BY ELIZABETH SCHULTE
The Toledo Blade newspaper ran a four-part investigative series, beginning October 22, in which journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss exposed terrible war crimes committed during the Vietnam War by an elite US Army platoon called the Tiger Force. The Tiger Force killings were on the scale of the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre, in which 500 Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered by US soldiers. The story was locked away in government files — until now.
"It was out of control", Rion Causey, a former Tiger Force medic, told the Blade reporters. "I still wonder how some people can sleep after 30 years." Between May and November 1967, the Tiger Force, an elite platoon of the 101st Airborne division of the US Army, moved across the central highlands of South Vietnam. They left behind a path of death and destruction.
In their eight-month investigation, Sallah and Weiss reviewed thousands of classified army documents, National Archive records and radio logs, and interviewed more than 100 former Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. They found not only that the Tiger Force was responsible for horrifying war crimes, but that the army and US government did nothing to stop them.
"A culture had developed within the unit that went far beyond aggression", Sallah explained to the November 14 US Socialist Worker. "Many members of the platoon went far beyond the bounds of war and began killing unarmed civilians — men, women and children — in some cases, very routinely, very systematically."
As soon as the Tiger Force arrived in Quang Ngai province in May 1967, it was clear that it was out for blood. Reports show that the US troops not only tortured and executed captured Vietnamese soldiers, but also routinely went after civilians.
In June, they shot a Buddhist monk for complaining about the treatment of villagers. One soldier shot a 15-year-old boy because, the soldier said, he wanted the boy's tennis shoes. Then he cut off the 15-year-old's ears and put them in a ration bag.
"There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears", former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told army investigators. Others would kick out the teeth of the dead to collect the gold fillings.
'Free-fire' zone
The Tiger Force was sent into the Song Ve Valley, led by field commander Lieutenant James Hawkins. Its assignment was to move villagers from their rice farms to "relocation camps" — imprisoned behind barbed wire and concrete, without food or shelter. For the next two months, the platoon burned villages and terrorised civilians.
According to the army, the valley was a "free-fire" zone. Technically, this meant that soldiers didn't need permission from commanders to fire on enemy troops. In practice, it meant that Tiger Force members were free to fire on anyone — soldiers and civilian alike.
"We killed anything that walked", former sergeant William Doyle, a platoon team leader, told the Blade. "It didn't matter if they were civilians. They shouldn't have been there", he added. For example, US soldiers fired on 10 elderly farmers who were simply working their crops.
"We wouldn't even have meals because of the smell", Vietnamese villager Nguyen Dam, now 66 years old, told the Blade. "There were so many villagers who died, we couldn't bury them one by one. We had to bury them all in one grave."
In August, the platoon moved on to Quang Nam province. The next month, the US Army launched Operation Wheeler, one of the bloodiest campaigns of 1967. Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Morse, nicknamed "Ghost Rider", was put in charge of a battalion made up of Tiger Force and three other units. He gave his "A", "B" and "C" companies new names: Assassins, Barbarians and Cutthroats. The soldiers lived up to these names.
Within weeks of arriving in the area, US troops faced fierce opposition from Vietnamese national liberation forces. In response to ambushes that killed five Tiger Force members, US troops went on a rampage, murdering unarmed civilians. "Everybody was bloodthirsty at the time, saying, 'We're going to get them back... We're going to even the score'", recalled Causey.
To cover up the mass murders, platoon leaders began to count dead civilians as Vietnamese soldiers. Army records show that this vicious killing spree included the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl and the decapitation of a baby so that a Tiger Force soldier could take the baby's necklace.
When women and children crawled into underground bunkers to hide, troops threw grenades into the holes. "We kept hearing human sounds which came from the direction of the bunkers", platoon member Charles Fulton told investigators. "They were the sounds of people that had been hurt and were trying to get someone's attention to get help."
In a few cases, US soldiers stood up to the senseless killing. Sergeant Gerald Bruner turned his gun on a fellow platoon member in order to stop him from shooting a Vietnamese teenager. Afterward, Bruner's commander yelled at him and told him to see a psychiatrist.
But for the most part, US soldiers who considered reporting the atrocities didn't — because their leaders warned them not to. "The commanders told me: 'What goes on here, stays here. You never tell anyone about what goes on here. If we find out you did, you won't like it'", said former private Ken Kerney.
From the top
In fact, murder and mayhem was encouraged from the top. Colonel Morse demanded that troops meet a body count number — 327, to match the battalion's infantry designation, the 327th. When the campaign was over in November, Sam Ybarra — the soldier who killed the teenager for his shoes — was congratulated in the US military's Stars and Stripes newspaper for the 1000th kill in Operation Wheeler.
Although the atrocities committed by the Tiger Force had been reported as early as 1967, the US Army didn't conduct an official investigation until 1971. During that four-and-a-half-year inquiry, the army substantiated 20 war crimes by 18 Tiger Force soldiers. No charges were ever filed.
At least six suspects were allowed to leave the army during the investigation, and therefore avoided being court-martialled. Witnesses also left. Former Tiger Force members told the Blade that army investigators encouraged them not to say anything. And when lead investigator Gustav Apsey presented his final report in 1975, it was so incomplete and inaccurate that it failed to make a clear case on key crimes.
In other cases, soldiers got a break from higher-ups. Under military law, it is up to the soldiers' commanding general to decide whether to prosecute — so none were. In fact, three war-crimes suspects were later promoted.
The cover-up didn't stop there. In 1973, summaries of the Tiger Force investigation were sent to US President Richard Nixon and the offices of secretary of defence James Schlesinger and secretary of the army Howard Callaway.
"If they had investigated this [and] said the army can't tolerate this and made it known at the time, there's a very real case to be made that we would have never had a My Lai", Sallah said. "When you look at where these war crimes occurred, they were only 10 or 12 miles away, in some cases, from where My Lai happened."
A week after the Blade's expose, the US Army was forced to agree to reopen the Tiger Force case. But the real question has to be asked: how many more US war crimes are left to be uncovered?
Trained to be murderers
"The killing haunts me every minute of my life", former Tiger Force member Douglas Teeters told the Blade. "To survive, you had to say, 'The killing don't mean nothing'. That's how you got through it. But eventually, it all catches up with you."
Today, Teeters is on medication, suffering from post-traumatic distress disorder, like another 500,000 Vietnam War veterans. He lives with the nightmares of what he saw and did.
The soldiers in the Tiger Force weren't born killers. They had to be trained to be killing machines. "Basic training is meant to teach you to disregard all the norms of civilisation and religion, and do violence against others for no reason except on the order of higher authority", Barry Romo, a former infantry lieutenant and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, told Socialist Worker.
Racism is also a key component. In Iraq, the US occupiers have been granted a license to kill. So far, not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians, including those who shot down 14 peaceful protesters in Fallujah in April.
Massacres like that will happen more often, as Iraqi opposition to Washington's brutal occupation grows. It's no wonder that Stars and Stripes reported in October that morale is low among US troops, who went to Iraq thinking they were "liberators".
"I pity the troops going back after spending two weeks on leave — with no end in sight", said Romo. "There will be combined feelings of sorrow, apprehension at dying, people being pissed off at the brass and not being able to take it out on them, but taking it out on Iraqis, and being put in situations where they shoot first and ask questions later."
You can read the Toledo Blade's series, "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths", at .
[From Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organisation. Visit .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 19, 2003.
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