Vietnam: There’s been quite a bit of controversy surrounding the Phoenix Program. You were a PRU adviser during one of your tours–could you shed some light on that?

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Walsh: I was 22 years old, still trying to figure out what my real identity in life was, and there I was assigned to the CIA in charge of a band of 105 mercenaries. Well, that’s a lot to lay on a kid. What do you do as a kid? You rise to the challenge. I matured probably more during that tour than any other in Vietnam. There are two tours that I matured a lot on; one was the Phoenix tour and the other was the Lebanon/Grenada tour.

Vietnam: But they didn’t want to give you that advisory job in Vietnam because of your age. How did you get assigned to it?

Walsh: I kept putting my name up on the board. It was that simple. They couldn’t figure it out until I got caught one night by our operations officer, Lieutenant Dick Flanagan, who is now Captain Flanagan, I might add. He probably doesn’t even remember that. I just went in there every night, and before I left I put my name back up there.

Vietnam: What about all the accusations that were made dur-
ing the war that Phoenix was nothing more than an assassination program?

Walsh: Well, when they first started out, it was. It was called the Counter Terror Program. A lot of the VCI (Viet Cong infrastructure) had already made up their minds that they were not going to be taken alive. It’s easy to say that it was an assassination program, but it wasn’t that way by design.

Vietnam: Dead men don’t talk.

Walsh: Exactly. You want them alive if you’re going to extract any useful information out of them. There were as many women in the program as there were men. The women were actually harder to break.

Vietnam: I remember reading that in your book. Why is that?

Walsh: Women have what I call reserves of strength. Their mental strength was incredible. Also, this was after the My Lai incident. Everybody on the U.S. side was a little nervous about that. So the VC women knew they were being careful about torturing people. The U.S. image had already been tarnished enough. Everybody was aware of that on both sides of the fence.

Vietnam: And the VC leaders were taking advantage of that?

Walsh: Everybody thought if you torture somebody, he would eventually talk. It doesn’t always work that way. I never saw any of that. I knew it went on at other times and places–I’m not that naive to think it didn’t. But one of my rules was no torture. I told my PRUs, ‘I’d better not ever find out it’s going on.’ I never saw or participated in any of that, and I would never allow it. I learned from the pros. I learned the basics from a Mexican-American guy. He said: ‘Mikey, if I ever have to lay my hands on them, I’m dumber than they are. However, I don’t have to do that because I’m smarter than they are, and I’ve got all the psychological high cards. I’m the interrogator.’ Well, those lessons, learned when I was only a 22-year-old kid, have never left me. You use your brains, your intellect, that’s how you break them down.

Vietnam: So you were successful on a number of occasions? Without using force, that is.

Walsh: Oh, yes. But, as I stated earlier, the women were smarter. They knew that all they had to do was hold on for 24 hours and the trail would be cold. The big boys would have gotten away by that time. And that’s who I was after. The men were easier to break down. They were all cutting deals.

Vietnam: How did the VCI work?

Walsh: It’s a mirror image of their society. The smallest unit of society in Vietnam was the family; then you had the hamlet, which was a group of families; a group of hamlets make up a village; a group of villages make up a district; a group of districts make up a province; and a group of provinces make up a region. So that’s how the VCI did it. It exactly paralleled their society. Their plan was simple: When the South Vietnamese government in Saigon fell, the VCI was ready to just step across the aisle and assume total control in one or two days.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to