Ybarra finally walked away from the others and curled up on the ground, sobbing. “Let him go,” said Lee. “Don’t go near him.” Throughout the night, as the soldiers waited for the next attack, they could hear Ybarra in the distance wailing in a deep, mournful voice—a chant taught to him by his elders. “He was in pain,” recalled Carpenter. “We all felt bad.” But the chanting grew louder. “It was getting to the point that he was going to give our position away, and we couldn’t afford for him to get louder. He was going to get us all killed, so we started talking about ways to shut him up. I mean, it got to the point that we were even talking about taking Sam out if we had to.” As the hours passed, however, the chanting stopped. The first stage of Ybarra’s period of mourning was over. Something else was next.
The NVA always waited. They always waited because the Americans never left their dead in the field. For the Tigers, it was better to camp until morning, when the reinforcements came. Meanwhile, platoon members gathered silently in the Vietnamese darkness.
In his own world, Ybarra plunged his knife into the ground, sobbing. His best friend—one of the few people in the world who really knew him—was dead. He had talked Ken into joining the Tigers, had told him they would help win the war together. And not only had he convinced Green to join but he had also talked Beck into volunteering for the platoon.
Ybarra turned to Barnett. “I’m going to kill every gook I can find,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
Kerrigan looked up. “I am, too.”
Other Tigers nodded in agreement. “You know what I say,” Doyle sneered. “You kill anything—anything that moves, even if it’s not moving. Just kill it.”
Sitting on the edge of the campsite, Fischer could hear the Tigers talking, and it scared him. He wasn’t the cocky soldier who came to Vietnam for adventure—the military brat who thought he knew it all. He was now a part of this unit and there was no way out. He was more alone than at any other time in his life.
On the other side of the camp, Bruner sat by himself. When his team had returned and found out Green and Beck were killed, he knew their deaths would set off an uncontrollable rage. The volcano was going to blow and he didn’t want to be there when it did. There was not much time.
Two Hueys arrived, but instead of landing in a space cleared by the Tigers, the airships swerved over the area where the platoon was ambushed. The gunners wasted no time, firing into the trees.
Within seconds, the snipers fired back, and for several minutes, the two sides exchanged rounds, with the choppers circling the trees to avoid being hit. The Tigers’ instincts were right: the NVA soldiers had never left. For several minutes, the choppers blasted away at the sniper posts until finally the firing stopped.
Ybarra, who was watching the exchange, waited. Then, without asking team leaders for permission, he sprinted to the two bodies still lying in the brush. When he reached his friend’s body, he quickly stopped. He knew Green was killed, but actually seeing him was too much to bear. He fell to his knees. Kerrigan and others surrounded Ybarra and the bodies. “Sam, we need to get out of here,” he said. “Those snipers may still be around.”
For at least a minute, Ybarra refused. He didn’t hear anyone. He began rocking back and forth, and started chanting again.
No one knew what to do about Ybarra, but they knew they needed to evacuate the bodies. Team leaders motioned for one of the choppers to land, while the other Huey circled to provide cover.
Shortly after the helicopter landed, the medics discovered the pilot didn’t have body bags. Grabbing ponchos, the medics ran over to the bodies, where Ybarra was still grieving. Without saying a word, they carefully wrapped the two corpses in the ponchos and carried them to the chopper. Ybarra stared in silence at the medics as they loaded his friend’s body through the hatch.
Just then, one of the medics ran over to Bruner. “You’re heading back to Chu Lai,” he said. The pilot, he explained, was instructed to bring Bruner back. Surprised at the order, Bruner didn’t have time to ask questions. He grabbed his rucksack and M16 and jumped on board.
As the chopper took off, Bruner looked down on the Tigers who were gathered in a circle and shook his head. On the way back to Chu Lai, the chopper had one last stop: a small fire base twelve kilometers northwest of Chu Lai, where the pilot was instructed to drop off boxes of coffee.
The rain was coming down, and one of the soldiers on the base volunteered to help unload the boxes. As he neared the entranceway, he spotted the two bodies wrapped in ponchos. As the rain pounded the chopper, one of the ponchos blew open, exposing the body inside.
The soldier looked over and felt his heart sink. Leon Fletcher backed up momentarily to catch his breath. It was his friend Ken Green. This was the friend he had tried to talk out of joining Tiger Force in the bar that night with Ybarra. This was the friend who had taken Fletcher under his wing when he joined the mortar patrol.
The coffee delivered, the chopper rose and headed to Chu Lai.
CHAPTER 19
When the Huey landed at Chu Lai, Bruner was instructed to report directly to battalion headquarters, where Captain James was waiting for him.
At first, he hesitated. It had been two weeks since Bruner was in the captain’s office, and he was still seething over the way he was treated. It was James who ignored the sergeant’s request for transfer, James who didn’t give a damn about the way Doyle and Hawkins were treating civilians.
Without saluting, Bruner stepped into the office and sat down. James looked up from his desk and barely acknowledged the sergeant. “Report to B Company,” he said. “You’re out of the Tigers.”
Bruner was tempted to say something about the way the Tigers were acting in the field, but he caught himself, stood up, and walked out the door. Finally, it was over. He would never forget the likes of Doyle, Hawkins, and Ybarra. In his own mind, they were fighting their own sick kind of war—and now pulling in the others, even against their will. He could see the anxiety in the young kids and knew they weren’t strong enough to keep their own bearings. It was simply too scary out there for them not to go along.
With four Tigers dead in just a few days, the hatred and fury would only act as a wicked undertow, sucking younger soldiers further into the darkness. There was no one there to stop it. This wasn’t about Communism or freedom or politics. This was about pure hatred. “It was just murder,” he later told his family. “It was plain, flat-out murder.”
Bruner had joined the Tigers after they had been well into their campaign and had always been an outsider. But coming into the platoon late had given him a clearer picture of the unit. He firmly believed the Tigers should have been pulled from the field a long time ago. They were beyond burned out. They were beyond combat fatigue.
As he walked by an airstrip on his way to his new headquarters, he bid farewell to the chopper pilot who brought him back to the base. “Where you heading?” he asked. The pilot pointed to several soldiers waiting to board the helicopter. “I’m taking them into the field. Some are going to be new Tigers.”
Bruner shook his head. He wished he could have warned them before they volunteered, but they were going to learn on their own.
When he hopped off the chopper, Rion Causey was anxious, his stomach in knots. The skinny, blond-haired twenty-year-old was a Tiger by chance. He and another medic had flipped a coin to see who would be replacing Bowman, and Causey won.
Getting into the Tigers was, he felt, better than some other options. “I just thought it was safer to be with them than with a line company,” the South Carolina native recalled. It was October 1, and he had been in country for only a week.
For Causey, joining the Army was part escape, part adventure. He didn’t have to enlist. He was already enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a dorm room waiting for him, when he decided to pull the plug on campus living. Watching the news reports about Vietnam had been stimulating at a time when he was restless. College seemed like the rig
ht thing to do for his father, a schoolteacher, but not for Causey. He didn’t care about a deferment. Going to Vietnam was an invitation to another world.
Looking around the camp, Causey noticed most of the platoon members were brooding. Ybarra was by himself in a corner, talking aloud, and Barnett was mumbling about how the Tigers were going to “even the score” and “get them back.”
Causey just listened. He knew before he joined the platoon that the Tigers had lost several soldiers but didn’t know the depth of their despair and bitterness. “What I remembered,” he said, “was they were bloodthirsty. There was no other way to describe it.”
The bonding among combat soldiers is deep and pervasive—and the Tigers were no exception. They saw themselves in those ponchos and body bags, and were now going to get even. For civilians, it’s difficult to understand the bonding among soldiers, but it’s deep and visceral. When a fellow soldier is killed, anger and a sense of revenge take over. Four comrades went down in two days: Green, Beck, Varney, and Ingram. Soldiers believe revenge can lead to some cathartic release, but it doesn’t work that way. The lust can never be satisfied, no matter how many Vietnamese the soldier blows away. Like a drug addict, he must kill more and more. For some soldiers, the situation gets worse because they’re overwhelmed by a sense of guilt—they survived, but not their comrades—so, to purge those feelings, they must kill more.
It wasn’t until noon before the platoon received its assignment—a vague call about a village eighteen kilometers due west of Chu Lai. Several Tigers ran over to the radio to listen to the voice breaking up on the other end. The order was unmistakable: clear the village. Twenty of the forty-five Tigers would be going. The assignment had nothing to do with reconnaissance, with searching for a hidden enemy camp. It was strictly destroy. This time, the enemy was in the open.
From the air, the village was easy to see: two trails crisscrossing the center of a collection of huts, peasants scattered about, carrying bundles on their backs. Nevertheless, because of the thick foliage, the choppers were forced to find a clearing a kilometer away. Once the soldiers jumped off the Hueys, there was little time to lose.
Ybarra led the way. He found a trail and began walking in the direction of the village, occasionally moving so far ahead he would have to be reined in by a team leader. Ybarra wasn’t the only soldier anxious to get there. The whole group was supposed to have been joined by C Company soldiers, but they had decided not to wait. Their stopwatch was their heartbeat.
After walking for nearly a half hour, they began to see a few scattered Chieu Hoi leaflets on the trail and knew they were close to the village. Ybarra was supposed to stop and wait when he reached the perimeter; instead, he kept walking straight ahead, oblivious to the potential dangers from snipers. Some of the soldiers behind him yelled for him to stop, but he kept moving forward.
Suddenly, Fischer and others heard the firing of an M16. As they ran toward the front of the line, they saw Ybarra, rifle raised, firing and screaming as peasants ran in all directions. Other Tigers joined in the attack, shooting into the huts. One soldier unclipped grenades and dropped them into a well, and then took his gun and began shooting water buffalo in a pen. A mother cradled a baby nearby, and an old man huddled against the well. Team leaders began screaming for the soldiers to cease firing, but the men didn’t stop. Fischer watched in disbelief. No warnings were given. None of the villagers had raised a rifle. There were no weapons. He remembered turning his head away, unable to watch.
Barnett, who had spent three clips firing into every hut, finally ran out of ammunition. So did Ybarra. The soldiers stood with their rifles raised. The firing stopped. There was no sign of movement. Without delay, Ybarra and others ran over to the huts and began flicking their lighters. In the past, they would have waited, first conducting a detailed search. No longer.
Barnett ran up to Hawkins. “We better try to find some weapons,” he said. “We got a lot of bodies, but we’re not finding any weapons.” Hawkins turned to him and snapped, “Don’t worry about the weapons. We can get them later.”
As the Tigers gathered near the trail to leave, Fischer fought his way through the thick black smoke, turning over bodies to see if there were any survivors. Just as he reached the center of the village, he could see the Tigers leaving. They weren’t going to wait for him to treat the wounded.
Not all of the Tigers were ready to leave, though: Ybarra, Kerrigan, and two other Tigers told the others they would catch up. They ran over to where bodies were on the ground. Each soldier leaned over a body and, after removing knives from their belts, began frantically cutting off ears.
The Tigers waiting near the trail looked back and saw Ybarra and the others standing over the bodies. The newcomers wondered what the men were doing, but the veterans knew.
Like clockwork, Morse was on the radio, demanding to know what happened in the village. The answer: the village has been cleared, numerous VC dead. Morse was elated, praising his recon unit. “That’s why you’re the Tigers,” he said before signing off.
By evening, the Tigers regrouped and set up camp. Causey hadn’t accompanied the unit that cleared the village but was told that tomorrow he would be assigned to Barnett’s squad. He didn’t know much about Barnett but could tell by his accent that he was a southerner and, by his demeanor, that he was edgy. He was snapping at everyone over nothing and was constantly pacing. No one could talk to him.
By the time the morning radio transmission came from headquarters, Barnett was already geared up. There really was no specific plan; Morse wanted the Tigers to set up patrols—once again, with destruction as the objective. No village should be standing. If you find enemy positions, call in an air strike and move on. It was that simple.
Barnett and Causey broke away with two other Tigers and headed on an eastward trail leading to the town of Diem Pho, and they were expected to pass through dozens of hamlets along the way, though none of them were supposed to be inhabited, Hawkins reminded the team.
They walked for what seemed to be hours, passing several burned-out huts but no villagers. After checking in with Hawkins by radio, Barnett led the men down a slope until they reached a stream with a cluster of huts on the other side. From the distance, Barnett could see there were people in one hut and motioned for his men to follow and stay quiet.
Quickly, Barnett crossed the stream, jumped up on the bank, and ran to the hut. With his rifle pointed inside, he shouted in Vietnamese, “Dua Tay Len, Dua Tay Len,” ordering them to raise their hands. Seven males exited the hut with arms in the air—some teenagers, some elderly. Causey could see the terrified look in their eyes. One Tiger checked the hut for more people and weapons but came up empty; another called on the radio to a team leader. “What do we do?” he asked. “We have seven people, no weapons.”
The response was swift. “They’re not supposed to be there.” Barnett didn’t need to hear anything else. He ordered the Tigers to line up the Vietnamese against the hut and then yelled, “Fire!” Barnett and the two Tigers opened up, but Causey couldn’t shoot. Though he was a newcomer, he knew the difference between combatants and noncombatants. What he was witnessing ran counter to everything he learned as a soldier and as a human being.
Barnett called battalion headquarters on the radio with his report: seven VC killed after a “brief engagement” with the enemy. His team was headed back to regroup with the rest of the element.
The Tiger teams returned to camp and tossed off their rucksacks. For the first hour, no one spoke, most of the soldiers simply too tense. Eventually, team leaders walked off by themselves and began talking out of earshot of the other men. Minutes later, Barnett headed back to the center of the campsite and told his team it was a “kill day” for everyone. The newcomers didn’t know what that meant, but Ken Kerney did. Kerney had been on patrol with his own team when they had entered a hamlet and surprised the people by opening fire. He hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on his M16, not on unarmed civilians, not
on women and children, but others had. Just like Barnett’s team, the soldiers left the bodies and burned the huts.
Kerney didn’t know how long he could stay restrained. It was easy to hate the Vietnamese for what happened to the Tigers over the past two weeks. It was easier to hate them for everything that happened since he joined the Tigers in May. And it was even easier to assume every Vietnamese was the enemy. They looked different. They talked different. Easier to assume they were less civilized, maybe even uncivilized, and their lives were less valuable.
In the past, he could talk to other Tigers about these inner conflicts and find that others felt the same way, and those discussions had been a way to keep sane, to purge the bad feelings. Now, Kerney wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know whom he could trust anymore. He knew that if he complained about the killing, he might get a bullet from another Tiger.
That was the dilemma for many Tigers who disagreed with the leaders. They could stand back and helplessly watch the slaughters, or they could go along.
As the men sat around the campsite, Kerney looked over at Ybarra, who had retrieved several bloodied, severed ears from a ration bag and, holding up a shoelace, was trying to string the first ear onto the lace. “Shit,” Ybarra said as he tried to poke a hole in the flesh. Not far away, Kerrigan was trying to make his own necklace.
Ybarra looked up, his eyes growing dark, and stared at Kerney so long that Kerney had to look away.
The radio call came early in the morning: intelligence reports indicated that a Vietcong leader organizing ambushes on American troops was living with his wife in a village fifteen kilometers southwest of Chu Lai. The orders were to surround the hut and capture him. There was a sense of urgency in the commander’s voice. The VC operative was being blamed for setting up scores of ambushes on line companies and may have been responsible for dozens of casualties. “You find him,” said a voice over the radio.
Tiger Force Page 19