Photo By Lori Stewart | A "tunnel rat" from the 1st Infantry Division inspects a Viet Cong tunnel entrance...... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
OPERATION CRIMP NETS TROVE OF DOCUMENTS
On 14 January 1966, Free World Military Forces (FWMF) wrapped up a search and destroy mission in the Hố Bò Woods near Saigon. Operation CRIMP resulted in the partial destruction of an immense Viet Cong underground tunnel complex and netted 600 detainees and approximately 1.5 million documents. The documents were a treasure trove of information about the Viet Cong in the 4th Military Region of South Vietnam.
Allied forces believed the Viet Cong’s 4th Military Region headquarters was located approximately twenty-five miles northwest of Saigon in an area of mixed open terrain and thick jungle known as the Hố Bò Woods. On 8 January 1966, 8,000 troops of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division—including the attached 173d Airborne Brigade and its attached 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1/RAR)—kicked off Operation CRIMP in this area. After preparatory artillery bombardment and air strikes, the 173d inserted three battalion-size units to search for enemy facilities and activities. The Viet Cong mounted the strongest resistance in the 1/RAR area, the enemy’s regional headquarters.
Based on previous operations, the 173d Airborne Brigade anticipated the capture of a large quantity of detainees and documents. To handle the load, interrogators from its 172d MI Detachment were assigned down to the battalions, while Sgt. Sedgwick “Wick” Tourison and two native interrogators from the South Vietnamese J-2 Military Interrogation Center (MIC) out of Saigon provided linguistic support for the brigade’s forward headquarters. A 25-year-old Philly native, Tourison was on his second Vietnam tour; the first had been as a Morse intercept operator in 1961-1963. An honor graduate of the Defense Language Institute’s Vietnamese course, he had returned to Vietnam in July 1965 and began working in the MIC’s advisory office.
Entering the Hố Bò Woods with the brigade’s forward headquarters, Tourison and his South Vietnamese counterparts set up their interrogation tents and waited for the troops to encounter the enemy. Within two hours, the first batch of captured documents arrived, and Tourison quickly processed what were low-level village records. He then assisted the interrogators in screening 300 detained men, women, and children. Throughout the day, Tourison tracked the locations where the prisoners and documents had been captured on an acetate-covered, 1:50,000 scale situation map already marked with previously collected information about the Viet Cong in the area.
As more of the enemy’s tunnel network—part of the extensive Cu Chi complex extending from Saigon to the Cambodian border—was discovered, the volume of captured documents increased. On 11 January, Tourison received “a mountain” of dank-smelling, bug-riddled documents, and they continued to pour in over the next couple of days. As he screened each bag, he plotted locations on the situation map, noting “what is there and what isn’t.” He recalled, “processing documents is normally a tiresome job, but this time I was too excited to even notice.” As his map overlays became more congested and he compared new plots with older information, Tourison soon realized the older information the Army had on the Viet Cong in the region was completely obsolete.
By the time Operation CRIMP concluded on 14 January, Tourison estimated they had processed 1.5 million documents generated by all the major staff sections of the 4th Military Region and the region’s communist party committee. In addition to a new understanding of the Viet Cong’s organization in the region, the document trove revealed the names of every communist party member in South Vietnam and target folders for military installations in Saigon, as well as a list of new targets to be investigated.
Unfortunately, after the operation, the South Vietnamese armed forces took sole custody of the documents and failed to further exploit them for timely intelligence. This unacceptable situation preceded the establishment of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam J-2’s Combined Document Exploitation Center in Saigon. Only later, however, did military officials learn the full value of the CRIMP windfall and that proper exploitation may have contributed to an early and successful end to the war.
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| Date Taken: | 01.12.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 01.12.2024 14:02 |
| Story ID: | 461781 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 215 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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