some for more serious crimes, others for small stuff, like refusing to get a haircut.

The stockade had also become extremely overcrowded. Built to house 400 inmates, it was crammed with more than 700 men, and most of them were black. They represented 11% of the troops in Vietnam. but more than 50% of the men incarcerated at the stockade were African American. It was a situation ready to erupt. On August 29, 1968, it did.

with Armed Forces Radio. My name is Richard Perdomo. I was with the 19th Combat Engineer Unit. I didn't even know there was a jail in Vietnam. I was guilty of refusing a direct order. I refused to fix a flat tire on a dump truck that I did not drive. It gave me six months for that. That's how I ended up at the stockade. My name is Scott Riley. I served with the first Air Cav. I was young, thought I was a bit of a badass, ended up going AWOL, got busted with a bunch of, a whole lot of marijuana.

My name is Jimmy Childress, Jr. I was stealing from the military M16s, grenade launchers. I even sold a couple Jeeps. In any war. There is always booty and money to be made. There is always criminal activities. When I first got to the prison, I saw the gates and stuff, and I said to myself, hey, look, I'm going to be safer inside this chain-link fence with guards and guard tires.

than I would be out there in the field. I thought, man, this is going to be all right. It's going to be a good six months, you know. But lo and behold, it didn't take me just a few days to realize that the danger was within that. barbed wire fence. Long Bend was the kind of place that from the moment you walked in, you were trying to figure out a way to get out. Here you are sitting in a war zone, in a jail, just at their mercy. The whole

Prison was not much bigger than one square city block, and it was just full of tents. Each tent would hold maybe 10, 15 people. In the mornings, they would take you out into this big open yard. to fill sandbags all day. We were out in 115 degree heat each and every day. Each three-man team had to fill 500 sandbags a day, but you were filling them with hard-packed clay, which had to be dug up with a pick and shovel. The guards and LBJ, they treated you bad, bad, bad.

You were being humiliated in that stockade. You were being kicked around. I remember one day, something popped me in the back of the head. I was ready to fight. But when I turned around, Major Jackson was standing there. And he was more or less in charge of the prison. He took me to the maximum security area, which we just called the box. Throwed me in that thing.

and just walked off. I don't know if you know what a carnage box is, but it's a steel box where Army used to keep supplies in. They had them in the stockade for us to lock us up in. That was a way of making you submissive. The temperature inside the box was 100-plus degrees. The light was constantly on 24 hours a day. And you were in there naked. And you're like, this is the U.S. military and you're treating your own soldiers this way? This is AFVM.

Serving the American fighting band 24 hours a day from the Delta to the BMZ. I was the deputy commander at the Stockade in Long Bend, Vietnam. When I first got there I could see that was a problem. Guards were reluctant to go to certain areas, especially at night. It wasn't safe. My name is Larry. Jay Kimbrough. I served as a guard at the stockade. I hated to go in. Having to deal with insubordination, name-calling, profanities.

The racial breakdown was there was more blacks than there were whites that were housed in the stockade. So they beat dissing and dapping. Dissing and dapping was a show of solidarity. between black prisoners. This would be a clenched fist or a bump. It's kind of hard to describe when you're white, but it was a soul brother thing. Hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm your specialist, James Brigham Hack, and I'll be your host for two hours of the Power of Soul, Saigon style. Check it out.

Black and white being in Vietnam was no different from black and white being in America. It was no different. You have racial tensions. From the very first day I got to the prison... The blacks all hung together. The whites that were there, we kind of all stuck to our one side. We weren't segregated through the military. We were separated by... The want to be separated. As an officer, let me give you my perception. There's always tension between races in a prison. You can control this.

with adequate staff. When you have control, the tension becomes doorless. Without control, what could you do? We needed more people. None came.

NBC interrupts its regular program schedule to bring you the following special report. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. When Martin Luther King was killed. That was definitely a turning point. They tried to keep the news from us black soldiers. But we had heard that almost every major city in the United States had rioted. A new burst of anger.

was afoot in the prison. All black soldiers felt the same. Like, why am I even over here? I mean, you can't even go back to America and sit at a lunch counter. You know? You can't go vote. You can't live in a certain community. When you say, who is my real enemy? And we were hot and crazy. we were fed up. So we decided we're going to tear this motherfucker down. Excuse my language.

You're listening to AFVN-FM in Saigon. It's 11.05. On August 29, 1968, at approximately 11.25 p.m., I was standing in my guard shack when I began to hear a loud noise, screaming, yelling. Then I knew we had a serious situation. We overpowered. the guards, and people come from everywhere. I remember getting up out of my tent and I walked out barefooted. I was looking around and I saw guys just running.

Black guys, white guys, everybody was just going in all directions. I thought, man, I got to get ready. So I put my boots on. I pretty much had on my underwear and my combat boots, and that was it. I was locked up in the box. And all of a sudden, kind of like out of nowhere, this black guy opens the door and says, come on out, man. And like...

Somebody had come over from the kitchen with a sheet pan full of flat cake, and we're just breaking hunks of this stuff off and eating it. The euphoria of being free. That moment, it was a beautiful moment, knowing all the while that this is not going to end well. Everything just sped up in fast motion. I saw six to eight prisoners running toward me. They threw me to the ground, started kicking, and pummeled me with fists. After that, they moved on to the mess hall.

that was set on fire. And personally, I don't blame them because the food was definitely lousy. I can remember running past the administration building. where they kept all the records of everyone. So I hollered for three or four guys to come go with me, and we kicked the door in. And I said, just start throwing records on the floor and set them afire.

So they would not know who anyone was. I was the highest ranking black officer at the stockade. So I just went in and tried to get them to... calm down i was surrounded by about a hundred inmates i think i talked to them for a good 15 20 minutes but then i heard two or three of them saying You ought to kill the Uncle Tom. They stopped listening to what I was saying, so I left. They opened the gate and let me out. That's probably when it really got dangerous.

They kept all the shovels and the picks in a little bitty shed. When they got those things out, it just escalated. Boom, boom, boom. Everybody went to fighting everybody. People were just knocking each other in the head, you know, starting fights and swinging shovels and picks and stuff. It wasn't just blacks on whites. It was just everybody lashing out.

It was the only time I was ever scared the whole time I was in Vietnam. When everything started to quiet down, there were like six state guards that we had on the ground. The military was saying release them, but I didn't want to let them go because I hadn't had enough. In fact, I walked past each one of them, bust them in the head with a stick.

Because I was really angry. I'm like, I'm going to make you pay for what you've done to me. And took some of my... comrades who had a little more sense than I did to say to me, no man, let him go.

Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Good evening. There was a riot with racial overtones at the largest U.S. servicemen's stockade in Vietnam. And 65 G.I.s were injured. A well prisoner who was killed, he was beaten to death with a shovel. The media was getting so little information as the story unfolded.

My name is Peter Arnett. I was a reporter for the Associated Press in Vietnam. The riot had reportedly been put down and things are back to normal. And yet... Three weeks later, the military was saying, well, we still have some holdouts. Twelve soldiers still controlled a section of the LBJ stockade. Days went by. The military is literally throwing boxes of sea rations over the fence for us to eat. So we kind of knew that they weren't going to kill us.

People started pulling out drugs from God only knows where, and we're literally laying in the yard in the hot sun getting high. turned out to be really an astonishing story. I mean, at any point, the military could have overwhelmed this group of resisting black prisoners. The decisions were made not to do it. The high command realized the story could grow much bigger.

And with the resistance to the war growing, they just didn't want to start drawing even greater attention to this whole racial issue in Vietnam. So the military played it low-key, and the riot basically lasted for most of September. The decision was made to send in a company in a riot control formation to use tear gas. That ended it all. After it was all over...

We knew who the ringleaders were, and we took care of them. U.S. military sources in Saigon said today that six Negro soldiers involved in a riot at the Longbin Stockade will be tried for conspiracy to commit murder. After the riot, I felt bad about it. I have regrets. And I felt disappointed because we didn't accomplish anything. other than tearing something up, like a child would tear up a toy. We just blew off steam, that's all. And we only made our bed harder than what it was before.

When I come home, I kind of left all of that behind me. It was just one of those hush-hush stories. It's not like describing a battle. There's nothing heroic about it. Families just don't like to think about their sons marching off to war. Instead of marching off to war, he marches off into a stockade. Today, I am 69 years old and I'm still angry about the way the military treated its own citizens. I still feel...

that something had to be done. I guess I was just trying to prove that I'm a human being. I'm over it now, but it took a long time. It took a long time. This story is produced by Sarah Kate Kramer with Nellie Gillis and Mejo Richman. Our editors are Deborah George and Ben Shapiro. The Ready Diaries team also includes Elisa Escarce, Micah Hazel, and Lena Engelstein.

We're proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best independent podcasts around. I'm Joe Richman, Radio Diaries. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.