Viet Cong Were Executed, Too

By The Associated Press

Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:29 PM ET
News.Yahoo

Four decades ago in Vietnam, anti-U.S. fighters were also put on trial and put to death, as in
Iraq today. But U.S. forces didn't help for long.

In the mid-1960s — the early days of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam's civil war — the U.S.-allied South Vietnamese government prosecuted and executed Viet Cong guerrillas, including some captured and handed over by U.S. troops.

In 1965, however, Radio Hanoi announced that a captured U.S. Army sergeant had been executed in reprisal for the Viet Cong deaths.

The U.S. command soon stopped handing over Viet Cong prisoners to the South Vietnamese government.

"The Viet Cong informed us that they would begin executing U.S. prisoners if we continued to facilitate the South Vietnamese executions, and we had reason to believe them," said Gary D. Solis, a Georgetown University law professor who served as a U.S. Marine lawyer in Vietnam.

In Iraq, too, insurgents have captured and killed U.S. soldiers, but thus far have not linked their fate to that of captured Iraqi insurgents facing a possible death penalty.