Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  CHAPTER 16

  If not for the river, the Tigers would have been lost. In the darkness, everything looked the same, but the sounds of the current kept the soldiers on track, and since their trail followed the waterway, the Tigers knew they were walking in the right direction. For now, all they could do was keep moving and hope the enemy was somewhere else.

  As the platoon rounded a bend of the river, Ybarra spotted some sort of illumination through the brush. He turned and relayed a message to Green for the line to stop. It looked like the light was coming from campfires burning in what was an enemy encampment or another village. Ybarra relayed another message to Green: he was going to crawl through the brush to get a closer look.

  After moving about twenty meters into the trees, he could see six grass-and-wood huts, with fires burning at the entrances. The people appeared to be peasants, but he wasn’t sure.

  After Ybarra returned, the Tiger team leaders agreed to wait until dawn before going into the hamlet. This time Hawkins concurred and the Tigers backtracked about twenty-five meters before coming to a halt and resting on the trail. They would pause until sunrise.

  The hours dragged on as the Tigers waited. They were tired, but no one wanted to sleep. Some were nervous and others were wired from popping Black Beauties. A few sat in the darkness, full of dread, among them Ken Kerney. He was worried about how the Tigers were changing, especially the ones who joined in June. Bowman was growing more sullen and angry. Kerrigan was so jacked up he was now constantly rocking back and forth, clenching his teeth, and cradling his rifle. Trout was turning into a mean, surly team leader who would berate soldiers for showing any hint of weakness or humanity. The other veteran Tigers, such as Ervin Lee, had seemed to give up, surrendering to the whirlpool. When Cogan had looked to them for help, they ignored him. The Tigers were becoming as dark and foreboding as the jungle around them.

  Kerney was fighting the forces himself. There were times he was tempted to shoot anything that walked. He was trapped in a Tiger Force in which there was no way out. The Tigers used to be a volunteer unit in which the soldiers could move in and out. But those days were over.

  The commanders had told those soldiers joining the platoon at Chu Lai not to expect to rotate out anytime soon. The top brass intended for the Tigers to be in the field for as long as it took to win the province. But it was increasingly clear that the province would never be won.

  In the darkness, the Tigers could hear low, hushed sounds coming from the front of the line. At first, no one knew what it was. But slowly, they could hear Ybarra. He was chanting in his native tongue. Green had heard the chants before, when they used to hunt for game.

  Before sunrise, Ybarra crawled to the area where the fires had been burning the previous night. An hour later, he returned to the Tigers and passed the message down the line: it was definitely a village. He didn’t know the number of people there, but they were up and out of their huts. The Tigers moved down the trail until they found the opening to the hamlet. As Ybarra and Green entered the clearing, the people began to run. Ybarra and Green opened fire, and soon Kerrigan and others joined the attack.

  Villagers started dropping to the ground as they were hit, but the Tigers didn’t let up. They continued firing in a frenzy that seemed to go on for several minutes—Doyle, Barnett, and Hawkins—firing into the huts until the soldiers yelled to one another to stop. Team leaders ordered the Tigers to check the huts. One by one, the soldiers looked through the round, thatch-covered entranceways. Some of the villagers were bloodied and crawling. Others were sprawled motionless on the ground. Team leaders agreed that they would leave the hamlet without calling for a medevac. They didn’t want to give their position away, and most of the villagers looked as if they would die anyway.

  As the soldiers began walking away from the village, Hawkins received a call on the radio from battalion headquarters: the 2nd NVA Division was inching closer to the city of Tam Ky, and the Tigers—just twenty-five kilometers away—were to find the base and call in air strikes, no excuses. The officer on the other end of the radio reminded the Tigers that two weeks had passed, and they still had not found the specific enemy encampment they were sent to find.

  Hawkins called for team leaders to gather around him and began ranting about the officers at Chu Lai. “They’re not out here in the damn field,” he said. He told team leaders a chopper would be landing momentarily with reinforcements, including a combat veteran sergeant, and then the platoon would leave the village.

  As the rest of the platoon gathered around the commander, the helicopter arrived and set down in the clearing. Three soldiers—all replacements—and a South Vietnamese interpreter jumped out and ran to where the platoon was waiting. One of the newcomers passed the message that Green and Ybarra were to board the chopper for the ride back to Chu Lai. They looked at each other with surprise. They had no idea their month leave was starting.

  Green couldn’t hide his excitement. He pulled Ybarra to the side, their words drowned out by the noise of the chopper. After a moment, the pilot signaled for the two to hop aboard. They were going home to family members who would barely recognize them.

  Once the Tigers were positioned around the village, Hawkins allowed the platoon to rest. It was barely noon, and several Tigers were cramping up with diarrhea. The jungle covered the sun’s rays, but it didn’t protect men from the steamy 100-degree temperatures and heat exhaustion.

  After gathering in a circle, some began to doze off when suddenly they were startled awake by loud voices. A couple of Tigers on the perimeter had captured two unarmed men and were dragging them into camp.

  The men, who appeared to be middle-aged and malnourished, were led to a clearing. Hawkins walked over and stared at the men and then motioned for his demolitions specialist, Private Floyd Sawyer, to “take care of them.”

  Sawyer, who was personally recruited by Hawkins three weeks earlier, decided to scare the two Vietnamese. Reaching into an ammunition bag, he pulled out a roll of detonating cord and began tying them up. He pulled out another cord and connected it to a claymore mine that he wrapped around a small tree. As the Tigers watched from a distance, Sawyer exploded the mine, blowing up the tree. The men began whimpering, their hands trembling. Bowman turned his head and couldn’t watch. “I hated what I was seeing,” he recalled. “It was just going too far.”

  Two Tigers walked over to the detainees and, one by one, began punching and kicking them, while another Tiger beat them over the tops of their heads with a shovel.

  The interpreter was brought over to the men, and he asked the prisoners the whereabouts of the NVA camp. The men shook their heads and insisted they didn’t know. Again, two Tigers took turns kicking and punching the men in the face until one fell unconscious in the dirt, dying. The other, covered in blood, was untied and told he could run away. The man tried to flee but stumbled to the ground. He rose again and began to run. From a distance, Sawyer, unaware the man had been ordered to run, looked up and noticed the prisoner was staggering away. “Dung Lai!” Sawyer yelled, meaning “halt.” When the man didn’t stop, Sawyer pointed his M16 and fired a shot, the bullet piercing the man’s neck. Now both were dead.

  Bowman, who turned around long enough to watch the shooting, covered his face. He had seen too much. To him, it was murder. “I couldn’t take it,” he recalled. He had enough. He had made up his mind to tell someone about what was happening to the Tigers.

  After sunrise, Hawkins was called to the radio to talk to Captain Carl James, liaison between the battalion and the Tigers. Battalion officers were anxious to know if the Tigers found the NVA base camp. Hawkins was at a loss for words. Daily, he had been getting the same call and the same question. And each time, Hawkins had been unable to provide the desired answer. All the killing and all the destruction his men had accomplished was, in so many ways, extracurricular. The base had been the target, and it had been elusive.

  “Where is the base camp, Lieutenant?” asked the voice on
the other end.

  There was no response.

  Then the officer asked about the Tigers’ body count—the number of enemy soldiers killed in the past day. Hawkins responded they had just killed a prisoner who tried to escape, but never mentioned the other murder. He gave no other details and snapped the discussion to a close. “We’re still looking for Charlie,” he said before tossing down the handset. He wanted a promotion, but fuck ’em. He didn’t need this kind of treatment. If the commanders were trying to force him out, he wasn’t going without a fight. What was war? War was killing the enemy, anywhere and everywhere. And that’s exactly what he was doing and was going to keep doing.

  After pacing around the campsite, Hawkins ordered team leaders to gather around him. He wanted them to break into small units. Using an antiquated map, he jabbed a finger at the paper, showing how he wanted each team to move in a different direction. Look for every possible tunnel and search every hut, he instructed. Every villager was the enemy. “This is a free-fire zone,” he reminded his men. “Anyone out there is fair game.” The enemy base camp was, Hawkins declared, near. “I can smell them,” he said. “They’re so close I can smell them.”

  Doyle’s team was the first to move out. He was one of the few Tigers who genuinely liked the platoon commander. When other soldiers criticized Hawkins, Doyle never joined in. After all, it was Hawkins who had encouraged Doyle to join the platoon when they were both recovering from injuries in a hospital in June. And it was Hawkins who had liberated Doyle to do what was needed. “He lets me fight the war the way I want to fight it,” he told other Tigers.

  Doyle wasn’t going to disappoint his commander. If the enemy was in the area, Doyle was going to find him. And then he was going to destroy. “We’ll get the bastards,” he said. And then he set out.

  The village was near the top of a hill, and below were terraced rice paddies, each one cascading into the next in what looked like a giant green waterfall. The soldiers could tell that at one time, this was a thriving community. There were the remains of a pagoda, a school, a barbershop, and even small wooden storefronts. The team was relieved to just get out of the jungle and see open space. No one was working in the rice fields that morning, but the stalks were healthy and close to being cut.

  Doyle told his men to get ready. Judging from the rice in the fields, the village was probably not abandoned. “You got gooks here,” he growled as he approached the huts.

  The South Vietnamese interpreter, known as Hanh, said he knew the area, and to the best of his knowledge, the people were not VC sympathizers. In fact, the VC had been extorting rice from the peasants for years.

  As they approached the first hut, a man emerged from the entranceway, smiling and waving papers. “Chieu Hoi,” referring to the leaflets dropped by the Americans. “Chieu Hoi.” Standing behind him was a pregnant woman and two small children. The interpreter quickly walked over to the man.

  After a brief conversation, Hanh turned to Doyle. “This man is here with his wife and children. They want to go to a relocation camp. He says the VC are all around, stealing his rice. But he’s afraid of them. He says his younger brother is hiding in the bunker near the hut.” Gerald Bruner, one of the replacements who just joined the Tigers, volunteered with two other Tigers to get the brother in the bunker just twenty-five meters away.

  Bruner, a talkative sergeant with broad shoulders, muscular biceps, and a bushy mustache, wasn’t sure about the Tigers. He had witnessed the beatings of the prisoner the day before and didn’t like it. His compassion for the people was rooted in his own background. When he was three, his father had abandoned their home outside Evansville, Indiana. His mother had loaded her three children in a car and headed to Los Angeles. At times, they lived in roach-infested apartments. From kindergarten through twelfth grade, Bruner and his brothers bounced around to seventeen different public schools. But his mother, Dorothy, who “was strong-willed and religious,” he recalled, was determined to improve their lives. At times, she worked three jobs, all the while encouraging them to stay in school. The brothers would often go to the truck-stop diner where she worked as a waitress, waiting to walk her home after her second shift ended. They once arrived home to find her being beaten by a drunken boyfriend and chased him out of the apartment before cornering him in an empty lot. Bruner smashed the end of an empty bottle and held the jagged piece to the man’s throat, warning him to stay away from his mother.

  For Bruner, life on the streets was unavoidable, but he developed a reputation for protecting younger kids in the neighborhood, one brother recalled. He was fast with his fists and agile, said Jack Bruner, now a plastic surgeon. “He wasn’t one to mess with.”

  Gerald joined the Army in the late 1950s and arrived in South Vietnam in 1965. While training, he lived with a Vietnamese family—an experience that opened his eyes to the Vietnamese people and a culture far removed from the mean streets of south-central Los Angeles. “I had found a sense of peace that eluded me in my childhood,” he later told his family. “These were strangers, and yet, they made me feel like family.”

  As Bruner walked toward the bunker, Doyle told Hanh to find out if the man knew the whereabouts of the enemy camp. Hanh turned to the man and asked. “He knows,” Hanh told Doyle. “But he’s afraid. He wants his family to be taken to the relocation camp first. He knows the VC will hurt him for telling.”

  But Doyle wasn’t about to budge; he wanted the information now. “You tell him that I’m not making any deals,” he said, his face turning red. Hanh talked to the man, trying to explain the team leader’s position, but the peasant shook his head. He did not want any harm to come to his family.

  Without waiting, Doyle swung his rifle around and struck the man in the head. The man fell to his knees, blood running down his forehead.

  The man’s wife and children ran to him but were held back by the soldiers. The wife looked at Doyle and began begging him to leave her husband alone. Doyle ignored her. He wheeled around, raised his rifle, and fired a round, the bullet striking the man’s forearm. Doyle tried to fire again but his gun jammed.

  The man, holding his arm, began crying and pleading tearfully for the soldiers to leave him and his family alone. But Doyle was undeterred. He turned to his men and said, “Shoot him.” Three Tigers raised their rifles and fired numerous rounds into the man. From the bunker, Bruner was startled by the sounds of the shots. He quickly motioned for the brother to follow him.

  When he reached Doyle, he saw the team leader standing over the peasant’s body. Nearby, the man’s wife and children were crying.

  “What happened?” Bruner asked.

  “What do you think? I shot him,” Doyle responded.

  “Why?” Bruner asked incredulously.

  “He’s VC.” Doyle sneered. “They’re all VC.”

  Suddenly, two soldiers grabbed the teenager and threw him to the ground next to his dead brother. One of the Tigers held a .45-caliber handgun to the young man’s head.

  Bruner quickly turned around and shoved the barrel of his M16 in the soldier’s face. “If you fire up the kid, I’ll do the same to you, damn it.”

  For a moment, no one moved. No one had ever raised a rifle against another Tiger to save a Vietnamese. Doyle ordered Bruner to lower his rifle, but the sergeant refused. “I’ll shoot your ass. You get your man off this kid now!” Bruner screamed.

  The two sergeants locked eyes, neither man knowing the other. Both came from broken families and had grown up on the streets. In any war, there are many wars, and now another had begun.

  The Tiger clutching the handgun stepped back and put the gun in his waistband.

  Trout, who had been standing nearby, ran over to Bruner and told him to back down. “Leave it alone,” Trout said. With his rifle still raised, Bruner turned to the radio operator and ordered a chopper to evacuate the family. There was no way he was going to let the Tigers harm these people.

  That night, Bruner didn’t sleep. He stayed up with his M16 a
t his side, guarding the surviving family members until a Huey could whisk them away in the morning.

  The call the next morning came from headquarters: the Tigers were being jerked around again, pulled back to Chu Lai. No reason was given. They had expected to stay in the field for another week but were now told to clear a landing zone and wait for the helicopters. One would pick up the Vietnamese family; the others would pick up the Tigers.

  As they waited for the choppers, no one spoke to Bruner.

  CHAPTER 17

  After arriving at Chu Lai, the Tigers trudged back to their camp and anxiously waited to be briefed about why they were yanked from the field. Some of the Tigers wondered aloud whether word had reached the battalion about the execution of the farmer in the Que Son Valley.

  But by the end of the day, nothing had happened. Then another day passed, and still nothing. No warrant officers showed up to pester the soldiers. Even the MPs seemed oblivious to the Tigers’ presence at the base.

  The third day after returning to Chu Lai, the Tigers were summoned to the mess area, but only to be told they were free to roam the base, including the bars. For the Tigers, it was the first time in weeks they had a chance to drink and unwind. As they broke into groups and ventured into Chu Lai, they began to talk to chopper pilots. The word was that there was a big operation brewing—the biggest since the Army began Task Force Oregon. It was no secret that the Army was losing ground in the Central Highlands. It didn’t matter that the Army and Air Force flew hundreds of sorties that had dropped more than fifty thousand bombs since late February. The enemy kept coming. Thousands of soldiers from the 21st and 3rd Regiments of the 2nd NVA Division were now entrenched—some in miles of underground tunnels.

  Even if the Tigers had found the enemy camp they had been sent to find, there were dozens of others. While the Army controlled key cities such as Tam Ky, Da Nang, and Quang Ngai City, it was failing in the other areas. The vast mountainous region along the Laotian border was under enemy control, but no one was saying so publicly.