Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  One day in June, he decided he was going to visit Green’s mother in Roosevelt, something he had talked about doing since returning from the war. Ybarra drove the thirty miles to the Green home, rehearsing a speech to break the ice. But by the time he arrived and met Kathleen Green at the door, he didn’t know what to say, and neither did Green’s mother. She was never fond of Ybarra and had told her son so. But this wasn’t the time to bring up the past. She invited Ybarra inside, and after several minutes, he took over the conversation. He was sorry for what happened to her son and, in his own way, accepted personal responsibility for the death. He didn’t go into detail but told her that her son “didn’t suffer. He died a hero.”

  Ybarra slowly reached into his pocket, hesitated for a moment, and then pulled out Green’s wallet. “Here,” he said. “This was Kenny’s. I had been keeping this for you for a long time.”

  She thanked him but couldn’t help noticing Ybarra was pained. She asked him if everything was all right, but he just nodded. He didn’t want to tell her that his world was falling apart. First his dishonorable discharge, then his return to a reservation that he longed to escape, and now the CID agents coming for him. Though he told his wife and others that he was unfazed by the Army investigation, it was just the opposite. He was deeply afraid of what they wanted.

  When he showed up at his mother’s home that night, he had already been drinking. He went inside and began to talk about the war. Therlene had heard it all before: the killing of villagers, the children, the look in their eyes before he killed them.

  But now she was scared for him. Her son had struggled after he returned to the reservation, but it was getting worse. “Please, Sam, please,” she said. “You need to get help.”

  She had never been able to predict her son’s behavior. At times, he would be enraged, screaming about how the gooks were all the same and how he should have killed more; other times he was contrite, deeply sorry about opening up on unarmed men, women, and children. Like others with PTSD, Sam would vacillate between justifying his actions and condemning what he did. He was on a seesaw, and so was everyone around him.

  It was easy to understand why he drank himself to sleep every night. What he and other soldiers in the field had never seemed to realize was that their minds were constantly taking snapshots of what they did. The images of the people shot or scalped were never lost but were stored like a computer program in the brain. Years later, these images would come back, and the soldiers—in the comfort of their homes and with their families—would be forced to stare at the snapshots in all their gore.

  For the past several days, Henry Tufts had been at his desk, his glasses at the end of his nose, poring over the soldiers’ statements and the personnel files. Even to a hardened commander who saw every war-crimes case from Vietnam, the words on the pages were disturbing.

  He was satisfied that the Tiger Force case was being investigated thoroughly. There were enough substantiated allegations to take this to an Article 32. But that wasn’t the issue. To Tufts, it was not about what happened in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, but why.

  He had reviewed 242 war-crimes allegations investigated by the Army CID beginning in 1965 with the first arrival of the troops. There were more than a dozen rapes, twenty-one assaults, a dozen murders, and several cases of body mutilations, including the case of an officer who was prosecuted for fastening human ears to his Jeep antenna. But most of the cases involved one or two people and a single crime. And in nearly a third of the allegations, enough evidence was gathered to take the cases to military court. When soldiers were convicted, they were forced to serve time or, in many cases, docked pay for the lesser offenses. Some were busted down to lower ranks.

  A few allegations were against entire combat units, but none involved platoons that carried out war crimes for so long without anyone stopping the carnage. “Seven months,” Tufts told his staff. How many people were killed in those bunkers when the Tigers lobbed in the grenades? How many children were killed? What happened to these soldiers to make them lose control for so long? Tufts knew that many atrocities occurred during the war that were never reported. But this case was documented, and that separated it from others.

  Tufts may have looked the curmudgeon, but he was fully capable of exploring the deepest recesses of human behavior—particularly in combat soldiers. Indeed he had spent his life studying the psychology of men in war. He once told his agents that he saw every different type of soldier when he commanded his own battery in the 868th Field Artillery Battalion in Europe in World War II. And had seen them run, seen them fight, seen them cower and cry, seen them kill, and seen them die.

  In his earlier years in the CID, Tufts hadn’t cared much about the deeper philosophical reasons for soldiers committing war crimes. His job was the nuts and bolts, to make sure soldiers weren’t committing crimes and, if they did, to dig up the evidence against them. It was police work. But after Vietnam, that changed. It wasn’t just about throwing the book at soldiers. It was about trying to understand what went wrong in the war. What went wrong with some of the troops. He had spent months overseeing My Lai, the worst case his office had ever investigated. But even My Lai was just one horrific day—not seven months.

  Tufts began to go beyond Apsey’s reports. He was able to get background information on more than a dozen suspects, including Ybarra and Doyle. He saw that some soldiers, such as Doyle, had long juvenile police records. Ybarra had been arrested numerous times before enlisting. In addition to the personnel records, Tufts got his hands on documents that showed that Tiger Force was created as a special unit with minimal oversight. Few commanders were supposed to know what the platoon was doing.

  After thirty-two years in the military, he was now seriously looking at retirement. He had just endured a long, brutal struggle to centralize CID operations—a three-year intramilitary battle that he clearly despised. But he made up his mind he wasn’t going to step down until the last war-crimes investigation was complete.

  Most CID agents at Fort MacArthur had checked out for the long Fourth of July weekend, but Apsey still had a stack of statements to read from ex-Tigers and was anxious to see if any missing witnesses had been found. In an age before the Internet and fax machines, he was at the mercy of the post office and a military mail system that was often a week behind.

  As he thumbed through the stack of names, he was disappointed. Apsey had hoped the agents had found William Doyle, whose name popped up innumerable times. Besides Ybarra, no one had been accused of more cold-blooded killings of civilians. And yet, little was known about the team leader. Another person missing was Rion Causey, the medic whose trail disappeared after his discharge.

  But the mail brought some good news. Two former Tigers helped answer a question that had been nagging Apsey for weeks: did the Tigers bomb bunkers without warning civilians?

  At first, Ken Kerney hadn’t wanted to talk, telling agents in 1972 to leave him alone. Now, two years later, he had agreed to shed some light on Apsey’s question: yes, it happened. He told agents that during a sweep of a hamlet, no interpreter had been available to lure the people from the underground shelters, or even to warn them about what was to take place. “The Tiger Force knew what to do,” he said.

  Charles Fulton was even more revealing, because he not only admitted to tossing grenades into a bunker but later heard the cries of the people underground. No one, he said, bothered to help the wounded Vietnamese. He freely admitted there were no weapons or signs of Vietcong.

  Apsey wondered, Could this have been a routine practice? It violated the Army’s policies and procedures and the Geneva conventions. Worse, because there were so many bunkers, no one would ever know how many in the province were turned into mass underground graves.

  He wondered with a growing sense of dread how far up the chain of command this case went.

  On August 8, everyone in the CID office at Fort MacArthur took a break from his or her work to tune in to one of the most his
toric events of the American presidency. Some gathered around a television while others listened to radios as Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office, saying that he had “never been a quitter” and that leaving office before his term ended was “abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first.”

  Apsey, who had been holed up in his office most of the day, walked out to catch a few minutes of the lonely figure on the screen. Like most of the other agents, he wasn’t surprised by Nixon’s resignation. Just two weeks earlier, the House Judiciary Committee approved one of three articles of impeachment. But while Watergate had been front-page news for nearly two years, Apsey had not been paying close attention to most of the developments—he had been so steeped in his investigation, he often didn’t have time to read the newspaper or watch television. His head was in 1967, his heart in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. When he came home at night, he would spread out the sworn statements on his kitchen table and scribble down new questions on a notebook for agents. If he was lucky, he caught a few minutes of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson—but only a few minutes. Indeed, the only moment Apsey had dwelled on Nixon in recent years was when he heard rumors that the president had been told about the Tiger Force investigation and was concerned about the case being leaked to the media. But Apsey never knew for sure, and to him, it didn’t really matter. He was going to continue to do his job.

  Three thousand miles away, Henry Tufts was at his home in suburban Washington DC, watching the same drama unfold on television. With deep contacts in the Pentagon and Congress, he had predicted this was going to happen. There were enough votes for impeachment, and the truth was there was simply too much evidence against the president.

  For weeks, Tufts had been keeping one eye on the Watergate events and the other on the Tiger Force case. He was now reviewing daily reports about the CID investigation. He wanted to know about every interview. He wanted to know about which ex-Tigers were still at large. He wanted to know about any new allegations.

  Tufts had the power to bury the case and simply chalk it up to a war that was fading from the nation’s attention. Or he could press ahead and resurrect war crimes that rivaled My Lai.

  He called the Presidio and made it clear: the president’s resignation would have no effect on the last war-crimes investigation of the Vietnam War.

  After several weeks of sorting through the case, Tufts had seen enough. Tiger Force was a military experiment that failed—failed miserably. This was a group of men—some abused and abandoned—who had finally belonged to something special. They were allowed to carry their own sidearms, grow beards, dress in their own distinctive uniforms.

  They were special.

  With little supervision, they were to creep into the jungle in small teams, find enemy positions, and call in air strikes. This was a new kind of war, with a nearly invisible enemy hiding in jungle and underground tunnels. The Army needed a new kind of soldier and a new kind of unit. If they needed to kill, then they could do so without telling anyone. The less they talked on the radio, the better. They were a spy squad.

  But then things changed. The Army was desperate to win the war quickly in 1967 and had a problem: the farmers in the Central Highlands weren’t leaving their homes. As long as they were growing rice, the VC had food. This had to end. That’s when Tiger Forced turned from a spy squad to a kill squad.

  In a perversion of warfare, the Tigers were sent into the Central Highlands with their anger, pain, and resentments—with none of the supervision that existed in larger units—and allowed to run riot among civilians.

  Tufts was painfully aware that the Vietnam War—with its frustrations and politics—spawned units that targeted civilians. But typically, the atrocities stopped after someone got wind of an out-of-control squad. Soldiers were disciplined. There was an end to the madness. Even at the massacre at My Lai, the carnage eventually stopped after helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. threatened to turn his chopper guns on the 11th Brigade soldiers who were carrying out the slaughter on the morning of March 16, 1968.

  In Tiger Force, there was no end, no commanders to slam on the brakes. The Army wanted Tiger Force to terrorize the Vietnamese. The Army created a Frankenstein, and then turned it loose. The rampage ended only when the Army decided to end Operation Wheeler on November 25, 1967.

  Tufts was disgusted. Tiger Force was the battalion’s execution squad. What had happened to his Army? What had happened to the Army that saved the world from Nazi Germany during World War II? The Army of his generation was made up of commanders who did not routinely target civilians. There was a code of honor. Tufts was an old-school soldier. Despite the exigencies of battle, he believed commanders and soldiers should never abandon what’s right. They do not need to target civilians.

  To see young kids deteriorate into such a monstrous unit was an indictment of the Army itself. It was the Army that created Tiger Force. Now, it was up to Tufts to clean up the mess.

  But what Tufts didn’t know was that he was about to be ousted from his job. The longtime CID director had been under pressure to step down himself by Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, who years earlier had taken Westmoreland’s place as chief commander of forces in Vietnam. Tufts was trying to hang on to his office long enough to see the Tiger Force case through. With Nixon’s resignation, however, it was impossible. The new choice for the CID was Colonel Al Escola, a younger officer who was handpicked by Abrams. Escola liked Tufts but realized the old colonel’s days were numbered. “They wanted him out,” recalled Escola. “There was a decision: a change had to be made.”

  Before departing on a warm summer afternoon, Tufts packed up numerous mementos of his years in the CID, including letters and commendations and copies of the regulations he wrote that defined the agency. But he also took a batch of classified documents regarding one case—a rare move for someone who prided himself on following the rules. The files would stay in his basement for the rest of his life: Tiger Force.

  While Apsey waited for the last of the interviews to be sent to his office, he began examining the Army radio logs. Each entry—complete with grid numbers, dates, and times—showed where the unit was moving on a particular day. Using an old Army map of the Central Highlands, he began plotting Tiger Force’s movements across the Quang Ngai and into the Quang Tin provinces. Along with each entry was a brief description of what the unit was doing that day. For hours, he leaned over his desk, connecting the dots from hamlet to hamlet.

  His suspicions were raised when he began reading the daily radio logs for November 1967. Going over each day, he noticed the same phrase: “VC running from hut, resulting in VC killed.” Apsey counted forty-nine killed in a period of eleven days. For the same period of time, no weapons were found.

  What bothered Apsey even more was that the radio logs were routinely reviewed by the battalion commanders as well as monitored over the airwaves. Not only did the soldiers report enemy kills but they also reported the number of weapons seized. Somebody in the chain of command had to know the soldiers were shooting people who weren’t carrying any guns.

  In looking over the logs, he noticed something else out of place. The records showed that on November 19, 1967, the Tigers logged the 327th kill of the ongoing military campaign. He recalled that a command had been broadcast over the airwaves weeks earlier with a goal for the battalion: “We want 327 kills,” the same number as the battalion’s infantry designation. Suddenly, Apsey had a terrible revelation: Tiger Force hadn’t been killing scores of innocents. It had been killing hundreds.

  James Barnett rummaged through his dresser until he found his medals from Vietnam, including his Silver Star for gallantry, before slapping the drawers shut. Cursing, he stuffed the medals in a package, sealed it with tape, and then drove to the post office.

  Barnett had been angry ever since hearing the news on the radio that the newly sworn-in president, Gerald Ford, was offering amnesty to deserters and draft dodger
s who fled the country to escape service during the Vietnam War. Ford had been in the White House only five weeks when he announced the amnesty as a way to “heal the deep national divisions the war had caused.” To most political observers, his announcement on September 16 was the first real indication that the new president was serious about moving the country away from divisions created by the war. But to the former Tiger Force team leader, it was a cold slap in the face. It took Barnett several minutes to compose himself before addressing the envelope to the White House. It wasn’t so much the issue of patriotism that angered him. It was the fact that he had gone through so much hell when others were allowed to skate free.

  At twenty-nine, Barnett was suffering from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: sleeplessness, nightmares, and an anger that had been welling inside of him ever since the war. The last time he was this upset was when a CID agent—for the fifth time—showed up at his home on June 21. A furious Barnett had refused to be interviewed. He was tired of the military and tired of the government. He had already taken part in a war that was eating away at him every day, and didn’t think the Army had a right to intrude in his life.

  What the military should have been doing was arresting draft dodgers, not mollycoddling them. For the president to wipe away their crimes was shameless. “No one had a right to do that,” he told reporters after shipping the package to the president. Barnett’s comments were carried in the Tennessee newspapers, and by the time they were picked up by the news wires, Apsey received a call from an agent at Fort Campbell. Apsey was immediately alarmed. If Barnett was willing to go public about sending his medals to the White House, he could just as easily spill his guts about Tiger Force. No one wanted the case to blow up in the media—especially now. For starters, the Ford administration would not react well to the news. Members of the administration, including Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, were trying to move the country in a different direction. Schlesinger, who had continued in his cabinet post from the Nixon administration, was trying to set an agenda that called for the rebuilding of the military to meet a growing Soviet threat. Vietnam had taken a toll on the American psyche, with most of the world now believing the United States was essentially defeated in the war. Rumsfeld, who was in Brussels during much of the Watergate crisis as an ambassador to NATO, was a leading proponent of not only moving beyond Vietnam but reforming the military. Rumsfeld believed public opinion turned against the war because of high casualties, not because of the war itself. To avoid the kind of casualties that came with ground troops, he and others pushed for a modern military that depended on technology and surprise—meaning massive airpower. Under his watch, the MX intercontinental ballistic missile was developed along with the B-1 Bomber and the Mark 12A nuclear warhead.