Editors’ note: this story also contains “The Mysterious Third Device“, which ran as a sidebar to the cover story on February 4, 2005.
Wilson had shot two officers dead in February 1982, and Burge worked five days straight to track him down, never going home. When Wilson was finally located, hiding in a west-side apartment, Burge was first at the door, attacking it with lock picks, tools rarely held by policemen. “I used a single-digit rake and tension bar,” he explained in a 1988 deposition.
According to e-mail from Ron Buzil, a member of the Bowen ROTC from 1964 to 1968 and later an infantry captain in Korea, the program was run by two army sergeants. Activities consisted of “drill, familiarity with weapons . . . leadership, army history and lore, sports, and more drill.” The cadets took target practice on a rifle range in the school’s basement, firing an assortment of rifles and handguns, which were kept in a vault.
Burge was assigned to the Ninth Military Police Company of the Ninth Infantry Division. He reported to division headquarters, which had moved three months earlier to a barren 600-acre island that the army had created from marshland about 50 miles southwest of Saigon. General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces in Vietnam, had named the base Dong Tam, which meant “united hearts and minds.” The delta region was a maze of rivers, canals, and streams subject to seasonal flooding, and among its rice fields, swamps, rubber plantations, and dense jungle were more than 1,600 hamlets. More than 15,000 troops were assembled there, many of them moving around by boat.
The MPs were also responsible for processing, guarding, escorting, and transporting prisoners. Chicago defense attorneys representing victims of the Burge crew have long wondered whether this duty introduced Burge to the interrogation methods that showed up at Area Two.
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Members of the Ninth MP Company manned POW holding centers at the base camps and division headquarters, and a boat that carried prisoners from the countryside to Dong Tam. Not all the prisoners were enemy soldiers. Some were civilians, many of them innocent, detained in sweeps. According to a Ninth Infantry operational report from early 1969, there were 1,507 detainees interrogated in the three-month period starting on November 1, 1968. The questioning was done by the division’s Military Intelligence unit with Vietnamese translators. Former Ninth Infantry MPs I interviewed said they were sometimes present during interviews and at other times stood guard nearby.
My attempts to locate Ninth MP Company veterans whose service approximated or overlapped Burge’s turned up several others who said they’d never seen a prisoner abused. Former deputy provost marshal Ray Merrill, now responsible for the training of General Motors security officers, was a 25-year-old captain when he served with the Ninth MPs at Dong Tam in 1968. Merrill told me he classified reports of field telephone torture as “urban legends.”
