As you have heard in other testimony, we don't treat our POW's very well, and we are bombing hospitals, which is in all of our lectures and training that we might have had in terms of what goes in warfare, we know that also is a violation. These things added up, you know, in the subjective minds of our soldiers is a dehumanization of the Vietnamese. Another specific incident, as a company commander in November time frame of 1968, my company was a mechanized company, we were sweeping a road south out of Dau Tieng toward another Bn's base camp. On this sweep we came through a village where we had an ambush patrol the night before from a platoon, from the 1st Bn, 27th Infantry, whose base camp I was sweeping toward. Not a shot was fired in anger from the enemy, but this platoon leader had called in white phosphorous mortar are that night on this village, and he had done it because he saw people moving in the village at night.
People get up out of their homes at night just to go to the bathroom.
I reported this to the Bn commander, to his command post at 1st, 27th, when I reached it later that day and then saw a systematic effort to hide this atrocity, if you will, and that was because I think that loyalty to your commander is often a greater value than truth in Vietnam. Certainly this LT wasn't being protected, but that Bn commander was being protected when this didn't reach Bgd, it didn't reach the press, it didn't reach the div level, and it never did. This was a platoon organized supposedly from former VC, and they had a great reputation as to getting POWs to talk, and their reputation was in sort of the Project Phoenix Program where we eliminated the VC infrastructure by finding who the VC were in the villages and hamlets, and these people would go in at night and kill them or take them away. Cu Chi, the div commander, General Williamson, would invite him as his personal guest that night at the meal. I did not know of any personal atrocities that Capt Phelps did or didn't do.