Political Prisoners

The scene was the living room of a Viet Cong representative in Pnompenh, the capital of Cambodia. While reporters, photographers and onlookers milled around, a bespectacled man named Nguyen Van Hieu, the representative in Cambodia of the National Liberation Front and a member of its Central Committee, brought off the elaborately staged affair like an experienced master of ceremonies. In a move obviously calculated to encourage dissent against the Viet Nam war in the U.S., the Viet Cong "symbolically" turned over three U.S. prisoners of war to an American antiwar activist, Thomas Hayden. The hope was, said Hieu piously, that the three soldiers would "contribute usefully" to the antiwar movements.

The prisoners were Sergeant Daniel Lee Pitzer of Spring Lake, N.C., Sergeant James E. Jackson Jr. of Talcott, W. Va. and Sergeant Edward R. Johnson of Seaside, Calif. Only Pitzer and Jackson were present at the ceremony, sitting behind a long table next to Hieu; the Viet Cong kept Johnson in the next room, explaining that he was too sick with dysentery to appear. The three had been prisoners in the Mekong Delta, and it had taken them, said Hayden, a month to reach Pnompenh from there, "under strafing, bombing and reconnaissance." All three remained in Viet Cong hands after the meeting ended, presumably pending negotiations on getting them out of Cambodia, with which the U.S. has no relations.

Echoes of Korea. Both Pitzer and Jackson made set-piece speeches, obviously memorized, thanking the Viet Cong for releasing them. Jackson, dressed in shorts and sports shirt, said woodenly: "The National Liberation Front made the decision to release me in response to the colored Negro American struggle for peace in the U.S." Pitzer said that "I have not been physically tortured or beaten. I wish to thank the Front for their lenient policy." Though neither sergeant hinted at a condemnation or repudiation of the U.S. war effort in Viet Nam, the circumstances inevitably raised echoes of Korea and brainwashing. In Saigon, the U.S. promptly released a report of a Viet Cong defector who said that he had tutored the sergeants in captivity on U.S. responsibility for the war.

It all sounded more like a straight indoctrination job than the physical and chemical pressuring usually associated with brainwashing--and whether it was really successful remains to be seen when the three Americans actually get home. In the event that the tutoring took and the three face court-martial or prosecution, they will have some backing. Hayden said that he represented a special committee of 21, including Martin Luther King, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Joan Baez and other antiwar militants, that was set up to give the men legal aid for any defense. He also claimed that the release of the men was a result of the meeting of American leftists and Viet Cong representatives in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, last September. The sergeants' onetime tutor, however, had another version: the Viet Cong had planned to release the men as early as last December, he said, but had not done so because the prisoners "weren't ready yet."

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