Sallah and Weiss quickly discovered the lead investigator in the case was living in Washington state, his name appearing on the bottom of nearly every important document. Gustav Apsey was surprised by the call. Reluctantly, he agreed to talk about the investigation, a case he said was troubling and “the hardest investigation of my career.” Sallah asked whether there was ever a court-martial. Apsey said he couldn’t talk about it. “I’m retired, but technically, I can still be recalled to active duty. I can’t say anything else about this case.” He did admit he didn’t recall any hearing.
Over the next few months, the reporters began tracking down scores of former Tigers who served between May and November 1967—the period in question. Some of the names came from the Tiger Force Web site. Others were found in the records. The interview that opened the first door to understanding the soldiers’ actions took place in late February 2003, when Sallah and Weiss tracked down a former medic. Rion Causey would offer the first real hint that what was reported in the records was painfully true. Slightly balding and thin, Causey had a pleasant face and a gentle demeanor. On the surface, it looked like he was unaffected by the war. He said the Tigers were a brave unit with a high casualty rate. “They were great soldiers.” But when he agreed to an interview in the backyard of his home in Livermore, California, the afternoon sun streaming through the trees, Causey revealed another side. “We did things,” he said, “that still bother me to this day.” Several Tigers had just been killed when he joined the unit in late September, “and everybody was bloodthirsty at the same time, saying, ‘We’re going to get them back. We’re going to go back there. We’re going to even the score.’” For just the short time he was with the Tigers, he described a trail of atrocities in the Central Highlands. One hundred twenty people—Vietnamese—killed, unarmed, with no one knowing if they were the enemy, shot over a period of thirty-three days. “I counted them,” he said. “It was all about body count. Our commanders just wanted body count.” He described men who were out of control—and leaders who looked the other way. And then he said the words that resonated throughout the reporting process: “I still wonder how some people can sleep thirty years later.”
While Sallah was interviewing Causey, Weiss was uncovering more secrets—this time, from the dead. The reporter reached family members of Sam Ybarra and Ken “Boots” Green—two Tigers whose names appeared prominently in the records for war crimes but who were long deceased.
Ybarra’s mother, Therlene Ramos, confirmed everything the reporters needed to know about her son and the allegations against him. After returning from the war, Ybarra openly talked to her about killing women and children.
“He was alive,” she said, “but he was dead.”
He held one wish before he died, she said: to return to Vietnam and help the people whose lives he had torn apart. “Something happened to Sam, and he was trying, trying to make good on what he had done,” said Ramos. “He wanted to help the people. To say he was sorry. But he never made it. He died before he could do anything.” In his last years, Ybarra was a drug addict and alcoholic who was always ranting about Vietnam. The cops were constantly warning him about public drinking and disorderly conduct. He tried to spend time with his two daughters, but in the end was too weak to leave the house. When he died in 1982 of complications from cirrhosis of the liver, he weighed ninety-five pounds. He was thirty-six.
In all, Sallah and Weiss reached more than sixty-five Tigers, some by phone, others by finding where they lived and knocking at their doors. At times, it was frustrating, with many hanging up. Others were taken by surprise but reluctantly talked. Many had never told these stories to even their closest family members. Some, such as Douglas Teeters, then fifty-five, had battled drug and alcohol addiction. A few, such as Floyd Sawyer, fifty-six, had spent time in prison. Married four times, former sergeant Ernest Moreland in 1999 had placed the barrel of a .45 handgun in his mouth and threatened to kill himself. Knowing he needed help, he walked into a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Jacksonville. “My nervous system is overwhelmed by everything,” said the fifty-six-year-old veteran. He suffered flashbacks and insomnia, but he would not talk about any specific war crimes. “I could still be charged,” he said. In the course of these interviews, Sallah and Weiss began confirming what was in the records, and how the atrocities—three decades later—affected the men. Over the course of five telephone interviews, Barry Bowman said he was still haunted by one of the central war crimes in the Tiger Force case: the killing of an elderly man by unit leader James Hawkins. “I was sprayed by pieces of his skull,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Warwick, Rhode Island. Bowman wasn’t innocent, either, he confessed. He shot a wounded villager.
When Sallah and Weiss reached Harold Fischer, fifty-four, he was collecting disability after selling used cars for twenty years. Divorced and living in San Antonio, Texas, he still regretted not doing enough to stop the atrocities. “I knew the slaughter of civilians was morally wrong,” he said, but he feared retribution from platoon leaders for speaking out. He spent years battling drug and alcohol abuse. “It was my only escape.”
All of the Tigers interviewed said they recalled the CID investigation—many worrying they would be dragged into a court-martial. Now living in Salem, Oregon, Teeters said the investigation ruined his life. He said he lost his job after Army agents showed up and flashed their badges at an alarm company where he was a supervisor in Seattle in 1972. “My supervisor was really security minded,” he said; his boss was scared about any publicity that would come out. “My life kind of spiraled down after that. I went the other way,” he said. “It was the last time I really held a steady, good job.”
He still struggles with the memories of soldiers slaughtering unarmed civilians. “I wake up with those sweats, soaking wet, man,” he said. “It’s not as bad nowadays because I got these pills. I take Zoloft and Triazoline. It knocks me out. That’s the only way I’m able to get through this.” Sawyer, who performed odd jobs most of his life, spent seven years in prison for beating a man in a barroom fight. “I beat him half to death,” said the former combat engineer who currently lives in Washington state. “I got drunk, got into an argument, and went back to Vietnam.” Married three times, he said he “drinks a case of beer a night just to sleep. I’ve tried very hard not to think about Vietnam.”
Sallah and Weiss found Bill Carpenter, a former sheriff’s deputy, living in Jefferson County, Ohio. Alone and divorced, he has become the self-appointed historian for Tiger Force. He didn’t always pay this close attention to his former unit. In fact, during the CID investigation, he and other former platoon members stopped talking to one another. “People were scared,” he explained. “Everyone just kind of lost touch for years.” During reunions the men began to reconnect, swapping stories about their families, jobs, and war-related disabilities, but there were still two subjects they tried to avoid: the CID probe and their former platoon commander James Hawkins. Even today, that’s something not lost on Hawkins. When he was reached by phone at his home near Orlando before the newspaper series was published, he admitted to not being invited to the gatherings. “I know there are some of them who got differences with me,” he said.
He even went on to confirm some of the atrocities documented in the records. “Look,” he said, “I killed people I had to kill. If they were in a free-fire zone, they were fair game.”
Hawkins had volunteered for one more tour in Vietnam after leaving the Tigers, serving as a helicopter pilot and eventually retiring as a major in 1978. He then spent the next two decades as a civilian flight instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Twice, he ran into trouble with the law after retiring to Central Florida: once for shoplifting twenty dollars in goods from a Wal-Mart, another for soliciting an undercover female officer for sex. Neither offense resulted in any jail time.
Bald with a slight paunch, William Doyle still bears a tattoo on his trigger finger—the ace of spades—and lives in a dilapidated farmhous
e in Missouri. He criticized the CID investigation, saying no one understood what it was like to fight in Vietnam. “No one had any business looking into Tiger Force,” he snarled. Married with five daughters, Doyle said he only did what he had to do to survive while ordering the executions of dozens of unarmed civilians. “If I walked into a village and everyone wasn’t lying prostrate on the ground, I shot those standing up,” he told Weiss in a series of long, rambling telephone interviews. “If they didn’t understand fear, I taught it to them. We were living day to day. We didn’t expect to live. No one out there with any brains expected to live. We were surprised to be alive next week. So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing—especially to stay alive. I’m not saying you give up and die. You struggle to live. But the way to live is to kill, because you don’t have to worry about anybody who is dead.”
For all those Tigers who bothered to talk to the CID and who now feel guilty about not doing enough to stop the atrocities, he offered his thoughts: “Those sorry sons of bitches. What’s the matter with them?”
Doyle admitted to everything, adding that he only had one regret: he didn’t kill more Vietnamese.
Sallah and Weiss were anxious to reach the two Tigers who tried to stop the killing, Donald Wood and Gerald Bruner, but were disappointed when they learned the men were deceased. Wood was thirty-six when he suffered a brain aneurysm during his son’s soccer game in Findlay, Ohio, and died in 1983. Bruner died of throat cancer in 1997. He was fifty-nine. From conversations with Wood’s relatives, including his wife, son, and brother, it became clear that the onetime lieutenant avoided talking about the war. “There were things he saw that clearly bothered him,” said his son, John, thirty-two, a bank officer in South Bend, Indiana. “The killing of civilians. But he didn’t like to talk about it.” Wood only discussed the war after drinking—something he did often—and usually only to fellow vets. One was Henry Benz, a onetime neighbor and now a Pittsburgh public schools administrator. He said Wood mentioned Tiger Force but didn’t elaborate. “From what I could tell, he looked at the Vietnamese as people—not stereotypes. He tried to understand them.” In the Hancock County Courthouse, Wood was known as a lawyer who took on tough criminal defense cases that many lawyers in the conservative Findlay area wouldn’t touch. “He didn’t give a damn about what those people thought,” said his brother, Jim Wood. “He always told his kids to stick up for the underdog. I always knew there was something driving that, and it may have been his time in Vietnam.”
Bruner didn’t try to hide his disdain for the way the Tiger leaders treated civilians, relatives recalled. After receiving an honorable discharge from the Army in 1975 as a sergeant, he lived most of his life in Colon, Michigan, spending many years assisting veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Before he died, he recorded a tape in 1988 about his tours in Vietnam, recalling the shooting of the farmer by Doyle. In the tape, he condemned the killing. “He wanted it known what happened,” said his wife, Karen Bruner. “He could never accept what they did. That’s just not the way he was.” She said her husband always felt he was forced from the Army for talking in the Tiger Force case. “They were writing him up all the time for being late and really small stuff. He finally gave up and got out.”
Of the 120 soldiers who rotated in and out of the forty-five-member platoon during the seven months in question, less than a dozen were killed in combat, records showed. Two were killed in action in 1968: Captain Harold McGaha was killed on January 21, 1968, and Sergeant James Haugh died on March 27, 1968. Sallah and Weiss tried to reach James Barnett, but they found out he died of cancer on August 27, 2001, at the age of fifty-seven. They also learned that Terrence Kerrigan succumbed to cancer and related complications on December 15, 2000, at age fifty-two. Former Tiger team leader Sergeant Manuel Sanchez suffered a heart attack and died on July 15, 1992. He was forty-six. Other Tigers had passed away: James Cogan on July 26, 1993, at forty-five; Ervin Lee in 1977 at thirty; Forrest Miller in 1979 at forty-five; and Benjamin Edge in 1990 at fifty-three.
The key interview would be getting to the top commander: Gerald Morse, the man known as Ghost Rider. His name was all over the records. The reporters tracked him down in Arizona, where he is a well-known senior racquetball player. Morse, seventy-four, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 1979, agreed to a brief interview by phone, insisting he did not know the Tigers committed war crimes. “Not under my watch,” he snapped. But when Sallah and Weiss called him several times later to answer more questions, he refused to return the calls. When a Blade photographer showed up at his door, his wife peered through the curtains, asking the photojournalist to go away. “He wants to be left alone,” she said.
Harold Austin, seventy-three, who retired from the military in 1971, preceded Morse as battalion commander and is now living in Duncanville, Texas. Like Morse, he said he was unaware of serious problems in the unit. “If I knew what was going on, I would have cracked down,” he said. “But I don’t know if that would have stopped it. When you’re not in the field, you have no control over what’s going on.”
Carl James, sixty-two, the former captain and designated liaison between the Tigers and battalion headquarters, blamed the Tigers for the end of his military career. During a battalion reunion several years ago, he began railing about the investigation into the Tigers. “I told them they held up my promotion for years because of that damn investigation,” said James, who lives in suburban Los Angeles. “I got so sick and tired of the Army, by the time I was finally promoted I was ready to get out.” He retired from the military in 1980.
In all, Sallah and Weiss successfully interviewed forty-three veterans during the newspaper’s investigation, but just talking to the ex-soldiers wasn’t going to tell the whole story. Part of the investigation required going to Vietnam. The radio logs of the platoon from the period in question, showing the platoon’s movements from day to day, were still on file at the National Archives. Using Army grid maps from 1967, Sallah and Weiss were able to trace the trail of the Tigers.
With the assistance of a translator, the reporters spent sixteen days in the Quang Ngai and Quang Nam (formerly known as Quang Tin) provinces, visiting Quang Ngai City, Duc Pho, and later Tam Ky and the Que Son. They heard plenty about atrocities, but none could be connected to Tiger Force. But when Sallah and Weiss went to the Song Ve Valley, everything changed. Within three days of interviewing elders, the reporters found people who had witnessed three war crimes by the Tigers. Tam Hau, a frail, gray-haired seventy-year-old who was barely able to walk alone, described finding the bloodied body of her uncle, Dao Hue, who was carrying a shoulder bar with buckets at both ends stuffed with geese. Everything she described matched the soldiers’ statements. Then there was Nyugen Dam, sixty-six, a rice farmer who watched as the two blind brothers were executed by the Tigers in a rice paddy. The last war crime was recounted by Kieu Trak, seventy-two, who described the assault on the ten elderly farmers—including his father.
With the soldiers on one side of the world and the victims on the other, Sallah and Weiss were now prepared to ask the Pentagon, What happened to this case? During a sweep of records at the National Archives, the reporters discovered that summaries of the Tiger Force investigation were sent in 1973 to the offices of Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Army Secretary Howard “Bo” Callaway.
Sallah and Weiss called Schlesinger, Callaway, and others who served during that period. Schlesinger refused to return phone messages. Callaway said he didn’t remember the case. Through his secretary, President Ford declined to comment on atrocities during the Vietnam War. Schlesinger’s successor, Donald Rumsfeld, who was now serving his second stint as defense secretary, this time under President George W. Bush, would not talk about the case, either.
Stumped, the reporters went back to Apsey, who led the investigation, and in a moment of reflection, he broke his silence. “There was no political will,” he said. “They didn’t want to prosecute.” No one had directly told h
im the case was dead, but when they had shipped him to the CID office north of Seoul a few weeks after filing the final report, he knew why. “They were really concerned about the press finding out. It was a bucket of worms. So it was better that they be done with it. To just end it.” Apsey added that after all these years, he felt vindicated. “I can tell you that I have been waiting for this for thirty years,” he said. “I always understood that someday this may come up. I am just relieved that it has.”
After six months of research, interviews, and a dozen trips to Washington DC and other cities, as well as sixteen days in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the reporters wrote a four-part series in October 2003 that would eventually prod the Pentagon to reexamine the case. The story would reemerge in the middle of the 2004 presidential campaign as a debate surfaced over whether atrocities occurred in the war—with both candidates forced to revisit their own actions during the conflict. That same year, Sallah, Weiss, and a third reporter who joined the team later, Joe Mahr, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in recognition of their series on Tiger Force, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths.”
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