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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
SGT. TOURISON INTERROGATES NORTH VIETNAMESE NAVY PRISONERS
On 1 July 1966, U.S. Army interrogators Sgt. Sedgwick “Wick” Tourison and M. Sgt. Grady Stewart were called upon to assist in interrogating nineteen North Vietnamese Navy personnel captured in the Gulf of Tonkin. Their comprehensive report provided immediately actionable intelligence as well as a full description of the enemy’s naval capabilities.
When the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy began the strategic bombing campaign in North Vietnam in early 1965, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet stationed ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to rescue downed pilots. In the late afternoon of 1 July 1966, a Combat Air Patrol spied three enemy motor torpedo boats on a course for two of the Navy’s ships in international waters about fifty-five miles east of Haiphong. When the enemy boats launched torpedoes in the direction of the destroyers, U.S. Navy attack aircraft sank all three. One of the Navy destroyers then plucked nineteen survivors, including their division commander, from the water.
Later that day, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph McChristian, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam J-2, sent 26-year-old Sergeant Tourison and 35-year-old Sergeant Stewart to Da Nang to assist two Marine Corps interrogators in questioning the captured sailors. Tourison, a Philadelphia native and honor graduate of the Defense Language Institute’s Vietnamese course, was on his second tour to Vietnam. Assigned to the Combined Intelligence Center-Vietnam in Saigon, he worked as an advisor to the South Vietnamese J-2 Military Interrogation Center. Stewart, a Texan who had survived the Korean War, was in Vietnam for his third tour. A Vietnamese linguist, he was an interpreter/translator in the Combined Document Exploitation Center.
At Da Nang, Tourison and Stewart boarded the Navy ship on which the prisoners were held. While waiting for the Marine interrogators to arrive, they were barred from officially interrogating the prisoners. They were, however, allowed to talk with the enemy sailors. After arranging for them to have cigarettes and local food options, the two Army interrogators “chatted” with the prisoners about their units and established rapport with several noncommissioned officers and the division commander, Senior Captain Tran Bao. They determined the prisoners comprised the complete crews of two of the torpedo boats; the crew of the third boat had perished during the attack.
By the time the Marine interrogators arrived on the ship two days later, Tourison and Stewart had compiled a one-hundred-page report on the North Vietnamese Navy. Noting the available information on the enemy’s naval capabilities in 1966 was more than two years old, Tourison described the contents of their comprehensive report: “It represented three days of hard ‘polite conversation,’ with very little sleep, and was a detailed description of the history, current organization, senior officers, ship inventory, logistics, radar, communications and procedures, naval surface-to-ship missiles, and naval facilities for the entire North Vietnamese Navy from top to bottom and throughout its northern and southern regions.”
Captain Tran Bao proved particularly helpful in supplying information that may have been obsolete if Tourison and Stewart had waited for the Marines to arrive. Disgruntled with his country’s failure to negotiate peace with the United States, the captain provided detailed information about North Vietnam’s navy, including the locations of hidden vessels. Some of the information gathered was used to execute immediate attacks on North Vietnamese naval facilities and vessels. Using bomb damage assessment photographs, the interrogators elicited additional information on secondary targets from the cooperative prisoners.
A few months after the two Army interrogators returned to Saigon, General McChristian asked Sergeant Tourison to review a special study on the North Vietnamese navy. Tourison discovered ninety percent of the report was based on the interrogations he and Stewart had conducted on board the U.S. Navy support ship. He later wrote, “[T]he United States Navy…did not normally encounter prisoners, and so had little appreciation for human intelligence or the various ways in which it was used. I think we may have given them some appreciation for HUMINT.”
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| Date Taken: | 07.01.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 07.01.2024 10:45 |
| Story ID: | 475275 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 49 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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