Quote History Quoted:
Was it RVN national police or ARVN policy to execute captured criminals/POWS?
Just wondering if this was an outlier or common practice. I didn't know the full story of this until the internet.
View Quote
From everything I've read (or heard from people that were there, and what they told me is why this is going to be pretty long) it wasn't official policy for them to execute prisoners, but they were fighting a very nasty civil war/insurgency so official policy often only went so far as people felt like following it and/or whether or not they thought that they could get away with it. And "getting away with it" really isn't exactly how Americans would think of it. The Vietnamese weren't really worried about global PR (or even their own courts really in a lot of cases) so I don't mean getting away with it legally but more like whether or not killing a guy out of hand would be something that would raise their stature among the locals or lower it. In some places popping the head VC guy whom everyone knows is the head VC guy as soon as you first walk into the village may actually back the whole village off the VC path and show you're some seriously bad motherfuckers and not to be trifled with; in other situations doing that could set the whole village against you and cause massive problems up and down the line because the whole village was either leaning hardcore VC to begin with or you nudged them that way by shooting him. The same things could happen with going the opposite of shooting, you could come in and be nice to the villagers, pass out free rice and vaccinate all the kids...and have
that make the village drift more anti-government because they're afraid that if they didn't have a VC problem already they were going to wind up with one now since you're being so nice to them it's going to draw the nearby cadres over like flies to shit to see what the deal is; or they could figure you scared all the VC off so now they're your best friends. Yeah it's crazy shit, but remember they're Vietnamese not Americans, so whether or not it makes sense to most of us, it was just how it was.
Okay this is getting long and I'm probably not explaining it right because I'm tired but basically: No it wasn't official policy of the Republic of Vietnam for their army or police to shoot prisoners/suspects/etc. in the middle of the street, in fact it was against their laws; but in practice it happened, and even though it may have been illegal in almost every case that doesn't mean it was even seen as the
wrong thing to do in every case. Plus you have the age old axiom of location, location, location. In Saigon or Da Nang that shit wasn't going to fly most days, but the day that picture was taken wasn't "most days" and I'm sure dozens of VC "prisoners" wound up with a bullet to the back of the head and then just dropped into a ditch in and around Saigon during Tet '68 and no one gave one fuck about it. Likely no one would have about this one either except for the fact at this one there was a cameraman present when the shooting happened. Out in the boonies though it was likely much more likely to happen, again depending on what they figured the results/consequences of doing it would be.
We, as Americans, can have a hard time reconciling something like that since to us it's usually a black and white kind of deal, but to the Vietnamese it wasn't. The thing is during the war some Americans actually figured that out too, and that lead to whole new rabbit holes like Phoenix, but that's an even bigger tangent so I'm not gonna go there now.
TL/DR Version: No it wasn't the official policy of the Republic of Vietnam but also wasn't a totally unprecedented thing either. Civil wars that are also insurgencies are complex things, add in that it's Vietnamese we're talking about with all the cultural and philosophical differences from how Westerners do/perceive things being in play and they become
really complex things.