| ID | 159677 |
| Title Proper | Pain Was unbelievably deep |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Allen, Michael J |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | Twelve hours into The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick cut from a carefully crafted segment on American prisoners in Vietnam and their contested place in the war’s politics and diplomacy to something less familiar to American viewers: the plight of 200,000 Vietnamese civilians and 40,000 communist combatants detained in South Vietnam's squalid prisons. As images of Con Son’s subterranean “tiger cages” appear on screen a Vietnamese man recounts how “puppet intelligence officers tortured me on the orders of the CIA … They used electricity from the wall outlet to shock me. They poured water in my mouth and held my mouth shut, so the water couldn’t come out. When I stopped breathing they had to stop.” At the mention of waterboarding, the directors cut from these subtitled words to their speaker, identified as “Nguyen Tai, N. Vietnamese Spy.” We look into his eyes and note his slight tremor as he concludes, “I still feel pain. The pain was unbelievably deep.” |
| `In' analytical Note | Diplomatic History Vol. 42, No.3; Jun 2018: p.423–427 |
| Journal Source | Diplomatic History Vol: 42 No 3 |
| Key Words | Vietnam War |