Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  It was the same feeling the surfer had before sunrise on those glorious mornings in Southern California when the twelve-foot waves were breaking. You couldn’t quite explain it. It was a feeling of exhilaration and fear—riding a wave but knowing you could wipe out at any moment and get sucked into the powerful vortex. You might pop back up or you might never come out from under.

  Ever since arriving at Carentan a week earlier, the lanky six-footer with short brown hair and green eyes had been pacing, waiting. Sometimes he would trek to the closest foothills and stare in the distance, knowing the enemy, too, was waiting.

  When he enlisted in 1966, Kerrigan had known this moment might come. He just didn’t know he would be so scared. The recruiters hadn’t told him about going to South Vietnam when he joined. Instead, they said he could end up in West Germany and, by serving for a few years, could go to college on the GI Bill. His mother, Joan, a single mom raising Kerrigan and his brother, Keith, on a bookkeeper’s salary, told him he was giving up his freedom. He was only nineteen—a year out of San Gabriel High School.

  “You’re not going to be going to the beach on weekends,” she pleaded with him. “I don’t want you to go.” But while Kerrigan relished his weekends on Redondo Beach, he knew his mother struggled to support her two boys. On the beach, everyone was equal. They shared their surfboards, towels, and sometimes their girlfriends. But away from the surf, there were two worlds in his hometown of San Gabriel and everyone knew it: the rich kids and the ones who mightily struggled to keep afloat. There were those who tooled around in shiny Alfa Romeos and those who drove beat-up Impalas. Kerrigan was in the latter group, and very conscious of it. He never shared his secret, but he loathed being on the outside and hated that his mother had to work so hard. He told his friends the only way he was ever going to get into one of those Mediterranean-revival homes that sat behind wrought-iron gates was to go to law school, and the only way to pay for it was to join the Army.

  Several friends begged him to reconsider. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a beach kid whose favorite song was “I Get Around” and who never talked about fighting. You ride the wave given you and you paddle in.

  Once he learned he was being sent to South Vietnam, he made up his mind he was going to serve his tour, come back home, go to college—UCLA—and then attend law school. Now, sitting in his tent, he wondered whether he made the right decision. Once in country, Terrence had tried to tell himself that South Vietnam wasn’t such a bad place. It reminded him a little of San Gabriel: the palm trees, the ocean just miles away—and the sun, the endless, glaring sun. He even nervously joked with another soldier about surfing the South China Sea. He tried to convince himself the villagers near the base seemed harmless, and he would walk to the edge of the base to toss tubes of Life Savers to the kids. He didn’t think about dying.

  Kerrigan wasn’t the only restless soldier. A light was still on in Sergeant Manuel Sanchez Jr.’s tent. The twenty-one-year-old had spent the last hour packing his gear: three canteens of water, a bag of rice, eight cans of C rations, two rolls of toilet paper, a tube of insect repellent, malaria tablets, a poncho, a toothbrush, and several rounds of ammo for his M16.

  While growing up on a farm in Roswell, New Mexico, “Junior,” as he was called, learned to be prepared. He never knew when his father was going to roust him from sleep to go into the fields. If he didn’t bring enough water and clothes, he was stuck—once in the fields, you didn’t go home until the work was done.

  Raised with seven siblings, Junior and everyone else in the Sanchez home pitched in. But he was the oldest male in a traditional Mexican-American family, so the burden seemed to fall on him. His father would look sternly into his son’s deep brown eyes and tell him, “Look out for your younger brothers and sisters. You’re the oldest.” And the old man meant it. If the younger kids couldn’t get out in the fields to work, Junior had to carry their load.

  During the week, the children went to school and worked the farm, but on weekends, the family hosted barbecues with cousins, aunts, and uncles at nearby Lake Van. There, Junior and his father would break out their guitars and serenade the entire countryside with Tejano music.

  Sanchez was now sitting up, writing another letter to his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. He hated being away from Mary Delfina, but he knew this wasn’t going to last forever. The Army would win the war. It was just a matter of time.

  He was now, he wrote Delfina, in a new province and didn’t know what to expect or when the operations would end. He asked her to be patient, promising that someday they would be married. Sanchez told Mary he might not be able to write anytime soon, since it was difficult to send letters from the field. Then he ended the letter like the others: “I love you.”

  Two tents away, Bill Carpenter had turned off his light. In five months, he had learned not to think about the next day, only the moment. That was the way to survive.

  It took him a while to stop dwelling on his roots in the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio, with its steel mills belching smoke into the pale winter sky. That was in the past, and he knew it didn’t do any good to get homesick. To a gangly country boy who had rarely ventured far from home, South Vietnam was an exotic world he had glimpsed only in movies and magazines. The unrelenting heat and rain and palm trees and wild monkeys and strange-looking people burning incense by the roadside—it was a long, long way from the Buckeye State.

  A bit of a braggart, Carpenter would never admit he was awestruck by his new surroundings. He had joined the Tigers by convincing the screening officers he could be a real killer, but the reality was that he was frightened by this new place. And no matter how long he stayed in South Vietnam, he would never quite understand the people and culture. Carpenter’s home was a microcosm of small-town Ohio, where life centered around football, Grandma’s farm, and openings at the steel mills. Hunting was a way of life and everyone dreamed of bagging a five-point deer with antlers the size of chandeliers. There were no Buddhists or Vietnamese in Jefferson County.

  Bill had played football on his high school team, boasting he was good enough to play for Woody Hayes. But the six-foot, one-inch 165-pounder was never offered a scholarship to play for Ohio State, so after graduating from high school in 1965, he joined his father in the railroad yards. Carpenter soon grew bored. Despite his own provincialism, he knew there was another world beyond southern Ohio. His big brother, Tom, had enlisted a year earlier in the Army and was now in South Vietnam, and Bill wanted to join him in this new adventure. “I’m going to Vietnam,” he would boast to his friends. And so he did.

  He found out after he arrived in December 1966 that he couldn’t hook up with his brother’s unit because of a rule banning siblings from serving together. But Bill found something better: the Tigers. He heard stories about the reconnaissance unit. “They had the reputation for being elite,” he recalled. If you wanted to rule the jungle, Tiger Force was your crew.

  In another tent, most of the medics were sleeping, but Douglas Teeters stared into the darkness. Just hours earlier, he had passed around a joint with others while listening to the album The Doors on a battery-powered turntable one of the medics had brought back from Hong Kong. The haunting strains of “Light My Fire” kept playing in his mind as he tossed and turned, unable to forget that he would soon be jumping onto a chopper.

  To pass the time, he got up and packed and repacked his medical kit. He had more than enough bandages, syringes, scissors, and antidiarrheals. There was something else, too. Teeters had been in combat—two months with Company B, treating soldiers with their limbs blown off and, in some cases, watching them die. It was so hard for him to forget the faces of men begging him to make the pain go away. The only thing he could do was shoot them up with morphine. Restocking his kit, he made certain there was sufficient liquid morphine; he had a dreadful feeling about Quang Ngai that perhaps no amount of pain killer would be enough. Returning to his sleeping bag, Teeters tried once again to sleep.

  CHAPTER 3<
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  A red sun rose over the South China Sea as helicopters departed the base camp carrying the newest “class” of Tiger Force. Three Hueys, each carrying men, circled Carentan and veered west, soaring over endless foothills that seemed to rise higher as the aircraft flew farther away from the coast. From the air, everything seemed blanketed by trees, a great green expanse that faded gradually only where it scaled the slopes of the oncoming mountains. After they passed over the first row of peaks, the land suddenly opened—and in the distance was a wide valley with lush green rice paddies cut by waterways glistening in the sun.

  From his seat near the open doorway, Donald Wood scanned the scene below: farmers toiling in a field, their conical hats protecting them from the rays. Water buffalo herded along a dike leading to the riverbank, where children splashed in the water.

  Wood knew all about the Song Ve Valley. As a forward artillery observer who had just joined the Tigers, he had been studying maps of the four-mile-wide-by-six-mile-long river basin for days. His job was to become familiar with every crevice of the valley so he could confidently call in air strikes when the platoon located Vietcong positions. If he made one mistake—one miscalculation—fellow soldiers could be hit by friendly fire.

  A remote, timeless basin some ten kilometers from the coast, the Song Ve had always been low on the Army’s priority list of trouble spots, but intelligence reports were starting to show that the Vietcong were extorting rice from Song Ve farmers. As his chopper began to descend, Wood could see that the wide stretch of rice paddies and hamlets was unscathed by the war. It was late June, and most of the rice was ready to be harvested. One of the goals of Task Force Oregon was to cut off the enemy’s food supply, and if that meant destroying the rice paddies, so be it. “This is as important as anything else we can do,” Westmoreland had said several months earlier during a planning session at the MACV.

  That point had been driven home during yesterday’s briefing. Even before the choppers departed the base camp that morning, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Austin had stressed to his men the goal of the Song Ve campaign. “The farming needs to stop. The VC are moving the rice on sampans along the river to enemy camps,” he said. But the Tigers had no clue just how much farming they needed to stop until they saw the expanse of green rice paddies on the valley floor. It was like trying to count the stars in the night sky.

  Thus, in order to curtail the harvest, they would have to take drastic measures. That meant clearing the entire valley and moving everyone out—all seven thousand inhabitants in seven known villages. In South Vietnam, there were several definitions for populated areas. But in general, a village was larger than a hamlet and, in many cases, plotted on government maps. Scattered throughout the Song Ve were hamlets, some with just four or five huts.

  Colonel Austin declared that the battalion’s three line companies, known as A, B, and C, would move the people and their livestock to the Nghia Hanh relocation center just west of the valley, while the Tigers would break into small teams and look for Vietcong and rice caches.

  As Wood’s chopper landed in a rice paddy, he watched as several farmers leaned over their plows in a nearby field, barely looking up. This had been their land for generations, and Wood wasn’t expecting an easy campaign, no matter how many pep talks the men got. The twenty-two-year-old officer was one of the few Tigers who had studied the Vietnamese culture—both in Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and later on his own. During his first two weeks at the base camp, he had talked to South Vietnamese translators about the people of the Song Ve. Most of the inhabitants were Buddhist farmers whose families had grown rice in the valley for hundreds of years. Wood and other battalion officers had been told in briefings that the province had always been difficult to control for the South Vietnamese government, partly because the people were fiercely independent. Some of the village elders were active in what was known as the Struggle Movement—an active campaign to bring peace to North and South Vietnam. Wood was told the people of the valley were pacifists and had tried to remain independent in the war, but it was getting more difficult. The VC had been trying to recruit, touting a fairer distribution of land ownership, while the government of South Vietnam had done very little to win any sort of support. That lack of effort was all the more telling since the people of the Song Ve had a grim recent history with the South Vietnamese. During a program launched by the government in 1958 to move rural people into “strategic hamlets,” the occupants of the Song Ve refused to move, and eventually the program was scuttled, though not before the South Vietnamese government killed some of the villagers.

  When the United States began sending fighting units to South Vietnam in 1965, parts of the strategic hamlet program were resurrected. Under the new plan, the peasants would no longer have a choice: To keep them from joining the Vietcong, they would be forced to live in relocation camps. Instead of growing their own rice, the government would feed them. In order to notify the people about the new program, the U.S. military came up with a system of dropping leaflets from aircraft, ordering locals to leave and promising food and shelter at the camps. This was very similar to a leaflet program, known as “Chieu Hoi,” that was offered to enemy combatants, but this one specifically targeted civilians, with millions dropped in various provinces.

  As his team of four soldiers gathered around Wood in the paddy, they looked up and watched as a chopper broke through the morning fog, the first wave of leaflets fluttering downward. Other choppers began circling the valley, releasing trails of paper. Over the next few minutes, the leaflets began covering the hamlets like freshly fallen snow.

  Wood’s team headed for the south side of the valley to set up a command post, while three other teams began moving in different directions for their first patrol.

  As Wood’s men reached a row of huts, shots were fired in their direction. The soldiers quickly scrambled for cover, but no one knew where the snipers were hiding. Wood radioed the platoon commander, Lieutenant Stephen Naughton, to let him know his position. The firing ceased, but it was clear the Vietcong had been watching the Tigers since they arrived in the valley. For more than a dozen rookie Tigers, it was the first time they had ever been shot at.

  Suddenly Ybarra began talking about opening fire if they found any civilians in the huts. Wood jumped in. “No one is going to fire on anybody who’s not armed,” he said. Wood knew what it was like to go into combat, the sickening feeling in the stomach and the inability to stop shaking even when your hands were wrapped around an M16. But he had also learned from his Special Forces training that you had to stay in control. You had to know when to fire and when to hold back. It could make the difference between killing an enemy soldier or an unarmed villager.

  When Wood had arrived in Vietnam, he had spent several months in the 1st Battalion/320th Field Artillery learning that firefights almost always begin without warning and that many times, there’s no time to call in the supportive air strikes. “You got to keep moving” were the words he remembered most from Special Forces. That is, don’t panic, don’t be stupid, and finish the job on your own. Air strikes were icing.

  For newcomers such as Barry Bowman, just talking about killing unarmed villagers made him nervous. Like most of the soldiers who served in Vietnam, he had received less than two hours of instruction on the Army’s rules of engagement and the 1949 Geneva conventions, which prohibited the inhumane treatment of civilians and prisoners—a crash course on the rules of war. The Tigers were handed cards when they arrived in Vietnam defining eighteen war crimes, but no one ever talked about them and it wasn’t clear if the cards had ever been read.

  Bowman knew that if you saw a war crime, you were supposed to immediately report it to commanders. “I just hoped I wouldn’t have to,” he recalled. But if you weren’t sure what constituted a war crime, how would you know what to report?

  To stay safe, the team took cover and waited to ensure the snipers left. As they hid in the brush, Wood and others watched as several Vi
etnamese villagers, mostly old men and women, emerged from their huts. One by one, the people reached down and began examining the papers on the ground. More generic leaflets had been dropped all over the province for weeks, but the instructions on these papers were specific. By June 21, the people would have to evacuate the valley for a relocation camp. That meant they had to leave in two days. The leaflets’ message was clear: “At Nghia Hanh you will be safe. There will be shelter for you and your family. Those of you who choose to remain in the area will be considered hostile and in danger.”

  Satisfied that the Vietcong snipers had given up, the men prepared to move on. Terrence Kerrigan looked toward the village but wasn’t really paying attention. His hands were still shaking, and he was barely able to hold his rifle. In the first two weeks of June, the Tigers had spent most of their time guarding combat engineers repairing sections of Highway One, the national roadway that ran along the coast of South Vietnam. Occasionally they would hear a few stray shots but saw no major combat. The whole thing felt a bit like a game. The free-spirited Californian tried to calm himself, but he was overcome with a sense of foreboding. He looked around to see if anyone was looking at him, but they were walking toward the village. They were going in, and Kerrigan had no choice but to follow.

  By late afternoon, more Hueys began arriving and dropping soldiers from the battalion line companies on opposite sides of the Song Ve River, the main waterway that cuts through the heart of the valley. Their job was to fan out across the basin and visit the seven villages in the company of translators who were to tell the locals they had to leave.

  When some of the soldiers from C Company entered the Hanh Tin hamlet, they met two elders who immediately told them the people didn’t want to move to a relocation camp. “This is our land,” said one of the villagers. A translator with the soldiers angrily told the elders they didn’t have a choice: They had to evacuate or they would be considered the enemy. They would be safe if they went to the camp. Their wives and children would be cared for. If the men were of military age, sixteen through fifty-five, they would probably be drafted into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to fight the Vietcong.