Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  Nyugen tried not to think about the victim, but it was difficult. As he lifted the arms of the man to carry him to the burial site, he noticed large gaping wounds on both sides of the man’s head. Because it was dark, he peered closer to get a better look and noticed the ears were missing.

  CHAPTER 10

  Green and Ybarra couldn’t sleep. It was like every other night: sweltering heat, with the air so heavy it was tough to breathe. The monsoon rains had just hours earlier soaked the valley floor. The friends were used to warm weather from growing up in Arizona, but nothing had prepared them for Vietnam’s humidity—a constant steam room with little breeze. The Tigers had set up camp hours earlier, hoping to sleep, but the mosquitoes and saturated air made it impossible.

  “I hate this place,” Ybarra blurted out to several soldiers gathered around the camp. So did Green. So did Trout. So did Ed Beck, now so covered with sores and cuts that he visibly limped and staggered on maneuvers. He was waiting until early morning, when he would sneak a quick dip into the cool waters of the Song Ve for some relief, even though the medics had warned him to stay away from the water. His open sores, oozing with pus and blood, would only attract leeches, and the Song Ve was full of them. But what else could he do? Beck had been hounding the medics for more antibacterial salve and tetracycline, yet it never seemed enough. The only way to numb the pain was by popping Darvon, a sedative and painkiller. It helped but left Beck woozy when he needed to be focused and clearheaded.

  Earlier in the day, air surveillance pilots had radioed battalion headquarters, saying they spotted a dozen enemy soldiers running down a foothill in the eastern end of the valley near a pagoda. Now, several hours later, the Tigers were camped just two hundred meters from that pagoda. Team leaders told the soldiers pulling security detail on the perimeter to be especially alert and quiet.

  Just after midnight, the Tigers were startled by an explosion. No one knew where it came from, but it was close enough that they could feel the earth vibrate. As some of the Tigers rolled over, M16s in hand, another explosion sounded just fifty meters away from the camp. Teeters heard cries of “Medic, medic,” then came another blast even closer, followed by a voice screaming in the darkness, “I’m hit!”

  Hawkins stood up and peered across the river. “Where the fuck are those coming from?” he asked aloud, but before anyone could answer, enemy soldiers began spraying the campsite with bullets from AK-47 assault rifles. The Tigers were trapped.

  To Wood, it was time to clear out. One medic, while bandaging the leg of a soldier, told Hawkins the small, sharp, slashlike wounds were from Chicom—Chinese Communist—grenades. It appeared the explosives were hand-tossed, indicating the enemy soldiers were close. The medics crawled to the four men struck by grenade fragments. The grenades seemed to be coming from a hill just beyond the pagoda, though no one knew for sure. Given that, Wood guessed the Tigers would have to move two kilometers west before it was safe to order an air strike.

  Clutching his M16, Wood yelled for the men to follow him as he bolted for brush just beyond the campsite. “The grenades were just coming out of nowhere,” recalled Bowman. Some of the soldiers ran to the medics to help them carry the wounded, and as the grenades exploded around the camp, the Tigers began moving westward.

  They didn’t feel safe until they could hear the grenades well behind them. When the platoon finally reached what remained of the Hanh Tin hamlet, Wood called battalion headquarters and requested an air strike, giving the coordinates of the areas north and south of the river from where he suspected the enemy launched the grenades. Within minutes, the gunships off the coast were firing 50mm shells.

  From across the valley, Company B soldiers were ordered to move to Hahn Tin hamlet to protect the Tigers. While the Tigers waited for the medevacs, they set up a security perimeter around the area. “It was a long, shitty night,” said Carpenter.

  Two medevacs arrived about the same time as the Company B soldiers. The Tigers quickly carried the wounded aboard. After the choppers departed, the platoon members and other battalion soldiers reinforced the perimeter and waited. For the rest of the night, no more shots were fired, but no one slept.

  Most of the Tigers expected to return to Carentan to rest, while larger and better-equipped line companies moved in. But by sunrise, the Tigers received their orders: stay on the valley floor. Their new mission was to patrol the trails along the river, round up any civilian stragglers, and send them by choppers to the relocation camp.

  No one liked the orders, not even Hawkins. By sheer geography, the Tigers were open targets from the high ground. “I began to question what the hell we were doing,” Bowman recalled. Commanders were making decisions from the safety of Carentan, not the valley. “We’re tired of being bait,” Trout complained.

  Soldiers are trained to go into battle, but there’s a fundamental component to combat: the infantryman wants to know his commander is supportive and understands the risks. The soldier wants to know the commander would do the same thing—and has been called to do the same in the past. It wasn’t lost on the Tigers that ultimately the orders—life-and-death decisions—were being made by officers in a base camp. The Tigers had been left to fend for themselves.

  Gathering their gear, they began breaking into teams, and then huddled for their assignments. One team would walk the wide, twisting trail running north of the river; another would cross to the south side and cover the main path there. Two other teams would inspect the areas once covered by the valley’s seven villages. Noticeably angry, Hawkins announced, “Anything in this valley is ours. There are no friendlies. Do you hear me? There are no friendlies. No one is supposed to be here.”

  Shouting, he gave the order “Shoot anything that moves!”

  The first team, after wading across the river to the south side, found a trail tucked deep in the brush. Much of the path was covered over by elephant grass, so the soldiers began cutting through the thick green stalks with their knives. Warned to be on the lookout for booby traps, they took their time slicing through the thick morass still soaked by the morning dew until they came upon a clearing.

  With the fog just lifting from the valley, the soldiers could spot three figures in the distance walking along a dike. The soldiers quickly jumped to the side of the trail and waited with rifles aimed. As the people came closer, the soldiers could see a young boy leading two men by the arms. The men, who appeared to be blind, were stumbling in the grass.

  As the villagers walked by, medic Forrest Miller and two other soldiers jumped out of the brush and grabbed the three Vietnamese. Miller quickly determined they were unarmed.

  “They’re just peasants,” he said.

  The soldiers surrounded the boy and men, and took them back to the clearing. As they waited for the first chopper of the day to arrive in the Song Ve, another team joined them a few minutes later. With Miller standing by, the soldiers argued over what to do with the detainees.

  Sergeant Ernest Moreland recalled that some of the Tigers firmly believed the three were “trail watchers” alerting the Vietcong to the Americans. Some suggested the peasants had something to do with the attack on the Tigers’ camp. Miller wasn’t so sure. Two of the soldiers had already separated the two blind men from the boy and began pushing the men into a nearby rice paddy. They raised their rifles and fired. Both men fell to the ground. It happened so fast Miller didn’t have time to react. He knew the two men shouldn’t have been in the valley but asked why they were executed.

  “They’re VC, man,” one of the soldiers said as he walked away.

  Miller glanced at the boy, who was trembling. As the soldiers began arguing over what to do with the youth, who looked no older than twelve, they suddenly picked up the sound of a chopper in the distance. Another minute and things might have been different, but now they couldn’t kill the boy—there might be witnesses from the Huey hovering overhead. Moments later, the chopper landed near the two bodies, and the boy was led to the open door and placed abo
ard for transport to Nghia Hanh.

  Stepping back from the madness, Tiger Force was at a crucial juncture. If there was a moment when this unit needed to be reined in, it was now. Once commanders look the other way, the soldiers begin to take liberties. As combat intensifies, so does the frequency of attacks. Soldiers are capable of spinning into a frenzy—feeding on one another’s anger and emotion. Without a strong leader to keep them in line, the attacks continue. Without a strong leader to impose consequences, nothing changes. That’s what was starting to happen in Tiger Force. Hawkins was supposed to be the governor on the engine, ensuring the motor didn’t rev too high. Instead, he was stepping on the gas.

  While the chopper was leaving the valley, another team was entering a hamlet a half mile away where new huts had been erected in the shadow of a tree line. As the soldiers began checking the hooches, an elderly man wearing a gray robe and tassels emerged and began shouting in Vietnamese. Without a translator on the team, no one could understand him, but the man was clearly upset. Dressed in the robes of a Buddhist worshipper, he appeared to be a village elder. Carpenter guessed the man was riled about the destruction of his village. The soldiers just brushed by the old man. They needed to search the huts for people, rice, and weapons and then clear out, not listen to his gibberish. But the man was undeterred. He followed the soldiers and continued ranting as they went from hut to hut, until one of the Tigers wheeled around and, without warning, fired several rounds into the man’s head and chest. As he fell to the ground, the Tigers rushed to the body and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching. They immediately began arguing among themselves: if the South Vietnamese translators or others saw that a holy man was shot, the Tigers could be in trouble. Someone might tell Colonel Austin or, worse, report the shooting to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in Saigon.

  Two of the soldiers came up with a solution: plant a grenade on the man to make him look like the enemy.

  As much as any Tiger, Manuel Sanchez despised the Song Ve but was determined to keep his men in control. If he could just hang on for another two months, he could be rotated back to the States. Just try to get through each day—each hour. Just think about Mary, how much you love her and want to be with her. How much you want to sit on her front porch, the sun setting, and sing to her. The night before he joined the Army, he had reclined on her porch swing with his guitar and had sung “Sixteen Candles,” watching her giggle. It was her birthday, and he had given her a sterling silver heart with a tiny diamond in the center so she would remember that his heart was with her while he was gone. Before leaving, she had pressed a crucifix into the palm of his hand. For much of his tour, he had kept the cross in his rucksack, but now, he found himself clenching it in his hand, leaving marks on his palm.

  Say the Our Father, he would remind himself. It will keep you safe. But whatever you do, don’t pop those pills. They’ll mess you up.

  He didn’t like the way some soldiers treated the villagers. He was Mexican-American, and he was conscious of the way his own people were treated back in southern New Mexico. Growing up, he was called a wetback more times than he cared to remember. And this in a state where the whites who taunted him came from families who hadn’t even heard of New Mexico when Spanish speakers had already settled the place.

  After these two weeks, Sanchez considered Hawkins a redneck who mistreated the Vietnamese. He was particularly upset over the execution of Dao Hue. “It was cold-blooded,” Sanchez told his team. “The man had no weapons and he offered no resistance.” He also believed that when soldiers cross the line in the field, “bad things happen,” he said. And bad things were already starting to happen, like the grenade attack the night before. When you stretched the definition of what was right too far, the band had a way of snapping back and slapping you in the face hard.

  As his team was walking down a hill and into a rice paddy, Sanchez spotted two peasants running across the field. He ordered them in Vietnamese to halt, but they ignored him.

  His soldiers raised their rifles, but Sanchez told them not to fire. “They’re not armed,” he said of the peasants. Instead, he bolted across the paddy, followed by his men, and after a short chase, they tackled the two Vietnamese. After searching the two for weapons, the soldiers led the detainees to a knoll just beyond the paddy.

  Sanchez suspected the older man was probably Vietcong, and with the assistance of a translator, he began questioning him. After several minutes, the man—hobbling from an earlier shrapnel wound to his lower left leg—confessed to being VC and said the younger detainee was his thirteen-year-old brother. On Sanchez’s order, a team member called battalion headquarters to report the capture of the prisoners and to ask what should be done with the injured detainee.

  Over the radio, a voice responded, “What do you do with a horse with a broken leg?”

  Sanchez shook his head. “I’m not going to kill him,” he said. He was going to hold the line. He was intent on bringing the brothers back to camp as his prisoners, and that’s what he was going to do—regardless of what headquarters suggested.

  All the Tiger Force teams were directed back to a clearing near the Hanh Tin hamlet, where they would camp.

  As darkness set over the valley, two of the teams reached the clearing, and the soldiers began unpacking. Wood agreed that he and five other soldiers would set up a security perimeter until midnight, and then another team would take over.

  Sanchez and his team dragged themselves into the clearing, exhausted, with the prisoners in tow. He was going to personally guard them until a chopper could come in the next morning.

  Ybarra wasn’t happy about the Vietnamese brothers being brought into camp. To punctuate his discontent, he began bragging about capturing a prisoner earlier in the day. Several of his team members cringed when he started to recount the story. It was an unwritten rule to keep quiet about patrol activities, even with other teams. But Ybarra was intent on telling the story.

  Green shifted uneasily but didn’t say anything as Ybarra began describing how he jabbed a knife into the throat of the detainee, just wanting to break the skin to torture him. But, he said, after several minutes of Sam coaxing his Arizona buddy into finishing the job, Green plunged the knife into the man’s neck.

  Instead of silencing a horrified group, Ybarra’s story simply encouraged others to unload. Two members from another team began by teasing Sergeant Robin Varney. “We call him ‘One Punch,’” one soldier said.

  Earlier in the day, the lone team with a translator had stopped a detainee. With the help of the interpreter, the soldiers began asking the man questions. Frustrated at the lack of response, the translator began cursing. Suddenly, Varney walked over and bet the soldiers he could knock the man out with one blow. Varney punched the man in the face, knocking him to the ground, but the prisoner was still conscious. The soldiers laughed, saying he lost his bet. The prisoner was forced back to his feet and then Ernest Moreland sneaked up behind the man, holding a bayonet in back of the prisoner’s neck. Varney then pushed the prisoner’s head into the blade, impaling him.

  By talking about what happened that day, the Tigers were unconsciously taking part in a ritual that had been around since the beginning of warfare. In World War I, they called it a hot wash. In World War II, it was a debriefing. By talking about the day’s events—usually combat—the soldiers are able to work their way through the memory and, in the process, minimize the emotions associated with the events. They were taking an important step toward justifying their actions in the field.

  But the Tigers were taking it one step further. They were desensitizing themselves to the torture and execution of prisoners—not enemy combatants.

  As Sanchez sat near his prisoners, two soldiers approached him and said they were ordered by Hawkins to take his prisoners down the hill just outside the camp. Sanchez decided he was going to accompany them.

  Sanchez followed the soldiers as they led the brothers down the slope. When they reached the bot
tom, the two Tigers ordered the brothers to stand next to each other, and before Sanchez could act, the soldiers raised their M16s and shot the prisoners from five feet away. Sanchez was stunned. He had vowed to keep them alive until a chopper arrived, and now he felt betrayed.

  He couldn’t look at their bodies. He turned around and stormed back up the hill, cursing. When he reached the top, he stomped to the far end of the camp to be alone, turning his back to the soldiers.

  One of the Tigers who led the prisoners away approached him, saying he was sorry. “I was just following orders,” he said.

  “Get away from me,” Sanchez snapped.

  In the darkness, Nyugen Dam crawled into the rice paddy, running his hands through the muck in search of the bodies. He needed to move quickly. The NVA and American soldiers were encamped, and he had just a few hours before dawn to find the dead.

  He barely knew the two blind men who were shot earlier in the day, but he knew the boy, Vo Cahn, and his parents. From a mountain perch a quarter mile away, he had watched as the soldiers led the two men into the field, certain they would be killed. He had hoped they would spare young Vo. In his mind, Nyugen could visualize the boy with the wide grin who often played along the dirt roads of the Van Xuan village. Nyugen had been happy to see the chopper swoop down and carry Vo away. At least he had a chance to survive at Nghia Hanh and maybe be reunited with his parents. This valley had turned into an abattoir.

  The blind men were not from the Song Ve but had ended up there after their village was bombed outside Duc Pho. They were led to the valley by a relative who was later captured by battalion soldiers during the evacuation. For the last two weeks, the two blind men had been going from hamlet to hamlet, just trying to stay away from the soldiers. Nyugen knew Vo was attempting to help the men hide.

  On his hands and knees, Nyugen brushed aside the rice plants as he moved along the paddy, looking for remains. Just before he reached a dike, he touched one of the bodies.