Tiger Force Read online

  Lu Thuan was saddened as he watched the soldiers. For the first time, the war was coming to the Song Ve, something he had dreaded for two years. He had seen the men from the 101st Airborne—known as “chicken soldiers” because of the eagle patches on their sleeves—in other areas of Quang Ngai, but somehow he had hoped they would bypass his valley.

  The thirty-one-year-old farmer knew that with the arrival of the American soldiers, it was just a matter of time before he and the others would get caught in the middle. A devout Buddhist who traveled every month to the pagodas—a house of worship—he had heard stories from the people along the coast who were forced to flee and the chaos and death that came with it. The VC would fire on the Americans, and the Americans would eventually retaliate by flying in planes with bombs. The valley—his valley, his home, his land, his wife, his children—none of it was safe any longer.

  After one night in the field, planning, the Tiger teams had mapped out their patrol areas. The valley was divided into four quadrants—north, south, east, and west—with each team responsible for hunting Vietcong positions and rice caches in their own sections and, unless ordered, staying clear of the line companies.

  Sergeant Sanchez insisted on teaching his team members a few tips about patrols—the same rules he learned when he joined the Tigers. As his soldiers passed through brush on the way to the west quadrant, he watched as Kerrigan moved toward two mangroves.

  “Quick, stop,” Sanchez said. Kerrigan looked at his team leader and froze.

  Sanchez, motioning with his hand for the other five soldiers to follow, walked toward Kerrigan. As they circled the soldier, Sanchez pointed toward the two trees, located parallel to each other, two meters apart. “What do you see there?” he asked the men.

  Sergeant Ervin Lee waited for someone else to answer, but everyone was silent, so he piped in. “It’s a good place to put a trip wire,” he answered.

  Sanchez asked Lee to repeat what he just said to make sure everyone heard.

  “Trip wire,” Lee said.

  Sanchez nodded. “There’s nothing there now, but when you see two trees within a short distance of one another, don’t walk between them. It’s a perfect place to string a wire at foot level that can set off an explosive.”

  Over the next hour, Sanchez passed on more rules, knowing the soldiers had already been briefed about these safety measures but also knowing that even good soldiers sometimes forget the most basic instructions, even those that could make a difference between life and death. He told them not to smoke on patrol; the flash of a lighter or wisp of smoke was enough to give away a soldier’s position. And then there was the rule about going to the bathroom: make sure you dig a hole to cover your excrement. “Your shit leaves a trail,” Sanchez said.

  Sanchez also told them about water. In the heat, a soldier could easily go through four canteens in twenty-four hours. If they happened to run out of water while on patrol, they should look for clusters of bamboo; there was a good chance a spring was nearby. As far as sleeping, he told them to use their poncho liners for sleeping bags. It would keep them dry and help protect them from spiders and other bugs.

  Though he spoke of insects and arachnids in a cavalier manner, the same was not true for all creatures of the Vietnamese terrain. Sanchez was a stickler about one thing: leeches. “Check your bodies every few hours,” he told the men. “They can latch onto you without you even knowing.”

  Five kilometers away, in the far west quadrant, Wood and his team came upon a thicket of bamboo. He stopped the men—mostly newcomers—and reached down to separate a single stalk from the others. “You see this?” he asked. “This is bamboo. It’s more dangerous than a rifle.”

  The newcomers seemed puzzled. Wood explained that the VC cut a piece about a foot long and then sharpen one end, mash feces in the hollow opening, and insert the other end in the ground.

  “The VC want you to step on this,” Wood said. “It’s a booby trap. And when it penetrates your boot, you will get an infection—count on it.”

  His team moved beyond the thicket and reached a rice paddy, when the soldiers spotted a thatched hut in the distance. Such huts were usually used to store rice, plows, and other tools, but as the Tigers moved closer, a man jumped out and, to the surprise of the soldiers, fired an AK-47.

  The Tigers dropped to the ground as the man dashed back into the hut. Without hesitation, they opened fire with their M16s, blowing the hut to pieces. It was the first time outside of training that some of the soldiers had ever fired their M16s, and they weren’t sure when to stop. After several minutes, they rose in unison and inched their way to what remained of the hooch. When they looked inside, they saw not only the dead man, his rifle laying across his torso, but a woman and baby whose bodies had been ripped apart by the barrage.

  The deaths were unavoidable—no one had known the mother and child were inside—but Wood was clearly upset. He turned from the rest of his men and walked away. Bill Carpenter quickly approached his lieutenant and tried to console him, but Wood brushed him aside. He was the team leader and was ultimately responsible. And, of course, he had fired his M16 just like everyone else. Indeed, it may have even been his own bullet that ended the baby’s life.

  Though he had been in skirmishes with the enemy, this was the first time Wood had seen a child killed in a firefight. But as an officer, he had to remain in control of his emotions. There were too many newcomers, and he knew they would be looking to him for guidance. If he showed any signs of weakness, he could lose their confidence. And this was no place to let that happen. No doubt, they were going to run into more ambushes.

  “Just forget it,” he told Carpenter. “It’s over. I just want to forget it.” But for the next several hours, he was quiet. He couldn’t shake the images. And there was no way he would ever tell his family what happened. They wouldn’t understand. How could they? Their lives revolved around church, Friday night football games, and fish fries in the small town of Fridley, Minnesota. It suddenly seemed so long ago when he packed his bags on a bone-chilling January morning in 1965 and drove to the bus station to report for duty. He had been on the move ever since: Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

  For most of his life, Donald Wood had been on the move.

  His father, a Whirlpool engineer, was always being transferred. By the time Donald was eleven, he had lived in three cities, and each time it became harder to adjust. He and his twin sister, Helen, and younger brother, Jim, had to make new friends and attend new schools. Finally, in Fridley, he found a home. In high school, he had developed a close group of friends and even stayed in contact with them through letters after joining the Army. But he couldn’t even tell them what happened. War was a series of brutal honesties that fostered a clot of terrible secrets. So it had long been, and so it would be.

  That night, the Tigers regrouped near a bend in the river and set up camp. While one of the Tiger Force teams patrolled the perimeter of the area, the rest of the soldiers stretched out along the bank, some finally getting a chance to empty their bowels. Wood kept to himself, while some of the others began to open the mail that had been delivered earlier in the day by supply choppers. For several minutes, the men were quiet as they began reading their correspondence, and then suddenly one Tiger began reading a portion of his letter aloud. When he stopped, another followed, and then another. The men took turns reading letters aloud—some from girlfriends, others from parents and siblings.

  Barry Bowman thought it remarkable that the Tigers—many of whom had only known one another for days—were sharing intimate details of their lives. “We read them and shared everything in them with our comrades as a way of coping with the danger we were in,” he recalled. In these pauses, moments disorienting with a sense of frontier and temporary relief, the men could let down their guard. They were still tethered to their old lives via each letter read. But soon that tether would break.

  CHAPTER 4


  The sun was just rising as a steady stream of men, women, and children began walking down a slope toward the Song Ve River. On both sides of the trail were soldiers, making sure no one tried to run.

  From a foothill, Don Wood peered through binoculars as the evacuation of the valley began. The ground was soaked from an early rain, the drops sparkling like jewels on the tall strands of grass. From the ground, the valley was as peaceful as anything he had seen in South Vietnam: coconut and banana trees, and clusters of thick mangroves. The elephant grass blanketing the basin was a kaleidoscope of greens—a bright spring color on the tops of the foothills and growing darker along the slopes until it became a dark olive along the river. Wood was struck by how beautiful it was—not just to the eye but to the ear. The sounds of songbirds filled the air.

  While the scene was tranquil, the temperature was rising. Though it was early, Wood’s shirt was already soaked from the heat and humidity—a virtual steam room that was relentless. It was the beginning of the monsoon season, which would mean rain—lots of it—nearly every day. The mud along the river was now dry, but by afternoon, it would be thick and deep. Not even the villagers would walk through the muck, preferring instead to walk on the grass.

  As a soldier, Wood knew the locals had to be moved and, in the end, believed they would be safer in Nghia Hanh than the valley. But he was disturbed at the sight of the people leaving their huts. This was their home. As Buddhists, they believed their connections to the land and their ancestors would be irrevocably shattered. Wood wondered whether they would ever return to the valley.

  Other Tigers didn’t share his concerns. For the past two days, Sam Ybarra, Ken Green, James Barnett, and William Doyle had been grousing that the evacuation was a waste of time. These Vietnamese were no better than the Vietcong, they said. They were all gooks, and none of them could be trusted.

  Wood tried to ignore them. He knew the difference between villagers and the Vietcong, and refused to buy into the grunt talk about every Vietnamese being an enemy. He understood why some of the soldiers bitterly hated the Vietnamese. From the time they were in boot camp to their arrival in South Vietnam, the soldiers were told the native people were despicable. Sometimes it was subtle—“They don’t grieve for their dead the way we do.” Other times, overt—“They’re not human.” Drill sergeants and even officers used a litany of slurs to describe the people of Vietnam: gooks, dinks, and slant eyes. Boot camp even included an exercise in which soldiers carrying rifles with bayonets would charge targets and, with every thrust of the blade, scream the word “gook.”

  Unbeknownst to many soldiers—but not to Wood—the Army had been carrying out a subtle but powerful indoctrination program that was insidiously dehumanizing the enemy, stripping them of any human qualities, and thus making it easer for soldiers to kill them. In warfare, that’s not unusual, but in Vietnam, it had been a growing problem. Not all soldiers had been attempting to distinguish between Vietnamese combatants and noncombatants. “They all look alike,” as the saying goes.

  Wood watched as South Vietnamese soldiers carrying clipboards went to each evacuee, writing down his or her name. Some of the adults carried burlap bags stuffed with rice and clothes. Others balanced shoulder bars with buckets at each end filled with rice. They had taken everything they could from their huts.

  As they reached the front of the line, the villagers were handed two slips of paper: a temporary relief payment for food, which equaled about eight cents a day, and a resettlement assistance voucher that guaranteed shelter. After each interview, they were moved single file to a larger clearing, where they gathered in groups, waiting for the soldiers to usher them aboard CH-47 helicopters, twenty-five in each chopper.

  By the time the second village was emptied, with more than one hundred people now gathered near the processing tent, another phase of the evacuation had begun. At the far northeast corner of the valley, large groups of livestock—water buffalo and cattle—were being led from holding areas surrounded by poles and barbed wire. In a scene reminiscent of a cattle drive from the Old West, the animals were herded down a foothill and through a gap toward a dirt road that eventually led to the relocation center.

  Other Tigers gathered on the foothill, chuckling at the scene below, some yelling, “Giddyup!” to the battalion soldiers passing by. To Carpenter, it was comic relief in what had been a tense three days. But to Wood, it was another reason for the Vietnamese to resent the soldiers. This was not a moment to be seen laughing.

  Wood peered through his binoculars as the first helicopter took off, and within minutes, another CH-47 landed to pick up the next group. He had been told in Officer Candidate School that the Army was going to win the war by gaining the support of the peasants—to “win the hearts and minds” of the people under a policy touted by President Lyndon Johnson. But that meant treating them fairly and with decency. Wood didn’t come to Vietnam to be a social worker, but he didn’t come to watch peasants be belittled, either. It struck him as wrong—and against everything he was ever taught. Though he was expected to show disdain toward the people, it was just too hard for him to play that role. Maybe he was just too idealistic. Maybe he expected too much.

  Just a few years earlier, he had toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps—swept up by the enthusiasm of a young Catholic president and an idealistic message of volunteerism. Wood wanted to go to Africa to set up schools, but here he was, in another third-world nation, with bullets instead of books.

  As a youngster, Wood had relished his role as an altar boy in a town where there were few Catholics. Masses were celebrated in the middle of the Fridley High School gymnasium—with Wood serving as an altar boy. He would arrive early on Sundays to set up the altar and folding chairs and stay after services to put everything back in storage.

  He continued going to Mass in high school, but he also began drinking, at first with friends after football games, and later, alone. A wild streak started to show his sophomore year, when he would jump into his Volkswagen Beetle and race through speed traps.

  He went on to St. Thomas Aquinas College in Saint Paul but dropped out after one semester. To keep from disappointing his father, a Navy veteran of World War II and Korea, Wood volunteered for the 101st Airborne. “He wanted to make us proud,” recalls his brother, Jim. The new enlistee invited his family to spend their vacations near his training bases at Fort Bragg and later Fort Sill. “We all came. We were excited about seeing him,” says Jim. “He even worked it out so that I could spend a weekend with him in his barracks.”

  Wood wasn’t the only one who had serious questions about what he was witnessing. Douglas Teeters, the Tiger Force medic, had been watching the villagers’ reaction to the American presence and realized there was no way the Army was going to win their support, “not after the way we were treating their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers,” he recalled. A month earlier in Duc Pho, the medic watched as several soldiers from B Company surrounded an old man who was selling trinkets from a roadside stand, picked him up, and carried him to the side of a creek before tossing him in the water. He remembered the soldiers laughing as the man splashed around frantically. Teeters had been angry, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want the soldiers to know he felt any empathy for the old man. But he was bothered by the image of the man’s children crying as they rushed to his side. Now, as he watched the evacuation of the Song Ve, he noticed tears running down the face of a child.

  That same day, the Army issued a press release about the cattle drive, calling it Operation Rawhide:

  More than five thousand residents of the Song Ve Valley west of here regained their identity with the Republic of Vietnam government as Vietnamese and American military units concluded the largest civil affairs operation ever launched in the Quang Ngai province. As the villagers were evacuated, the joint military force collected cattle and livestock, initiating the second phase of the operation by driving the herd to Nghia Hanh. While helicopters whisked the villa
gers to Nghia Hanh, paratroopers began the cattle drive. They dubbed the overland route “The Chisholm Trail,” and cries of “Head ’em up; move ’em out” echoed throughout the valley. The Vietnamese forces sang folk tunes; the paratroopers replied with Western tunes.

  By the time the sun was setting over the valley, only a few villagers were still milling around the clearing area. From the foothills, Lu Thuan watched sadly. No longer would he venture into the rice paddies to work, or watch his children play on the backs of water buffalo. From a crevice in the rocks, he had spent most of the day watching the people leave. Two days earlier, he said good-bye to his wife and two children, and fled with other men to the first mountain ridge west of the river. Since they were all of military age, had they gone to Nghia Hanh, they would be forced to serve in the South Vietnamese Army.

  As Lu watched, he wondered when he would ever see his family again, and how long he and others could survive in the Annamese Cordillera Mountains. It was just a matter of time before the Vietcong would return and fight for control of what was one of the most productive rice-growing valleys in the Central Highlands.

  The following day, three Hueys swooped over the river basin to look for signs of life. No one was in the rice paddies in the Song Ve, and no one was along the river, but the pilots were surprised to see people walking openly along the trails leading to the Hanh Tin hamlet in the center of the valley, some carrying wood and buckets of water.

  Immediately, the lead chopper radioed headquarters: You got people crawling all over the place. “I thought you cleared the hooches,” the pilot said. Clearly the Army had missed scores of villagers who had successfully hidden from the American patrols.