It didn’t take the Tigers long to figure out they hadn’t been brought back to Chu Lai for disciplinary reasons. The Army had much bigger plans, and somehow they were going to be a part of it.
New troops were arriving on base every day to replenish the units losing soldiers in the Central Highlands. One of the newcomers to the Tigers was Daniel Clint.
The nineteen-year-old private was already in the field with the battalion’s A Company and remembered seeing the Tigers at Carentan in their striped fatigues and jungle caps. “I always saw those guys together—a real bond,” he recalled. “And I wanted to be a part of that.”
For Clint, joining the Tigers was his way of jumping into the war feetfirst. He didn’t like the way the line companies operated in the jungle. When he had arrived in South Vietnam in May 1967, he had been sent to the line company with 150 other soldiers. “It just seemed like we were too big and made too much noise. We could be seen from a mile away,” he recalled. “I wanted to get into jungle warfare.”
That was a big step for a young man who was raised as a Mormon and had never fired a gun before joining the military. He broke his mother’s heart when he enlisted in the 101st Airborne at the end of 1965. Junuetta Clint never got over losing her first husband in World War II when she was pregnant and married only four months. Now she was worried she was going to lose her son.
But for Clint, he didn’t see any other future. He grew up in a home with two brothers and a sister, and knew what it was to be poor. When he was five, his father, David Clint, died in a train accident, leaving his twice-widowed mother to raise the kids mostly by herself. Though she had a master’s degree in psychology from Brigham Young University, she rarely worked because of complications from polio. “I remember going to bed hungry more than once,” he recalled. After graduating from high school in 1965, he waited tables at the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone Park but realized it was a dead-end job. The Army offered adventure and a steady paycheck.
As Clint was arriving, Teeters was leaving.
Uptight and surly, the twenty-year-old medic was close to the edge and everyone knew it. It was better for him to get out. He couldn’t get through the day without popping amphetamines and smoking pot. He was losing weight and sleep—his nerves frayed from the speed and gunfire. He had once dreamed about going to medical school; now he wasn’t dreaming at all.
“By the time I left,” he recalled, “there was an anger and a frustration with the soldiers who were left, and it was getting worse by the day. Everything was becoming so crazy and so damned demeaning and so damned sick.” Emaciated and strung out on drugs, Teeters headed home.
Since returning to Chu Lai, Bruner had spent his days alone. He had noticed something about the Tigers that bothered him, and it wasn’t just the dustup in the village.
To Bruner, there was something deeply rotten about this unit. What bothered him was that after the prisoners were beaten and killed, he heard one of the Tigers laughing. And then he saw Doyle and the others smirking as they walked away from the village after the killing. In some of the Tigers, such as Kerrigan and Barnett, he noticed a vacant, hollow look in their eyes, he later told his family. “It’s like they’re dead,” he said.
Within the unit, Hawkins and Doyle were already putting their own spin on the confrontation in the village: Bruner was a coward who didn’t belong in the Tigers, they said. If he couldn’t kill, then he should be in the rear. “Bruner should be a civilian affairs officer,” Doyle told his men.
Two days after returning to Chu Lai, Trout walked into the tent area and informed Bruner he was to report to Carl James’s office. Bruner assumed right away why he was being summoned. Hawkins had written a letter to James condemning Bruner’s actions in the village.
As soon as Bruner arrived at the captain’s office, James lit into the sergeant. “Don’t you ever threaten another soldier with a gun! What’s wrong with you? You need to see a psychiatrist?”
Before Bruner could respond, there was a knock on the door. It was a sergeant from A Company who needed to see James. He said he heard about the complaint against Bruner and wanted to vouch for him. “He’s a good soldier,” the sergeant said. “We never had a problem with him.”
James took a breath and then looked over at Bruner. “What happened?” he asked. Bruner hadn’t wanted the episode to come up, but now he was upset. They were trying to hang his ass and treat him as a criminal. He recounted the day’s events and how he was justified in using his rifle. And while he was willing to forget the event if that’s what the brass wanted, he wouldn’t agree to do so without a transfer. He had been with the Tigers less than a week, but he wanted out.
James shook his head. “We need every soldier,” he said. Bruner was going back in.
CHAPTER 18
In the darkness of his parents’ Arizona living room, Kenneth Green shifted restlessly on the sofa, his head throbbing. He swallowed four aspirin, shut the curtains, turned out the lights, but nothing seemed to ease his headache.
Kathleen Green watched from the kitchen as her youngest son turned to one side, then another, unable to shake the pain that had been nagging him since coming home on leave. She had noticed the day he arrived he was uneasy and tense, and when he laid down, he complained about the pain shooting through his head. He was skinny and seemed to walk slower. When she asked him questions about Vietnam, he didn’t answer.
Kathleen had been looking forward to seeing Ken but had been disturbed by the way her son had acted. For the first three days, he slept on the sofa, once waking up screaming. “It’s not about you, Mom,” he had told her after one of his long naps. “It’s about everything over there and I can’t take myself out of it. It’s like I’m still there, but I’m not. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
She asked him why he was going back; he had served his year in the war. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said.
Ken looked at her. “I gotta be back there with Sam and the others,” he said.
Kathleen Green shook her head. It was the last thing she wanted to hear. She never liked her son hanging out with Ybarra. It’s not that she didn’t like the boy. She actually felt sorry for him. But he wasn’t a good influence on her Ken. Every time she saw Ybarra, he was angry, and that was the last thing her son needed. Ken already had a bad temper, a trait he picked up from his father. And he always seemed to get angrier when Sam was around.
After four days in the house, Green decided to leave in the morning before anyone was up. He jumped in his ’64 SS Chevelle and began driving. He knew coming home was a mistake. He should have gone to Bangkok or Hong Kong; instead, he was back in Roosevelt, and he didn’t want people to see him like this, especially not his mother or father or siblings. He wasn’t the same person, and he knew it. Too much had happened. And the only people who could begin to understand were a world away in South Vietnam.
Green drove by the rusted and faded San Carlos Indian Reservation sign and turned onto the dirt driveway of the home where Ybarra was staying with his mother and stepfather. Ybarra was already standing near the front steps, a beer in hand and a six-pack at his side.
Ybarra grabbed the beers and jumped into the car. He said they should head into Globe so they could catch up with some of their old friends, but Green gripped the wheel and didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to see anyone. If he wasn’t with Sam, he would just as soon be alone. He didn’t want to talk about the war, and he didn’t want to answer any questions. He just wanted to get on the open road and keep driving forever, never having to stop for anything. He knew he couldn’t tell Ybarra about not wanting to return to Vietnam or his premonition about dying. But maybe they could just drive and get drunk and pretend it was like it once had been.
They pulled into an open lot where several cars were parked, and immediately a dozen people bounded out of their cars and ran to Green’s familiar blue Chevelle. Ybarra jumped out and began shaking hands, while Green stayed in the car, barely noddi
ng to the friends who pressed around the driver’s window.
Ybarra motioned for Green to get out and join the friends, who were cracking open bottles of Coors. Green took his time walking over to the crowd.
The group was waiting for others to arrive before heading to an old drinking spot in the hills along Sugar Creek overlooking Globe. Some of Green’s high school buddies began peppering him with questions about the war, but he tensed up and just nodded. “Aw, man, it’s a war, what else can I say,” he said.
In much of America, it was the Summer of Love, 1967, the emergence of hippies, Haight Ashbury, psychedelic rock, and the beginning of a cultural revolution that would sweep the nation. But it was clear the movement hadn’t reached here, in the hills of central Arizona, where teenagers wore crew cuts and military families were still moving into 1950s-style subdivisions. This is where Democrats turned out en masse to elect Republican Senator Barry Goldwater—a conservative icon who pushed the military to bomb Hanoi into dirt and rubble. In these parts, there were no antiwar protests.
One by one, the cars pulled out of the lot and headed up the winding roads to Sugar Creek. Once they reached the spot, they parked, grabbed their beers, and headed to a thicket of cottonwood trees along the creek that would shroud their private party.
For hours, they stretched along the grassy banks and guzzled beers, laughing. Some of the friends talked about enlisting in the service before they were drafted. “It’s just a matter of time,” one said. Ybarra piped in. “You should join the 101st,” he said, nudging Green. “Right, man?” Green didn’t say anything.
Ybarra stood up. “You should see what we do over there,” he said. “We’re the Tigers, man. We’re killing more gooks than the other units in our battalion.”
For the next few minutes, he bragged about the Tigers sweeping into villages and “firing everyone up,” he said. “They’d run when they saw us.”
Some of the friends looked at Green for his reaction, but he was stone-faced. “You could see he was really uncomfortable,” recalled Roger Askins, who went to high school with Green. “Everyone could see Ken wasn’t happy with what Sam was saying.”
By nightfall, Green was sitting on a large boulder and staring into space. “He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t talking about girls,” said Askins. “He wasn’t the same guy.”
That became clearer just before the party broke up. As Ybarra continued raving about the war, Green suddenly rose and crept up on a stray cat near the creek. With everyone now fixed on Green, he bent over and grabbed the animal, holding it tightly in his hands.
“You want to see what we do in Vietnam?” he asked, his eyes bulging. Before anyone could respond, Green bit down on the back of the cat’s head—and then in one motion, snapped the animal’s neck.
With his friends staring up, he tossed the limp cat to the ground and casually walked back to the rock. “Man, Ken,” one friend said incredulously.
For the rest of the night, no one bothered Ken Green.
Two nights before his leave ended, Green dressed in his uniform and joined his family for dinner. For days, he had been avoiding everyone, but he realized it was almost time to return to Vietnam.
His younger sister Sherry had been asking him to go bowling, but he kept putting it off. After dinner, he finally told her he would go. Still in his dress uniform, Green and his sister drove to the bowling alley but said very little on the way. Green and Sherry had always been close, but he couldn’t bring himself to open up. He couldn’t share his secrets, because they were his nightmares—too deep, too diabolical, too incriminating.
From the moment he walked into the bowling alley, Ken felt as if everyone was looking at him. No one came over—they just stared. He immediately grew uncomfortable but didn’t want to lose it, not in front of his sister. Deep down, he wanted to make her proud, even if he wasn’t so. It was better not to say anything.
After hanging out for a couple of hours, he and his sister left. Green was depressed, and out of place. He didn’t belong in the bowling alley. He didn’t belong in the bars. He didn’t belong in the restaurants. After a year in Vietnam, nothing felt right.
He was resigned to return to the Tigers but didn’t like the way the war was playing out and was even less certain about surviving another tour. He had told Ybarra and others about his grim premonition. There was no disputing the fact that returning was dangerous. With more than 100,000 North Vietnamese coming into draft age each year, NVA leaders such as General Vo Nguyen Giap were prepared to fight for another generation, or longer. Besides the endless stream of trained NVA soldiers, thousands of North Vietnamese civilians had already joined the cause: grandmothers digging tunnels and children dragging bags of rice to NVA soldiers. Families were willing to bear sacrifices—even the deaths of loved ones. The people were swept up by a nationalistic fervor not lost on American soldiers, who witnessed how quickly the North Vietnamese would rebuild after U.S. bombs were dropped on their camps and bases.
As major trails were blown up and bridges incinerated, civilians from the North would quickly clear the routes and rebuild the spans over waterways so that their soldiers could keep moving southward. It was amazing how quickly the people could reconstruct a bamboo bridge. As with the war with the French the previous decade, the strategy was to remain strong while enduring losses.
Despite the setbacks against a powerful American military, NVA leaders believed the war could be won, though it might take twenty years. That’s how long they were willing to fight. The Americans were formidable, but the strength of the enemy only made Giap and other military leaders more determined.
No matter how many bombs were being dropped on the Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces, “they keep coming,” Green told Ybarra. Vietnam was a sinister loop.
In fact, unknown to the two Tigers, a debate over the air campaign was heating up in Washington that same week. Several generals told a Senate subcommittee they were handcuffed by the Johnson administration’s policy of selective bombing. The answer, they claimed, was an all-out bombing assault: open season on the North. The hawkish chair of the subcommittee, John Stennis of Mississippi, agreed, and took the administration to task on national television. He ripped into Secretary of Defense McNamara, saying his reluctance to bomb key targets in the North was a sign of weakness. After the panel debate, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina added salt to the wound. “Your words,” he told McNamara, “are the words of a Communist appeaser. It’s a no-win policy.”
No one was home when Green packed his duffel bag. He looked around the house, the photos on the walls of him and his family members. He thumbed through his high school yearbook and placed it back in his room.
His mother was waiting outside.
They talked briefly about writing. Kathleen told him to be careful and hugged him before he left. She worried not just about her son’s surviving combat but also about his future return. “I was afraid that with everything he was going through—and with his temper—there was no telling what he would have done when he got home for good.” But Ken Green would not be coming home ever again.
Several Tigers stood on the edge of the airstrip, waiting for Ybarra and Green to get off the C-130. They had thought about throwing a welcome-back party for them but didn’t have time; they were gearing up to go into the field on the mission they had been hearing about for weeks.
As the two Arizonans exited the plane, Kerrigan ran up to greet them. He had been fretting for days about whether Ybarra and Green would make it back for the new operation. For someone who used to be scared of Ybarra, the once free-spirited surfer now craved the company and approval of the most ruthless Tiger.
After returning to the campsite, the Tigers began telling Green and Ybarra about the new campaign, a “balls to the wall” search-and-destroy effort to win Quang Tin. Nothing was sacred: No more villages. No more NVA base camps. Erase everything. The official name of this new campaign was Operation Wheeler, named after General Earle Wheeler, chairman o
f the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Tigers would be turned loose with very little restraints. Morse and others were clear about their objective: “Find, fix, and destroy all VC and NVA forces and neutralize VC and NVA base camps,” according to the command log. They were to find all outposts of the 2nd NVA Division, and if the Tigers ran into anything, they were to wipe it off the map.
“You’re the Tigers,” Morse told Hawkins and team leaders. “I expect you to be the Tigers.” In preparation for Operation Wheeler, to begin on September 11, Morse changed the names of the battalion’s line units from A, B, and C Companies to Assassins, Barbarians, and Cutthroats. A sign bearing the names of the new companies was posted over the base headquarters.
During the first week of Operation Wheeler, the platoon saw little action. Most days were spent looking for camouflaged enemy bunkers fifteen kilometers northwest of Chu Lai, but as the Tigers walked the trails they were unable to find any underground hiding places. (They didn’t see any NVA either, though six soldiers in other companies were killed in the first few days of the campaign.) Every morning and every night, the Tigers would hear the radio crackle and Morse, under his name “Ghost Rider,” firing the same questions: What’s the body count? How many enemy soldiers were killed? The Tigers didn’t have a lot to report.
On September 20, the ninth day of Operation Wheeler, things began to pick up. The Tigers were instructed to go to the top of a hill to check on the condition of an American adviser who had been out of radio contact twelve hours. The South Vietnamese camp he had been staying in had been hit by mortar fire the night before, and no one knew if anyone was still alive.
After hiking two kilometers, hacking part of the way through thick mangroves, the Tigers stopped at the edge of a rice paddy. On the other side of the field was a thicket of trees at the base of the hill. The soldiers began moving single file across the rice field when shots were fired. With bullets flying, the Tigers retreated quickly into the jungle.
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