Con Son Island

Côn Đảo Archipelago - Con Son Island is the largest

Con Son Island is a small (10 miles long) island off the coast of Vietnam. My Daily Kona got me started. I had never heard of the island and that's not surprising because it is tiny and way off the coast. Look at Google Maps at a scale large enough to see all of Vietnam and it disappears.

Vietnam to Con Son to Manila - 1,100 miles

Mr. Garibaldi's post talks about escorting the remnants of the South Vietnamese Navy from Con Son to the Philippines. The South Vietnamese Navy ships were carrying 20 to 30 thousand refugees.

Con Dao Prison

Con Dao Prison was built on Con Son Island in 1861 by the French colonists. It was used by whoever was in charge to house political prisoners until it was closed in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam war. This is the site of the infamous Tiger Cages.

Tiger Cages 7/70/20

Every once in a while, South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu flies down to Con Son Island with a plane load of friends to bask on sparkling, sandy beaches and swim in the South China Sea. And occasionally, special lights carry political prisoners and criminals to the national jail on the island. Despite its pleasant surroundings, the prison has for years had the fearsome reputation of being something of a South east Asian "Devil's Island." Last week, after two U.S. congressmen became the first Westerners to thoroughly inspect the prison since the French left Indochina, it was apparent that Con Son still lived up to its reputation-and that the visit would further strain U.S.-South Vietnamese relations.

It wasn't easy to search the aging penal colony. But the Democratic congressmen - Reps. Augustus F. Hawkins of California and William R. Anderson of Tennessee, both members of a House Select Committee on U.S. Involvement in Southeast Asia - had help from an expert. He was Don Luce, a 35-year-old researcher for the World Council of Churches and a longtime war critic. Armed with maps prepared by Luce and aided by Luce's fluent command of Vietnamese, the team proceeded through the prison. When they asked to see "Camp Four, the maximum security section, they were halted by the South Vietnamese warden and his American adviser. As they argued, an almost-concealed door swung open and the investigators slipped inside. There, they found some 60 "tiger cages"-tiny pits each housing four or five prisoners. "What I saw was the most shocking sight of my life," said Hawkins. "[The prisoners] were starved, often they were without water and forced to use their own urine. Boxes of lime were on top of the cages. It was scattered when-ever there was any protest."

Last week, however, the House team submitted its interim report, and the conditions at Con Son prison were mentioned only in a single paragraph. Angered by the document, staff member Thomas Harkin, who accompanied the prison investigators, quit his post in a huff, sold his color pictures of the tiger cages to Life magazine, and claimed the report was a "whitewash." Not surprisingly, that charge seemed excessive to committee chairman C.V. (Sonny) Montgomery of Mississippi, who had tried to confiscate Harkin's tiger-cage pictures before the group returned to the U.S. In Montgomery's view, his committee's mandate was to assess the entire U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and not the conditions in one South Vietnamese prison. Still, the flap produced results far beyond the normal impact of a fact-finding tour. For after initial denials, the Saigon government admitted that some 500 prisoners were in fact being held in tiger cages at Con Son and promptly dispatched a ten-man Interior Ministry team to investigate the matter.

Newsweek, July 20, 1970

I copied the above text from Texas Tech as it looked like something that might just disappear. I vaguely remember hearing about the kerfuffle back when it happened.

USS Kirk

The USS Kirk was commissioned in 1972. At some point she was transferred to the Taiwanese Navy where it is apparently still operating.