DAY 1: Rogue GIs unleashed wave of terror in Central Highlands
By MICHAEL D. SALLAH and MITCH WEISS
BLADE STAFF WRITERS c THE BLADE, 2003
QUANG NGAI, Vietnam - For the 10 elderly farmers in the rice paddy, there was nowhere to hide.
The river stretched along one side, mountains on the other.
Approaching quickly in between were the soldiers - an elite U.S. Army unit known as Tiger Force.
Though the farmers were not carrying weapons, it didn't matter: No one was safe when the special force arrived on July 28, 1967.
No one.
With bullets flying, the farmers - slowed by the thick, green plants and muck - dropped one by one to the ground.
Within minutes, it was over. Four were dead, others wounded. Some survived by lying motionless in the mud.
Four soldiers later recalled the assault.
"We knew the farmers were not armed to begin with," one said, "but we shot them anyway."
The unprovoked attack was one of many carried out by the decorated unit in the Vietnam War, an eight-month investigation by The Blade shows.
The platoon - a small, highly trained unit of 45 paratroopers created to spy on enemy forces - violently lost control between May and November, 1967.
For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.
They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.
They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.
A review of thousands of classified Army documents, National Archives records, and radio logs reveals a fighting unit that carried out the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War - and commanders who looked the other way.
For 41/2 years, the Army investigated the platoon, finding numerous eyewitnesses and substantiating war crimes. But in the end, no one was prosecuted, the case buried in the archives for three decades.
No one knows how many unarmed men, women, and children were killed by platoon members 36 years ago.
At least 81 were fatally shot or stabbed, records show, but many others were killed in what were clear violations of U.S. military law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Based on more than 100 interviews with The Blade of former Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, the platoon is estimated to have killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in those seven months.
"We weren't keeping count," said former Pvt. Ken Kerney, a California firefighter. "I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice."
Many details of the period in question are unknown: Records are missing from the National Archives, and several suspects and witnesses have died.
In many cases, the soldiers remember the atrocities and general locations, but not the precise dates.
What's clear is that nearly four decades later, many Vietnamese villagers and former Tiger Force soldiers are deeply troubled by the brutal killing of villagers.
"It was out of control," said Rion Causey, 55, a former platoon medic and now a nuclear engineer. "I still wonder how some people can sleep 30 years later."
Among the newspaper's findings:
Commanders knew about the platoon's atrocities in 1967, and in some cases, encouraged the soldiers to continue the violence.
Two soldiers who tried to stop the atrocities were warned by their commanders to remain quiet before transferring to other units.
The Army investigated 30 war-crime allegations against Tiger Force between February, 1971, and June, 1975, finding a total of 18 soldiers committed crimes, including murder and assault. But no one was ever charged.
Six platoon soldiers suspected of war crimes - including an officer - were allowed to resign during the investigation, escaping military prosecution.
The findings of the investigation were sent to the offices of the secretary of the Army and the secretary of defense, records show, but no action was taken.
Top White House officials, including John Dean, former chief counsel to President Richard Nixon, repeatedly were sent reports on the progress of the investigation.
To this day, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command refuses to release thousands of records that could explain what happened and why the case was dropped. Army spokesman Joe Burlas said last week it may have been difficult to press charges, but he couldn't explain flaws in the investigation.
But one former soldier offers no apologies for the platoon's actions.
William Doyle, a former Tiger Force sergeant now living in Missouri, said he killed so many civilians he lost count.
"We were living day to day. We didn't expect to live. Nobody out there with any brains expected to live," he said in a recent interview. "So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing - especially to stay alive. The way to live is to kill because you don't have to worry about anybody who's dead."
Battle-tested platoon drew special mission
In a conflict marked by fierce guerrilla warfare, the task force needed a special unit to move quickly through the jungles, find the enemy, and set up ambushes. That role fell to Tiger Force.
Considered an elite arm of the 101st Airborne Division, the platoon - formed in 1965 - often broke into small teams to scout the enemy, creeping into the jungle in tiger-striped fatigues, soft-brimmed hats, with rations to last 30 days.
Not everyone could join the platoon: Soldiers had to volunteer, needed combat experience, and were subjected to a battery of questions - some about their willingness to kill.
The majority of those men were enlistees who came from small towns such as Rayland, Ohio, Globe, Ariz., and Loretto, Tenn.
By the time Tiger Force arrived in the province on May 3, 1967, the unit already had fought in fierce battles farther south in My Cahn and Dak To.
But this was a different place.
With deep ties to the land, the people of Quang Ngai province were fiercely independent.
In this unfamiliar setting, things began to go wrong.
No one knows what set off the events that led to the deaths of untold numbers of civilians and prisoners.
But less than a week after setting up camp in the province, Tiger Force members began to break the rules of war.
It started with prisoners.
During a morning patrol on May 8, the soldiers spotted two suspected Viet Cong - the local militia opposed to U.S. intervention - along the Song Tra Cau River. One jumped into the water and escaped through an underwater tunnel, but the other was captured.
Taller and more muscular than most Vietnamese, the soldier was believed to be Chinese.
Over the next two days, he was repeatedly beaten and tortured. At one point, his captors debated whether to blow him up with explosives, according to sworn witness statements.
One former soldier, Spec. William Carpenter, told The Blade he tried to keep the prisoner alive, "but I knew his time was up."
After he was ordered to run - and told he was free - he was shot by several unidentified soldiers.
The platoon's treatment of the detainee - his beating and execution - became the unit's operating procedure in the ensuing months.
Time and again, Tiger Force soldiers talked about the executions of captured soldiers - so many, investigators were hard pressed to place a number on the toll.
In June, Pvt. Sam Ybarra slit the throat of a prisoner with a hunting knife before scalping him - placing the scalp on the end of a rifle, soldiers said in sworn statements. Ybarra refused to talk to Army investigators about the case.
Another prisoner was ordered to dig bunkers, then beaten with a shovel before he was shot to death, records state.
The killing prompted a medic to talk to a chaplain. "It upset me so much to watch him die," Barry Bowman said in a recent interview.
One Tiger Force soldier, Sgt. Forrest Miller, told investigators the killing of prisoners was "an unwritten law."
But platoon members weren't just executing prisoners: They began to target unarmed civilians.
In June, an elderly man in black robes and believed to be a Buddhist monk was shot to death after he complained to soldiers about the treatment of villagers. A grenade was placed on his body to disguise him as an enemy soldier, platoon members told investigators.
That same month, Ybarra shot and killed a 15-year-old boy near the village of Duc Pho, reports state. He later told soldiers he shot the youth because he wanted the teenager's tennis shoes.
The shoes didn't fit, but Ybarra ended up carrying out what became a ritual among platoon members: He cut off the teenager's ears and placed them in a ration bag, Specialist Carpenter told investigators.
During the Army's investigation of Tiger Force, 27 soldiers said the severing of ears from dead Vietnamese became an accepted practice. One reason: to scare the Vietnamese.
Platoon members strung the ears on shoe laces to wear around their necks, reports state.
Former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told investigators: "There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears."
Records show soldiers began another gruesome practice: Kicking out the teeth of dead civilians for their gold fillings.
For medic Rion Causey, the war was no longer about killing civilians but defending American strongholds as the enemy moved toward Saigon.
As the base camp was overrun and soldiers were dying, he came to a grim conclusion:
"The only way out of Tiger Force was to be injured or killed."
He was right.
On March 6, 1968, he was injured, and as he was lifted by the helicopter, he recalled looking at the Tiger Force soldiers below.
"I remember just kind of saying to myself: ?'God help you guys for what you did. God help you.'"
