Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  Using the trees for cover, the Tigers lined up and opened up on the hill, where—judging from the rising smoke—the enemy was positioned. For several minutes, the two sides exchanged fire, and suddenly the enemy stopped shooting. The Tigers waited and then began firing again, but no one fired back. They agreed to take a chance and walk back toward the hill. As they crept to the trees just in front of the hill, they discovered empty platforms and spent shells where the NVA had been positioned.

  Ervin Lee, acting as a team leader, grabbed the radio and told commanders about the firefight. “I think we’re clear,” he said. But he was ordered to wait before scaling the hill; a couple of new replacements were on the way.

  Lee and the others took a break in the shade of the trees. It had been their first firefight in several days, and their adrenaline was pumping.

  Sergeant Terry Lee Oakden, who just joined the Tigers, held up his jungle cap and put his finger through a bullet hole. “Look,” he said, “they almost got me.”

  The Tigers laughed. Oakden turned to Robin Varney, who had been showing the new sergeant the ropes. “They ain’t gonna get us,” Oakden said, smiling.

  A base camp mail clerk just a few weeks ago, Oakden had been in South Vietnam since July 18 but hadn’t seen any action. “I didn’t join the Army to hand out mail,” he would say. When Oakden ran across the Tigers at the base, he would pester them about hitching up. Varney took a liking to the eager twenty-year-old upstate New York native and helped him get in. As they waited for the reinforcements, some of the men began unbuttoning their shirts. It was incredibly hot, even in the shade, with a slight wind. The ground was dry and dusty, and the dirt blew into their eyes.

  Varney, who had been in South Vietnam ten months, announced that he had decided to sign up for another tour. Several Tigers immediately looked up. “Are you crazy?” asked Dan Clint. “Why would you do that?”

  Varney just shrugged. The Seattle native with thick horn-rims was confident he would survive. After all, he had already lived through so much.

  By late afternoon, a chopper swooped over the jungle and landed in the rice paddy. Clint recognized one of the newcomers jumping off. He couldn’t believe his eyes: it was Private Harold Fischer III. They had been best friends at Fort Campbell. Clint ran over and greeted his old buddy.

  Fischer, a new medic, fit the mold: he didn’t respect authority and had already faced a disciplinary hearing for laughing at a drill sergeant during an inspection at Fort Campbell. Harold had grown up on Army bases. His father, Harold Fischer Jr., was a jet ace in Korea who shot down ten MiGs during the war in 1953 and spent two years in a Chinese military prison. After the war, Fischer’s parents split up, and his mother, Dorothy, married another military man, Earl Harrell, a sergeant. Harrell turned out to be an abusive drunk who took out his frustrations on his stepson. Fischer dropped out of high school on his seventeenth birthday and enlisted in the Army.

  The night before he hopped on the chopper to join the Tigers at the hill, Fischer, barely eighteen, got stoned for the first time—and loved it.

  With the new arrivals, the Tigers were ready to climb the hill. As they neared the slope, Hawkins ordered them to stop. He was told over the radio that mines had been planted on the hillsides by the South Vietnamese, and the Tigers were to wait until someone from headquarters could bring the platoon maps of where explosives were buried.

  Lee, Carpenter, and others set up a security perimeter around the hill while the rest of the platoon waited. Clint removed his shirt to cool down and broke out a can of pound cake as he monitored the radio. For nearly a half hour, Carpenter stared at the trees and brush on the hill for any signs of movement. “We didn’t want to be caught off guard,” he recalled.

  Suddenly there was an explosion up the hill. The men on the security detail froze before looking up. “I could see a wall of dirt moving toward me, and I hit the ground,” Clint remembered. He could feel his back sting like “someone had taken a baseball bat with nails sticking out and hit me.”

  Carpenter and others were stunned to see four American soldiers sprawled on the hillside, one of the men screaming in pain.

  Hawkins ordered the remaining Tigers not to move.

  From a distance, Carpenter yelled to his commander, “Why do we have people up there?”

  Hawkins said he had ordered the men to climb the hill to see if they could spot anything. Carpenter had enough. He began to rush toward his commander but was restrained by other soldiers. “You fucking idiot!” he yelled at Hawkins. “Why do you think we’re waiting for the maps? What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m going to kill you! How could you do that? You sent those guys into a minefield.”

  Hawkins stood in silence as the soldiers continued to restrain Carpenter. “Take it easy,” said Leo Heaney, trying to hold back the specialist. “We got hurt people up there.” But the Tigers were unable to help the soldiers because doing so risked tripping more mines. A radio operator called for a medevac while Carpenter and the others waited.

  The Tigers could see that one of the men lying motionless on the hill was Oakden. Three others were moving, but barely: Charles Fulton, Dan Clint, and Robert Diaz. Carpenter was sickened at the sight. He had tried to talk Oakden out of joining the Tigers. “I told him that he was going to make the same money being a mail clerk as being a Tiger. You’re not going to get a bonus for being in the Tigers.” But Oakden had kept pressing battalion officers to let him join. Now Carpenter waited for the chopper to arrive and remove Oakden’s body.

  A few minutes later, a South Vietnamese courier arrived with a map of the hill showing where the mines were planted. There appeared to be an open pathway close to where the soldiers tripped the explosives. Several Tigers volunteered to walk the path to reach the injured men.

  One by one, the Tigers inched closer to the bodies. Fischer rushed over to Clint, who was in pain on the ground from shrapnel wounds to his leg and back. Fulton had a large bulge in his thigh from where the shrapnel had passed through. The bottom of Diaz’s leg was nearly blown off. The medics quickly shot up the wounded with morphine and albumin to stop the bleeding before loading them onto a chopper for the long trip to a field hospital.

  Since the area now appeared to be secure, the Tigers set up camp. Carpenter and others had long wanted to eliminate Hawkins or get him shipped back to the States. They had hoped he had learned something from his earlier mistakes, but they now agreed that nothing had changed. “If you guys didn’t hold me back at the bottom of the hill,” said Carpenter, “I would have killed him.”

  That night, none of the grunts talked to Hawkins. In their minds, his mistakes were finally catching up with them. They could survive in the Song Ve with someone like Hawkins, but not here. There was no room for error in this godforsaken province. He was going to get them killed.

  Hawkins seemed oblivious to what happened. Early the next morning, he and the unit’s forward artillery observer, Lieutenant Edward Sanders, headed off in the distance and began firing their rifles. Bruner, who thought the Tigers were being ambushed, grabbed his M16 and sprinted to the officers. When he reached them, he saw the two men laughing. He looked over and could see a farmer running for cover in a rice paddy, leaving two water buffalo in the middle of the field. Bruner turned around angrily and asked Hawkins what he was doing.

  “Test firing into the rice paddy.” He smirked.

  Bruner lowered his rifle and clenched his teeth. If he had been back on the streets of Los Angeles, he would have pounded on Hawkins without hesitation. It was enough that a field commander allowed the killing of civilians and even placed his own men at risk. But now the commander was using a villager for target practice. He looked Hawkins in the eye. “I want out of here,” he said. “I want to go to a line company.”

  Hawkins stepped back. He didn’t like Bruner telling him what to do. “The only thing I’m going to do is send you to the battalion commander,” he said. “You can be court-martialed.”

  Disgusted, Bruner
turned around and walked away. There was nothing he could do, not now. But he made up his mind that this would be his last assignment with the Tigers, no matter what, do or die.

  Varney was already up monitoring the radio when he heard the message: the Tigers needed to set up a blocking position. Thirty minutes earlier, B Company had run into a snake pit: NVA soldiers armed with grenade launchers. The Americans had opened fire, forcing what appeared to be a platoon-size element to retreat along the river. The Tigers were now ordered to cut off the escape.

  Varney—whose team was closest to the river—rousted the others and ordered them to follow. Within a few minutes, they were rushing to a ridge overlooking the waterway. It wasn’t a smart move. The team members had no idea how many NVA soldiers were fleeing. To mobilize five soldiers as a blocking unit—a role normally reserved for at least a platoon—was crazy.

  But Varney wasn’t the sort to wait around. He could be cocky—a trait that came with surviving almost a year of ambushes, jungle rot, booby traps, and heat exhaustion. And he, like other Tigers, was past the point of no return. He had come to the grim conclusion that the secret to surviving was to kill all Vietnamese, no matter whose side they were on—the sooner, the better; the more, the merrier.

  Varney turned to Jerry Ingram, an eighteen-year-old private from North Florida who had been with the Tigers since the Song Ve Valley campaign. Ingram earned the respect of the veterans, partly because of Varney. The older Tiger had taken the time to show him how to survive, and Ingram had shown the others that he was bold and loyal.

  “Look,” Varney whispered, “down there.”

  The Tigers watched as a line of NVA soldiers began wading into the river, guns held high. It appeared as if the Vietnamese were crossing to the other side. The Tigers waited, and as the last soldier entered the water, they opened fire.

  Some soldiers dropped below the surface, and at least two scurried to the other side and began running. Varney spotted the fleeing NVA and took off. Right behind him was Ingram.

  The two jumped to the riverbank and, with their rifles pointing toward the escaping Vietnamese, crossed the shallow water. As soon as Varney pushed through a thicket of trees, he was hit once in the chest by enemy fire, falling to the ground. He jumped up and began running toward the fire before he was hit three more times, his glasses flying in the air.

  Ingram took off in the direction of the shots and, as he broke through the same thicket, was shot in the head. Across the river, Carpenter and others heard the gunfire, but waited. They didn’t know how many NVA were waiting in the brush, or whether they had fled. Nor did they know what had happened to Varney and Ingram.

  After several minutes, Carpenter and his men waded across the river and began searching for the men. Before long, they came upon the bodies.

  Carpenter took one look at Varney on the ground and turned away. To see a veteran Tiger, one who had survived so many firefights, lying motionless in the dirt was too much. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Varney was the one who killed—not the other way around. Other Tigers began huddling around Carpenter and looking at the two bodies in disbelief.

  By the next day, platoon members were listening to radio calls from the line companies reporting casualties every hour.

  The evidence that Operation Wheeler was a disaster was becoming clear with each reported fatality. They had walked into a giant ambush.

  The Tigers decided to regroup and stalk together as a unit.

  Bowman wasn’t usually in the front of the line. His job was to stay behind to treat injured soldiers. But by late afternoon, he moved ahead of the others. His days of being cautious were over. He didn’t care. He again recalled how, after one of the Tiger Force murders, he had spoken to a chaplain in Chu Lai, and the response had been, Don’t stir things up. Let it go. So that’s what he would do. And if he was going to die, he would die, and it didn’t matter where he was walking.

  Carpenter noticed his friend’s position and warned him to get back. But Bowman ignored him—he wasn’t going to be told what to do. Carpenter had noticed the medic changing, like so many other Tigers. In the beginning, he would have listened, even jumped when he was ordered. Now—emotionally drained—he was cadaverous and exhausted, his eyes and demeanor making it clear it was going to end here, one way or another.

  Soldiers are trained to be brave and kill, but they also need to be rational to survive. To exercise proper thought processes. Bowman, like other Tigers, was shutting down. He had been through so much trauma, he was unconsciously cutting himself off from everything that was important, including staying alive. “I just wanted to die,” he recalled. He had simply seen too much—and done too much. He wasn’t even thinking about the war anymore—not the war he came to fight. Not the war against Communism—good versus evil. That was light-years ago. This was an entirely different excursion, one about taking lives, not saving them. For days, he had been trying to reconcile with what he and others were doing to civilians, and with his own moral code, but it was impossible. So he came to a grim conclusion: continue to kill or get out—even in a body bag.

  As the team came to the top of a steep hill, shots were fired from the trees. Someone had been waiting for them. The soldiers dropped to the ground and fired back. Hit, Bowman fell and grabbed his leg. Carpenter and others jumped to his side. Bowman was in terrible pain. “Stay calm, stay calm,” Carpenter said. “You know what this means? You’re going home.”

  After Bowman was whisked away to safety, the Tigers found a winding trail leading to the high ground and began walking. No sooner did they reach the top than they spotted an NVA soldier, who saw them and began running. Several Tigers lifted their M16s and fired, catching the soldier in the back. It was a Pyrrhic killing: they knew that by shooting, they had given their position away, and it would be a matter of time before others—many others—would be coming. “There were a lot more of them,” recalled Kerney, “and we knew it.”

  The Tigers decided to stay on the trail and stay close to one another. After hiking for another thirty minutes, they saw two more NVA soldiers. Again, the Tigers opened up, killing one and confiscating several AK-47s, 120 rounds of ammunition, and a pistol belt.

  With the sun now slowly sinking below the trees, the Tigers would soon have to call Morse with the body count, and also report they had still not found any enemy complexes. As they began to look for a place to clear for a camp, gunfire ripped through the foliage. The Tigers dived for cover, pinned down by a steady round of fire from what appeared to be AK-47 assault rifles. Team leaders agreed to break into three teams. Judging from the gunshots, there were more than a dozen enemy soldiers. “It sounded like an entire platoon,” recalled Fischer, who lay flat on his stomach as the bullets whizzed by.

  Not far away was Lee. Without flinching, he ordered Ken Green and Ed Beck to move forward to scout the enemy’s position. Because of the seven-foot elephant grass, thornbushes, and mangroves, it was difficult to see where the enemy was nesting.

  Green and Beck didn’t hesitate. They rolled over and cut through a patch of the high grass until they came to a clearing. It was a terribly exposed place to be, and they immediately paid a price. Within seconds, Lee and the other Tigers heard Green’s voice: “Shit, I’m hit.”

  Ybarra and the others wanted to run to him, but Lee ordered them to stay put. They then heard Beck cry out, “We need a doc!”

  Though Lee ordered the Tigers to wait, Fischer jumped up and sprinted toward the wounded men. He may have been scared, but once he heard the voices calling for help, he felt he had to respond. When he reached Green, he could see a bullet had ripped through the soldier’s upper thigh. But other than the leg wound, it looked like he could be saved.

  Green was even smart enough to play dead so that the snipers would let up. Beck, who had watched Fischer rush to Green’s side, began firing into the trees to provide cover. Fischer grabbed Green’s ankle to drag him back into the brush, and as he pulled the body, shots ripped into the ground aroun
d them. One of the bullets tore into Green’s head, pieces of skull and flesh exploding all over Fischer’s uniform. The medic looked down and knew right away: Green was dead.

  Just a few seconds later, Beck fell to the ground, his shirt covered in blood. “Doc,” he said, “you gotta help me.” He had been shot four times in the stomach and upper torso. Fischer didn’t want to make the same mistake of dragging Beck and exposing him to fire, so he dropped to his knees and reached into his bag for bandages. But he knew it was too late. Beck was gasping and shaking, and within seconds, he stopped moving.

  Fischer turned around and ran toward the other team members who were waiting. “Where’s Ken?” shouted Ybarra.

  Fischer was shaking, unable to answer.

  Again, Ybarra shouted, “What’s going on, man?”

  But Ybarra didn’t have to ask. He already knew. As he wheeled around and began to run toward the bodies, several Tigers pounced on him. “Sam was freaking out,” Carpenter recalled. “He had to be held back.” Lee ordered his point man to stay calm and then walked over to Fischer to find out what happened to Green and Beck. But the medic, shaking and sobbing, was in no condition to explain. “They’re dead,” he mumbled.

  With tears rolling down his cheeks, Ybarra turned to Lee. “Can I get his body?” he asked. But again, Lee said no. “Sam, they’re waiting for us, and I can’t afford to lose you or anyone else.”

  Sam abruptly turned around and walked over to Fischer. “You killed him,” he said, pointing his finger at the young medic. Several Tigers immediately ran over to subdue Ybarra.

  Fischer didn’t know why Ybarra was blaming him. He was trying to save Green—not get him killed. But he hadn’t known that the NVA routinely waited for other Americans to come to rescue the fallen soldiers, only to then pounce. The other Tigers knew to stay put because they had combat experience. Fischer had only been in South Vietnam less than two weeks.