Tiger Force Read online

  Diem was killed in a coup on November 1, 1963, and just three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. But American policy stayed the same. President Lyndon Johnson increased aid to the country, though he resisted pressure to send combat troops until the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

  On August 2, 1964, two North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the USS Maddox, a destroyer on an intelligence-gathering mission in the waters off North Vietnam. Two days later, another attack on the destroyer, this time involving North Vietnamese torpedoes, was reported. In fact, there was no evidence to support the claim. But Johnson accused the North Vietnamese of a blatant attack on a U.S. ship, and he convinced Congress to pass a special resolution granting him the extraordinary power to take retaliatory action. In the next several months, U.S. warplanes dropped thousands of bombs over North Vietnamese military targets, and in March 1965, the first ground forces arrived.

  There was little debate among Americans over whether the country should be involved in the conflict. Soldiers such as Green, Ybarra, and Beck were oblivious to the history of Vietnam. All they knew was that the Communists were trying to take over another country—just like they had taken over Eastern Europe and China. Like so many other new arrivals, they were convinced American firepower would force the enemy to surrender and American troops would soon be home. They were all going to be heroes.

  CHAPTER 2

  The veterans who served with Ybarra knew he liked to be alone. He ate by himself and slept in his own tent. Even on patrols, he walked alone. Most of the Tigers learned after a few weeks to stay out of his way, because you never knew which Sam you were going to get. He could be surly, other times, cool. Ybarra once pulled a knife on another soldier because he thought the soldier was laughing at him. He rarely smiled, but when he spotted Green hopping off the arriving convoy truck, he jumped up and threw his arms around his old friend.

  It had been three weeks since Ybarra convinced his buddy to join the Tigers. Green was the last replacement for a platoon that had not been at full strength since what they were now calling the Mother’s Day Massacre. For Green, it was easy to get into the platoon, partly because eager commanders had scrapped the more rigorous screening process in order to get the Tigers back into action. Some of the new soldiers had even been allowed into the Tigers with little or no combat experience.

  Over the past several days, new recruits had been arriving, and for the first time in weeks, the camp was busy. Transport trucks were bringing in M16s, M60s, M79s, and ammunition, while UH-1 and CH-47 helicopters were dropping off rations and other supplies. It was easy to spot the veterans in the camp. Some wore beards—a rule violation in other units, but not in Tiger Force—and others were dressed in dirty, faded fatigues. Some of the new Tigers were playing poker with veterans, and others were in their tents, door flaps open, reading letters from home.

  Ybarra showed Green around. There was nothing glamorous about the base. Built along the foothills near the white sandy beaches of Quang Ngai province, Carentan was a typical temporary camp, consisting of numerous rows of tents erected along dirt roads that turned into muddy trenches during the monsoon season. There were a dozen makeshift buildings for the officers, but otherwise it was a sea of canvas.

  Named after a town in France captured by the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Normandy, Carentan was home to the Army’s 1st Brigade—“The Nomads of Vietnam”—a legendary unit of the 101st. No one could ever say this unit stayed in one place too long. Like mercenaries, the brigade’s soldiers were constantly sent from one hot spot to another. In the first two years of the war, they had been pulled to six different provinces, always leaving a trail of enemy casualties. They put down an insurrection in the coastal province of Phu Yen. They engaged the NVA in the Central Highlands of Kontum province.

  The brigade was made up of three battalions: the 2nd Battalion/327th Infantry, the 2nd Battalion/502nd Infantry, and the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry. In all, there were 3,500 soldiers. Each battalion had roughly 900 men and was similarly structured. Each had a reconnaissance platoon with about 45 soldiers. Then there were the three to four line companies, each with 150 men. They were considered the fighting units, the grunts, the guys who did the dirty work, the ones who humped through some of the most treacherous terrain ever encountered by American combat units, and all the while were targets of snipers, booby traps, and ambushes. The rest of the battalion soldiers were in what was known as “the rear”—the support and headquarter companies, with officers and sergeants carrying out most of the duties. The S-1 officers took care of the paperwork: soldiers’ records, payroll, and supply services. The sergeants made sure the grunts had enough ammo, weapons, and rations. The S-2 officers gathered and interpreted intelligence information and tipped off top commanders about new developments. The S-3 officers were in charge of training. The S-4 officers took care of logistics, making sure vehicles and equipment arrived as needed. The S-5 officers carried out civil affairs, such as listening to complaints from villagers. The headquarter company officers were the big shots who gave the orders.

  The Tigers were the reconnaissance platoon in the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry. But unlike other recon units, the Tigers had additional responsibilities. Not only were they supposed to find the enemy but they were to engage the enemy, at times acting as a commando unit. They were there not just to search but to destroy.

  Carentan looked out of place along a coastline sprinkled with thatched huts crowded along the narrow, dusty roadways that hugged the South China Sea—as third world as any area of Vietnam. The people were poor and were growing more dependent on American troops for food and menial jobs. It wasn’t uncommon to see skinny, barefoot children standing at the edge of the base begging for food scraps and Life Savers.

  Before Green had a chance to unpack and settle into his tent, a battalion sergeant called for the men to gather. It was early for a real briefing but not too early for an announcement from headquarters, usually delivered by commanders who said their piece and left before any real action began. Slowly the soldiers moved into the mess area and, without standing in formation, gathered around a sergeant. For the first time in six months, most of the Tigers were new. They had not been trained in the exigencies of guerrilla warfare, or surviving a terrain with a dozen species of poisonous snakes and spiders. For this Tiger Force platoon, it would be on-the-job training.

  Those lessons would be held in one of the most dangerous provinces of South Vietnam: Quang Ngai. The briefing sergeant was clear: “You will listen to your team leaders!” he shouted to the men. “If you want to come back alive, you will listen to what they say.”

  Harold Trout had heard all the pep talks before. A stocky, tough-talking thirty-year-old soldier from southeastern Missouri who was now in his eleventh year in the service, he knew more about survival than most of the young officers sent to lead platoons in Vietnam. His men considered him a “born soldier.”

  Trout could be caustic and stubborn, demanding the men under his watch do things his way. Like a flinty big brother, he kept the younger soldiers alive, but he could also be ruthless, knocking them upside the head when they were out of line. Wounded a month earlier by a booby trap that killed a point man, he was fully recovered from his injuries. Like other soldiers injured in battle, Trout could have finished his first tour in Vietnam in a safer unit, but he missed the action and wanted to get back to his Tigers.

  Standing at the opposite end of the circle from Trout that morning was James Barnett, a tall, strapping Tennessean—six feet, four inches tall and two hundred pounds—with a tattoo on his left arm of a devil and pitchfork and the words BORN TO RAISE HELL . Like Trout, he had a short fuse and could also be a bully. He would push around the new Tigers, seeing if they would stand up to him. But while Barnett liked to brag about his toughness, the truth was that, under fire, he was the first one to dive for cover. Only twenty-two, he didn’t share Trout’s years of experience in the Army, nor perhaps his blunt confidence. The two men
loathed each other.

  The newest team leader was a wiry, balding sergeant: William Doyle, at thirty-four, was the oldest Tiger. He had joined the Army in 1950 after he was told by a Kansas City judge to either suit up or go to jail for beating a teenager with a bicycle chain in a park. (Doyle said he attacked the victim after the victim called Doyle’s girlfriend an “ugly bitch.”) It seemed as if everyone who worked in Kansas City’s juvenile justice system had run into the wiry, foulmouthed teenager who had been on the streets since he was twelve. His mother died in a car accident when he was six, and his father, a switchman in the local rail yards, routinely came home drunk and beat the youngster. When the old man contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium for three years, Doyle caught a break and was placed in a foster home while his sister was sent to a convent. While she stayed with the nuns, William found that his living arrangements didn’t last, and he began running with an Irish street gang. “We were getting into fights all the time,” he recalled. “That’s how you survived.” In the end, he said, it was “good training for the infantry.”

  Covered with tattoos, Doyle stood five feet, nine inches, weighed 150 pounds when he enlisted, and went by the nickname Scar. He had left the Army in 1953 and bragged about being a mercenary who had fought with Fidel Castro against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, but no one knew for sure. Doyle rejoined the U.S. military in 1956 and eventually went to South Vietnam, where he expressed a hatred for Vietnamese people almost from the start.

  As team leaders, Doyle and the others would be there to help the newcomers deal with booby traps, spider holes, and impending ambushes—all of which were likely. The briefing sergeant tried to explain the upcoming dangers. “This is like no place you’ve been before,” he said, reminding them that Quang Ngai was a Vietcong (VC) stronghold—twice the size of Rhode Island—with the enemy hiding in underground tunnels that resembled ant farms. The enemy could be right under the feet of American soldiers, and they would never know until it was too late. In addition, snipers had been attacking U.S. soldiers every day since their arrival in the province on May 3—a dozen ambushes in the first fourteen days.

  Bill Carpenter, who had been with the platoon five months, didn’t need the briefing. To him, Quang Ngai was a “hellhole” that he wanted to forget. “You had VC crawling all over the place,” he recalled. “You’d walk up to these villages, and they were flying VC flags over the huts.” He scanned the circle of newcomers and shook his head. They were about to discover there was a big difference between shooting a stationary target at Fort Campbell and firing at a sniper you couldn’t see.

  Newcomers such as Private Ken Kerney hadn’t taken that into consideration when they joined up. Like so many others in the early years of the war, Kerney enlisted for adventure and patriotism. It was 1967, and despite fifteen thousand killed in two years of fighting, most Americans supported the war. But now, standing in the sweltering heat with the enemy lurking beyond the hills, Kerney was jittery. For the first time, he wondered whether he made the right decision.

  He had grown up in a Catholic blue-collar family in a bungalow in Berwyn, Illinois, just outside Chicago, where pictures of John F. Kennedy adorned living room walls. It was a neighborhood where the events of the day were followed on television and where people—swept up by Cold War rhetoric—argued that the spread of Communism must be stopped or the Soviets could someday take over America.

  But for Kerney, the reality seemed a bit less clear when viewed from Carentan. After two months in country, he began to think about his mother and her parting words. “I worked hard so you didn’t have to do this.” Ever since his father died when he was ten and his mother took a job with U.S. Steel as a secretary—working her way up to become a sales rep—Kerney was supposed to be a businessman, not a soldier. He had tried to follow his mother’s wishes, studying business for a year at Morton Junior College, but he dropped out. It was all because of one friend, Art Voelker, who returned from the early war, filling Kerney’s head with stories of a faraway exotic place. Kerney was seduced and off he went.

  Fellow midwesterner Barry Bowman had no idea what the conflict in Vietnam—or the Tigers—was all about. Sure, he had read the newspapers and watched the TV news from his home in Chicago, but he’d never paid close attention to the details. To the twenty-two-year-old medic, it was still a war of patriotism that was merely a continuation of World War II and victories over the Nazis and Japanese. Another evil force needed to be stopped, and America was going to do it.

  But it was one thing to be sitting at the dinner table with families in small towns talking about a distant war. Standing in the circle that day, Bowman realized for the first time that he would be going on reconnaissance missions—and he might not come back.

  Before the briefing, the newcomers were told the Tigers would be joining the rest of the battalion to “clear the land” and to “take the fight to the VC.” If the U.S. Army was going to win the war, the briefing sergeant said, it was crucial to secure Quang Ngai. “This is going to be your job to go out there and take it back.” Like a football coach, he paced back and forth, repeating the phrase “We’re going to take the fight to the enemy.”

  Nothing more detailed was specified, and the briefing sergeant wasn’t much help: “You’re going to be going into a place where no Americans have ever been,” he said. “This ain’t Saigon. They’re not going to welcome you with open arms.” That was a bit of an understatement.

  Just as the sergeant began to unfurl a large map showing the grid coordinates of the province, two officers interrupted, announcing that the commander had arrived. The veterans looked at one another, puzzled, but everyone quickly jumped to attention, and the group was joined by scores of other soldiers. It was not, as had been expected, Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Harold Austin but rather the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland. Dressed in his familiar starched fatigues, Westmoreland walked briskly to the head of the formation and turned toward the men. The lean, steely eyed general was known for showing up unexpectedly in the field, most of the time to deliver pep talks. This was a visit he had been eager to make. These were the soldiers from what he referred to as his “fire brigade,” and he made no bones about his affection for the unit, which he considered a crucial part of the 101st Airborne. Westmoreland had been the commander of the 101st from 1958 to 1960 and kept close ties with the commanders. Now, his eyes moving along the front row of soldiers, the four-star general reminded the men that he was counting on them. “You are here for a reason,” he said, “and I can’t stress that enough.” Along with soldiers from the 196th Light Infantry Brigade and the 25th Infantry Division, the 1st Brigade would be part of what was known as Task Force Oregon, created in February 1967 to take complete control of the area. In all, there were twenty thousand troops.

  The general was well aware that the Central Highlands, stretching from the Laotian border eastward to the South China Sea, had been a contentious area since the French occupation. To Westmoreland, it was a key geographic area. The Buddhist farmers who occupied the mountainous region had always felt they were neglected by South Vietnamese leaders, and now with the American invasion, they felt threatened. They were stubborn and independent and had no more allegiance to Saigon than Hanoi.

  Westmoreland and others at the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV), including General William Rosson, feared that the guerrillas would set up an armed line from Laos to the sea, cutting South Vietnam in half. If that occurred, they believed, Americans would not be able to move supplies to troops in the demilitarized zone—the area that divided South and North Vietnam. Westmoreland argued that in order to control the Central Highlands, especially Quang Ngai, thousands of civilians needed to be moved to relocation centers so they wouldn’t support the enemy. For the last two years, the U.S. military and South Vietnamese government had been setting up temporary camps throughout the province, but, as the Marines had learned, forced relocation was not an ea
sy or popular policy to implement. Earlier that year, the Marines had been assigned to herd 300,000 people from the province to relocation camps—about half the province’s population—and soon discovered that people would only leave kicking and screaming. Protests erupted, and many, forced from their homes, escaped the camps. Not surprisingly, the Vietcong was gaining support among the people and had already set up a network of clandestine routes that allowed the North Vietnamese Army to carry guns and ammunition to the area to battle U.S. troops.

  One of the Tigers, Douglas Teeters, tensed up as the general brushed by him, pacing. For years Teeters had heard about the man who was handpicked by President Lyndon Johnson to run the war, but now here he was in the flesh. Teeters wanted to turn and look at the most powerful military leader in South Vietnam but was afraid to move a muscle. So he stared ahead, rigid as bone, and listened as the commander shouted to the men from just a few feet away.

  Westmoreland warned them their toughest days were still ahead. They were to look for the enemy and destroy everything in their path. “Wear down the enemy,” he ordered. “They will surrender.”

  Before the general left, he described a color code to help the soldiers on patrol identify the people of Quang Ngai. “If the people are in relocation camps, they’re green, so they’re safe,” he explained. “We leave them alone. The Vietcong and NVA are red, so we know they’re fair game. But if there are people who are out there—and not in the camps—they’re pink as far as we’re concerned. They’re Communist sympathizers. They were not supposed to be there.”

  The men listened.

  Private Terrence Kerrigan tossed in his sleeping bag. It wasn’t the heat or the mosquitoes buzzing in his ears that kept him up. He was just hours away from his first reconnaissance mission—and the rush of adrenaline was already starting. No sense in even trying to sleep.