QUESTION. A couple of people on the panel mentioned brutalities to
women. Is rape and other sexual brutalities to women--brutality
involving the vagina in particular--is that a usual feature of people
on tour in Vietnam?
BANGERT. Yeah, I think that in regards to women in Vietnam, first of
all, you get this feeling sometimes when you're over there that you
don't even think of their sex. This is really disgusting. You don't
even think of them as human beings, they're "gooks." And they're
objects; they're not human, they're objects. The general rule was a
Vietnamese who is dead is confirmed Viet Cong and one who is living is
a Viet Cong suspect. And that's the way it was. Back to this specific
instance where I talk about the disembowelment of the women--I think
the person involved was a freaked out sexist, if that's what you're
trying to get at. I think maybe he had problems. He had to be--he was
in the Army for 20 years.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22joe+bangert%22+group:alt.war.vietnam&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.war.vietnam&safe=off&selm=9enugu08hb%40enews3.newsguy.com&rnum=11MODERATOR. Any of you gentlemen here on the panel, could you release
any incidents of fragging that you ever heard of or saw?
MODERATOR. Mr. Bangert, you said you had an incident of this.
BANGERT. I guess the majority of us had been in country for about nine
or ten months and this new guy came. The new guy was a lifer. A lifer
was in charge of the mail. He stopped the mail for about three days
because he wanted his troops to shine their shoes or something or
clean up or shave or get a haircut and he stopped the mail. So someone
told him if we don't get mail by noon on a specific day before
midnight, that night you're going to be offered. But since he was hard
and he was in the Korean War, he thought that what happened in the old
Marine Corps is happening in Vietnam, he persisted and the mail wasn't
gotten out and before midnight he was fragged. And the mail did come
through the next day.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22joe+bangert%22+group:alt.war.vietnam&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.war.vietnam&safe=off&selm=9enugu08hb%40enews3.newsguy.com&rnum=11