the swiftly accelerating descent into hell described in this book is captured succinctly in the following paragraph, told from the perspective in November 1967 of Army Pvt. Kenneth Kerney, then a member of the elite fighting unit known as Tiger Force:
“Kerney had watched the total breakdown of a unit. He remembered in June when there was a camaraderie and sense of goodwill. Back then, the Tigers were bad—–, but they weren’t murderers. . . . What scared him was that there was no one to stop these assaults, that the leaders were actually encouraging it.”
“Tiger Force” chronicles the longest war-crimes case of the Vietnam War, a case comparable in notoriety to the My Lai Massacre. But My Lai, however infamous, took place in one day, not over seven months – and My Lai was exposed, whereas Tiger Force was covered up for more than three decades.
Covered up, that is, until October 2003, when the Toledo Blade newspaper published a four-part series telling what happened in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam from May to November 1967. Acting on a tip, Blade reporters Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss and John Mahr undertook a months-long investigation that resulted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning series. Sallah and Weiss then expanded their investigation into this compelling book.
Tiger Force was a special-purpose platoon in the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, a tough, commando-style outfit used for reconnaissance and scouting-type missions. It was a respected and useful, if rough-and-ready, force.
But as things began to go increasingly bad for U.S. forces, pressure was put on for “results.” The pressure, inevitably passed down military-fashion, led to the ungluing of Tiger Force.
The Tigers, frustrated by weeks of being hit by snipers in the Song Ve Valley, committed unacceptable acts of “revenge.” Their platoon leader, an incompetent whom they hated, gave the order, “Shoot anything that moves!”
In August, upon moving to a base at Chu Lai in Quang Tin province – and the start of Operation Wheeler, an extreme search- and-destroy operation – the descent began in earnest. They killed villagers hiding in bunkers en masse with grenades. They fired on entire villages indiscriminately, killing civilians, not enemy combatants.
GIs committed barbarous acts, cutting off ears, noses, scalps. Corpses were mutilated. A recently slain baby was beheaded. A young mother was shot dead, point-blank. Uncounted numbers of innocent people, probably in the hundreds, were killed.
Rogue soldiers? Yes, but who created them? The authors point out that, in the opinion of the head of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (known as CID) in the 1970s, “The Army wanted Tiger Force to terrorize the Vietnamese. . . . The rampage ended only when the Army decided to end Operation Wheeler on November 25, 1967.”
Further, those in authority deliberately chose to ignore warnings about what was going on. The lead CID investigator in the 1970s concluded that “battalion commanders knew what was happening in the field.”
One Tiger Force sergeant said years later, “It was plain, flat-out murder.” He had tried to resist, and believed his outfit should have been pulled from the field. “They were beyond burned out. They were beyond combat fatigue.”
That didn’t matter. They were producing high body counts – whether civilian or military seemed immaterial – and that’s what the brass wanted. “You’re the 327th Infantry,” a voice on the radio, identified later as that of the battalion commander, said. “We want 327 kills.”
Sallah and Weiss have done a commendable job of telling not only the overarching combat story, but the often wrenching personal stories as well.
Their conclusions seem well founded – indeed, they are founded in large part on the Army’s own extensive investigation (which never saw the light of day). They interviewed scores of people: former Tigers, soldiers’ relatives, former CID investigators. They scoured reams of documents, including sworn statements made during the three-year CID probe.
The damning, 55-page CID report that in 1975 came out of that probe was quietly covered up after it was sent to the secretaries of defense and army. The head of the CID was forced out. The lead CID investigator was reassigned to South Korea.
An unstated lesson in all of this lies in Pvt. Kerney’s observation above and rings across the years. It is that to get what they think they want our masters will give us enough rope to hang ourselves, and then, when they fear they will be complicit in a crime, deplore the easy availability of hemp.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, graduated from the Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., and served in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1969.
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Tiger Force
A True Story of Men and War
By Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
Little, Brown, 388 pages, $25.95
