End of an Ordeal

When Hanoi launched its massive offensive last spring, South Viet Nam's defenses collapsed so quickly that a number of Western civilians fell captive to the advancing Communist forces. Last week the North Vietnamese released 14 civilians, all but one of whom had been seized in the Central Highlands capital of Ban Me Thuot and held for 7% months. Among them were nine Americans including U.S. Consular Officer James Lewis, five missionaries and the six-year-old daughter of a missionary couple. TIME Correspondent David Aikman met the returnees in Bangkok and cabled this account of their ordeal:

Captured by startled North Vietnamese who were conducting a house-to-house search last March, the missionaries had their hands bound and were trucked to a "reeducation camp" being used to interrogate South Vietnamese prisoners of war. For five weeks the missionaries lived in the camp's leaky huts and tried to cope with hordes of snakes and scorpions. Although there was sufficient rice, there was little else to eat, and most of the prisoners lost 20 Ibs. or more; eight of the 14 contracted malaria. "Our captors were very edgy," recalls Mrs. Lillian Phillips, a member of the Christian Missionary Alliance who was captured along with her husband Richard. "But there was no brutality, no harsh treatment."

Same Questions. Between April and August, the group was moved four times, ultimately being taken by truck up to North Viet Nam. During the journey through the South, their small convoy passed a group of children who shouted excitedly: "The Americans are back! The Americans are back!" Inside North Viet Nam, the missionaries were interned at Son Tay Camp, near Hanoi, which was the target of an abortive raid to release U.S. military prisoners in 1970 (they had been moved elsewhere just before the raid).

To keep themselves busy, the prisoners studied their Bibles, prayed and kept diaries; Mrs. Phillips baffled her guards by chasing butterflies. Everyone was interrogated 15 or 20 times. The Communists always asked the same questions: Who were they? What was their profession? Their rank? Had the U.S. financed their work in Southeast Asia? Until the very end, the North Vietnamese seemed determined to prove that the missionaries were in the pay of the Central Intelligence Agency. At times the prisoners managed to turn the tables on their interrogators. Mrs. Betty Mitchell, a Christian Missionary Alliance member who had worked in the Ban Me Thuot area for nearly two decades, told the camp commandant: "One day you are going to meet your maker and you will have to answer to him."

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