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Tiger Force
Tiger Force Read online
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedin any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,including information storage and retrieval systemswithout permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: May 2006
ISBN: 978-0-7595-1573-4
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
TO OUR WIVES AND CHILDREN
There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be made known.
LUKE 12:2
CAST OF CHARACTERS
TIGERS:
SERGEANT JAMES BARNETT
January 1967 to January 1968
PRIVATE EDWARD BECK
June 1967 to September 1967 (KIA: September 29, 1967)
SERGEANT GERALD BRUNER
August 1967 to September 1967
SPECIALIST WILLIAM CARPENTER
January 1967 to December 1967
PRIVATE DANIEL CLINT
August 1967 to May 1968
PRIVATE JAMES COGAN
June 1967 to September 1967
SERGEANT ROBERT DIAZ
April 1966 to September 1967
SERGEANT BENJAMIN EDGE
June 1967 to August 1967
SERGEANT CHARLES FULTON
June 1967 to September 1967
SPECIALIST KENNETH “BOOTS” GREEN
June 1967 to September 1967 (KIA: September 29, 1967)
SERGEANT JAMES HAUGH
May 1967 to March 1968 (KIA: March 27, 1968)
SERGEANT LEO HEANEY
December 1966 to October 1967
PRIVATE JERRY INGRAM
June 1967 to September 1967 (KIA: September 27, 1967)
PRIVATE KENNETH KERNEY
May 1967 to December 1967
PRIVATE TERRENCE KERRIGAN
May 1967 to May 1968
PRIVATE GARY “LITTLE SKI” KORNATOWSKI
September 1966 to October 1967
PRIVATE JAMES MESSER
August 1967 (KIA: August 22, 1967)
SERGEANT ERNEST MORELAND
September 1966 to October 1967
SERGEANT TERRY LEE OAKDEN
September 1967 (KIA: September 20, 1967)
PRIVATE CECIL PEDEN
June 1967 to September 1967
PRIVATE FLOYD SAWYER
July 1967 to October 1967
PRIVATE SAM YBARRA
April 1967 to January 1968
TEAM LEADERS:
SERGEANT WILLIAM DOYLE
June 1967 to November 1967
SERGEANT ERVIN LEE
July 1966 to October 1967
SERGEANT DOMINGO MUNOZ
May 1967 to July 1967 (KIA: July 28, 1967)
SERGEANT MANUEL SANCHEZ JR.
December 1966 to July 1967
SERGEANT HAROLD TROUT
March 1967 to February 1968
SERGEANT ROBIN VARNEY
November 1966 to September 1967
(KIA: September 27, 1967)
MEDICS:
PRIVATE MICHAEL ALLUMS
January 1967 to April 1968
SPECIALIST BARRY BOWMAN
May 1967 to September 1967
PRIVATE RION CAUSEY
October 1967 to March 1968
PRIVATE HAROLD FISCHER III
September 1967 to January 1968
PRIVATE RALPH MAYHEW
August 1967 to December 1967
SERGEANT FORREST MILLER
May 1967 to May 1968
PRIVATE DOUGLAS TEETERS
May 1967 to December 1967
OFFICERS:
LIEUTENANT COLONEL HAROLD AUSTIN
June 1967 to August 1967
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOSEPH COLLINS
September 1966 to June 1967
LIEUTENANT GARY FORBES
March 1967 to May 1967
LIEUTENANT JAMES HAWKINS
July 1967 to November 1967
CAPTAIN CARL JAMES
June 1967 to November 1967
CAPTAIN HAROLD MCGAHA
November 1967 to January 1968 (KIA: January 21, 1968)
LIEUTENANT COLONEL GERALD MORSE
August 1967 to December 1967
CAPTAIN BRADFORD MUTCHLER
November 1966 to November 1967
CAPTAIN LARRY NAUGHTON
May 1967 to June 1967
LIEUTENANT STEPHEN NAUGHTON
June 1967 to July 1967
LIEUTENANT EDWARD SANDERS
August 1967 to November 1967
LIEUTENANT DONALD WOOD
June 1967 to August 1967
C COMPANY:
PRIVATE JOHN AHERN
July 1967 to March 1968 (KIA: March 16, 1968)
PRIVATE GARY COY
August 1967 to November 1967
CID:
WARRANT OFFICER GUSTAV APSEY
CAPTAIN EARL PERDUE
CAPTAIN FRANK SUGAR
COLONEL HENRY TUFTS
COLONEL KENNETH WEINSTEIN
INTRODUCTION
1975
The sun glared off the hood of his blue Buick as Gustav Apsey peered through the windshield at the white clapboard shack. Rust stains ran down the sun-bleached wood, and scattered around the home were beer cans, cardboard boxes, and a rusty tailpipe from a pickup truck. There were no mansions on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, just miles of scrub and cacti and rows of shacks built on dry sand and clay. It was one of the poorest and most desolate areas of southeastern Arizona, a no-man’s-land where generations of Native Americans survived on food stamps and other government handouts.
Apsey slowly pulled into the gravel driveway and turned off the ignition.
For a moment, he stared at the shack’s door and then at its windows, trying to catch any movement through the flimsy sheer curtains and cracked glass masked with tape. Just two days earlier, shots were fired over the top of a police car that had pulled into the drive on a disturbance call. Instead of radioing for backup, the patrol officer turned his car around and left. “It’s just Crazy Sam,” he said to the dispatcher at the reservation. The police had long known to ignore the man who lived in the shack at the end of the road. And you certainly did not want to encounter Sam Ybarra when he was drunk.
For Apsey, an Army investigator, it was important to get the tribal police to accompany him, since he was a federal agent on their land now, on their reservation. But when he had gone to the police station, the officers had been less than thrilled to help. They were Apache, just like Ybarra, and there wasn’t exactly a long history of benefits for the tribe when they helped out white guys from the U.S. Army.<
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Reservation police chief Robert Youngdeer told the investigator about Ybarra’s drinking and warned that he might even fire his gun at Apsey’s car. But Apsey was undeterred. He had waited too long for this and traveled too far. He assured Youngdeer he was only going to question Ybarra—not arrest him. Besides, Apsey didn’t want to have to come back with more agents. There was already bad blood between the feds and Native American activists on other reservations, and no one needed any trouble at San Carlos.
Youngdeer agreed to assign reservation police sergeant Frank Cutter to follow the agent’s car to Ybarra’s home; he couldn’t spare any more officers. He had only thirty to cover one of the largest reservations in the Southwest, an expanse of land that could have been an entire state: 1.8 million haunted acres.
Apsey opened his car door and stepped onto the driveway, while fellow investigator Larry Pereiro bounded out the passenger side. Cutter, who trailed the investigators in another car, joined the men.
The three walked slowly to the door.
Apsey knocked and peered through a torn screen at a dark figure on a couch just inside.
“What do you want?” asked the man without getting up.
Apsey responded, “Are you Sam Ybarra?”
The man didn’t move.
Apsey knew it was Ybarra. He had seen pictures of him and knew this is where he lived.
“We’re here to talk to you,” Apsey said.
After a moment of tense silence, Apsey saw the man raise his hand and motion for the men to enter.
Apsey slowly opened the door and stepped in, followed by the others. It was sweltering inside. The air reeked of urine and sweat, and flies swarmed over a table covered with beer bottles and food that had been left out for days.
Ybarra’s face was gaunt and yellowish as he leaned back on the sofa, his hollow eyes expressionless. He was unshaved, and his soaked T-shirt and shorts clung to a body that had shriveled from 200 pounds in the Army to about 145 pounds. To Apsey, the man on the couch hardly bore a resemblance to the once burly Vietnam paratrooper whose battlefield exploits had been written about in Stars and Stripes.
Apsey introduced himself, flashing a badge from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and then introduced Pereiro, who flipped open a wallet showing his Army badge.
Ybarra didn’t flinch. Instead, he sat motionless, his eyes darting from one man to the other. Targeting. He had been visited by Army investigators before and had always refused to cooperate—three times before.
Apsey opened a notebook, jotted down the date—March 21, 1975—and began, “You are a suspect in a military investigation and are under investigation for murder, body mutilations, and conduct unbecoming a soldier.”
Apsey waited for a response, but Ybarra sat stone-faced. Apsey stood in silence, listening to the flies buzz and his own breathing.
Finally Ybarra slowly rose to his feet, prompting the police sergeant to move closer to him. The former paratrooper looked at Apsey for a moment and then quietly said, “I want a lawyer.”
The Army investigator closed his notebook and stared at Ybarra. “Are you sure?” he asked. Ybarra nodded without saying a word.
Apsey stood for a moment, knowing this was his last chance. “I was hoping we could talk,” he said. “I came a long way to see you.”
Ybarra folded his arms and turned away. There was no use in trying to ask any more questions. Apsey hesitated momentarily, his frustration apparent to the others, then turned and walked out the door as the others followed.
As he climbed back into his car, Apsey realized this was the end. No more interviews and no more trips around the country.
During the drive to the Phoenix airport, Apsey’s mind began to drift back over the endless hours he had spent on the case: The nights he was hunched over a Royal typewriter at his office—alone—writing questions for agents to ask suspects. The reports he was forced to write for commanders. The trips he made around the clock to the mimeograph machine to copy files.
For three years, he lived and breathed this case. For three years, he had descended into an unimaginable nightmare, thirty-six months of blood and fear and ghosts. Trips to the grocery store or restaurants with his wife weren’t the same anymore, his mind wandering to the images described over and over in sworn statements. Even to grizzled war-crimes investigators like Apsey, the details were outrageous, and no one in the story was as frightening as the man back in that shack—a half Apache, half Mexican soldier who, among other things, had once worn necklaces of human ears and tied a scalp on the end of his rifle as a trophy.
“I wanted him to talk to me,” Apsey wistfully told the other investigator in the car. Perhaps Ybarra could have explained what happened.
Apsey shook his head, just as he did so many other times. An Austrian immigrant who was educated by Jesuits in his native country, he was appalled by what he had learned over the past several years. It was counter to everything he knew about the people of his adopted country.
Apsey pulled into the airport, his mind drifting to the same question he had grappled with every spare moment since beginning the case. And after an investigation that had led agents to more than sixty-three Army bases and cities around the world, he didn’t have the answer. Perhaps it was right there in front of him, but the darkness was too profound to make it out.
In the night gloom, Sam Ybarra stumbled toward his mother’s trailer, just beyond the scrubland that covered one end of the San Carlos Indian Reservation.
Though he was drunk, he knew the road by heart. Since his dishonorable discharge from the Army in 1969, this was his world—a desolate area one hundred miles east of Phoenix and home to thousands of Native Americans for generations. Most of his days began with a beer and a joint, if he could get a young Apache to score for him. By late afternoon, he was passed out.
Ever since Apsey and Pereiro had left his house earlier in the day, Ybarra had been restless, pacing the floor. He began downing bottles of Coors shortly after his visitors departed and hadn’t stopped until he walked out the door of his shack to go to his mother’s.
He reached his mother’s home and opened the back door. Therlene Ramos kept the door open for her son even when she wasn’t home. He plopped down on a couch in the living room, hoping the thoughts would fade, or end altogether. But each time he closed his eyes, the memories would rush back. The more he tried to forget, the more he remembered.
The door opened, and suddenly Therlene walked into the home. She flicked on a light to find her son once again in her living room. He was curled on the couch, tears in his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He responded, “It’s my life. What I did. What I did. I killed people, Mama. I killed regular people. I shouldn’t have. My God, what did I do?”
Therlene had seen her son shake and cry before, but not like this. Maybe it had something to do with the visit by the Army investigators, word of which was already making the rounds on the reservation.
Therlene knew that when Sam was like this, the best thing she could do was listen. She didn’t want to push him; she didn’t want to know the details, or why the Army kept returning to his home to ask him questions about a war that ended for her when her son returned.
But for Sam, the war was always there, and nothing could make him forget, especially after investigators showed up. This time, they hadn’t even asked him about the others: Hawkins, Trout, Barnett, Doyle. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw their faces—and the faces of those they killed.
He had promised his family he would never talk about what happened when he served with Tiger Force. Never. That was part of his past. But in the darkness, he would wake up sweating, and sometimes the slightest noise would roust him from his sleep. His wife would reassure him he was not in Vietnam, that he was home—in his own bed. Still, there were times she would watch him as he cried in his sleep, or as he jumped up in bed and acted like he had a rifle in his hand, “in his fighting stance,” recalle
d Janice Little.
Sitting on his mother’s sofa, Ybarra began sobbing uncontrollably. With all the beer he had been drinking, he should have been passed out by now, but he was too upset by the people who came to his door.
“He said to me, ‘Oh, I really feel bad. I asked God to forgive me for what I did, for killing all those people, all those civilians, all those children,’” recalled his mother.
As he always did when facing the nightmares, Ybarra would bring up his best friend, Kenneth “Boots” Green. The memories of Boots lying in the dirt, blood gushing from his head, haunted Ybarra. “Why did he have to die?” he asked his mother between tears. “Why?”
Because when it all got crazy, when Boots went down in an ambush on September 29, 1967, that’s when Ybarra really lost control. And now he was afraid everyone would know what he had been trying to lock away for years.
CHAPTER 1
1967
Even through the haze of smoke in the dimly lit lounge, Sam Ybarra glimpsed Ken Green as he walked through the door. “Kenny, over here!” shouted Ybarra over the music blaring from a tape deck. Meeting, the two friends hugged as the other soldiers looked up from their beers and shot glasses.
It had been nearly a year since they arrived in Vietnam, and this was one of the few weekends the two could meet on a break. They’d been waiting it out, and now at long last it was time to down beers and later slip into the brothels that lined the streets of Kontum. Green introduced Sam to two buddies, Leon Fletcher and Ed Beck. For days, Ken had been telling them about his time with “Crazy Sam”—cruising the streets of Globe, Arizona, in Green’s blue 1964 Chevelle SS, guzzling Ripple with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” crackling over the radio. And now, in this sad and near corner of Southeast Asia, the two old friends were together again.
To most people, they were as opposite as they were close: Green was boyish, good-looking, and cocky—the type of guy who could turn heads in a crowded room. Ybarra was dark skinned, with a round, pockmarked face—awkwardly shy unless he was drinking. But for all their differences, they shared something in common: they were constantly in trouble.