In 1967, Something TERRIFYING Happened In Vietnam The Army Refused To Put On Record 

In 1967, Something TERRIFYING Happened In Vietnam The Army Refused To Put On Record 

In the summer of 1967, in a valley so remote it barely appeared on military maps, a unit of elite American paratroopers began doing something that their own government would spend the next 30 years trying to make the world forget. They killed farmers in rice paddies. They killed elderly men kneeling in the dirt.

And when Army investigators finally found out what happened, after 4 and 1/2 years and over 100 witnesses, not one soldier was ever charged. To understand what Tiger Force became, you first have to understand what it was supposed to be. In November 1965, Major David Hackworth, one of the most decorated soldiers of the Korean War, created a new kind of unit within the 101st Airborne Division.

The idea was simple and it was bold. Hackworth believed the way to beat the Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungle was to become better guerrillas than them. Faster, leaner, more aggressive. He called them Tiger Force, named for the tiger-striped fatigues they wore. 45 hand-picked paratroopers, volunteers only, men who had seen combat before and were willing to go back in.

They were genuinely elite. Two Tiger Force members, Lieutenant James Gardner and Staff Sergeant John Gertsch, would receive the Medal of Honor. The unit’s parent battalion received a presidential unit citation from Lyndon Johnson himself. But Hackworth had already moved on by 1967. He was promoted, rotated out of Vietnam, and said later he had no idea what was coming.

Because what came next had nothing to do with the unit he built. By May 1967, Tiger Force had arrived in Quang Ngai province in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. They were given a mission. Find enemy supply routes, disrupt Viet Cong operations, and rack up body counts. That last part, body counts, is where the story starts to break apart.

Because in this war, body count was the only metric anyone in command seemed to care about. And that pressure, filtering down through every level of command, was about to have consequences that nobody in Washington would want to admit existed. The Song Ve Valley was a 4 by 6 mile farming basin in Quang Ngai province.

About 5,000 Vietnamese civilians lived there. Farmers, mostly. Elderly men and women. Families. The US Army’s plan was to force those civilians into government relocation camps, cutting off the Viet Cong’s food supply. When villagers refused to leave their ancestral land, the valley was declared a free fire zone.

And Tiger Force was sent in to enforce it. What happened in those months was documented in sworn testimony by more than 100 witnesses. And it is difficult to read. Within days of arriving, the killing of prisoners had begun. On May 8th, the platoon captured a man suspected of being Viet Cong. He was beaten and tortured over 2 days.

Then, according to testimony gathered by Army investigators, he was told he was free, told to run, and shot in the back. Sergeant Forest Miller later told investigators that killing prisoners had become, in his words, an unwritten law within the platoon. But, that was just the start. On May 15th, Tiger Force walked into an ambush by a North Vietnamese battalion.

The battle, soldiers would later call it the “Mother’s Day Massacre,” left two Americans dead and 25 wounded. Veterans of Tiger Force have cited that ambush as a turning point, a crack in the unit’s cohesion, the moment when something shifted. From there, the killings began moving in a different direction, away from combat, towards civilians.

In June 1967, near the village of Duc Pho, Private Sam Ebara, a 20-year-old from the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona, shot a 15-year-old Vietnamese boy. Not because the boy posed a threat, because Ebara wanted his tennis shoes. When they didn’t fit, he cut off the boy’s ears. That same month, a man in Buddhist robes was shot after complaining about the treatment of villagers.

To disguise the killing, soldiers placed a grenade on his body to make him look like a combatant. In July, according to the sworn testimony of Specialist William Carpenter, Tiger Force opened fire on roughly 10 unarmed elderly farmers in a rice paddy. Carpenter told investigators, “We killed about 10 of the farmers, then stopped firing.”

Then, on July 23rd, came the moment that investigators would later call one of the most clearly documented killings of the entire investigation. An unarmed 68-year-old Vietnamese carpenter named Dao, who was clubbed with a rifle by Sergeant Harold Trout. As a medic tried to treat him, as Dao Hue knelt in the dirt, Lieutenant James Hawkins walked up and shot him in the face.

Specialist Carpenter witnessed it. He told investigators, “I just knew he was dead, as half of his head was blown off.” Years later, when the Toledo Blade tracked down Lieutenant Hawkins, who had retired from the US Army with an unblemished record, he admitted to the killing. By August 1967, Tiger Force had moved north into Quang Nam province and joined a larger campaign called Operation Wheeler.

And if the Song Ve Valley had been a descent into darkness, Operation Wheeler was something closer to free fall. The battalion commander overseeing the operation was Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Morse. He renamed his companies “Assassins,” “Barbarians,” and “Cutthroats.” His radio call sign was “Ghost Rider.” And according to multiple soldiers’ testimony, he set a body count target of 327 kills to match the battalion’s own number, the 327th Infantry Regiment.

There were no requirements about who those kills were, just the number. Soldiers began throwing grenades into underground bunkers, the civilian shelters that Vietnamese families used for protection during air raids. Men, women, children. The cries of the wounded came from inside those bunkers through the night.

Former platoon medic Ryan Causey, who later became a nuclear engineer, told the Toledo Blade that in one 5-week period alone, Tiger Force killed approximately 120 civilians. To make the numbers work on paper, commanding officers logged dead civilians as Viet Cong enemy kills. Over one 10-day stretch, the unit reported 49 enemy dead, but in 46 of those deaths, not a single weapon was recovered.

The mutilation of bodies had also become routine. Soldiers severed the ears of the dead and carried them as trophies. Medic Larry Cottingham later told Army investigators, “There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears.” 27 Tiger Force soldiers testified that they had either participated in the ritual or witnessed it firsthand.

Stars and Stripes, the official US military newspaper, published a story praising Private Sam Ibarra as the man who recorded the platoon’s 1,000th kill of Operation Wheeler. The article treated it as a milestone, an achievement. On November 19, 1967, the unit’s logs recorded the 327th kill, the number Morse had been aiming for.

The war crimes investigation would later confirm that most of those 327 were not enemy combatants. Three and a half years after Tiger Force left Vietnam, a soldier named Sergeant Gary Coy filed a complaint with Army authorities. He reported that a Tiger Force soldier had decapitated an infant.

The US Army Criminal Investigation Command opened a formal inquiry. What followed was the longest war crimes investigation in the history of the Vietnam War. The lead investigator was Special Agent Gustav Apsī, a meticulous, driven man who happened to be the son of a German officer from the Second World War.

He later said that background made him believe more strongly, not less, that America had to hold itself to account. Apsī and his team used more than 100 investigators. They collected nearly 400 sworn statements. They tracked former Tiger Force members to more than 60 cities across the United States and the world.

By the time the investigation concluded in June 1975, investigators had substantiated 20 separate war crimes. They identified 18 soldiers as having committed those crimes across 30 specific allegations. The findings went up the chain, all the way up. Progress reports from the investigation were sent to the office of the Secretary of the Army, to the Secretary of Defense.

And according to the Toledo Blade’s reporting, White House officials in the Nixon administration, including former counsel John Dean, designated as a liaison between the White House and Army CID, received repeated updates. Nobody moved. Nobody acted. Apsie wanted to prosecute. He presented three murder cases against Hawkins, Trout, and Private James Cogan.

He believed he had grounds to pursue 15 or 16 officers still serving in the military, including Lieutenant Colonel Morris. But the decision to charge rested with each suspect’s commanding general. And not one of those generals moved forward. Apsie was reassigned to South Korea. In November 1975, 5 months after the final report was filed, Lieutenant Hawkins received a summons to the Pentagon.

He was read a brief by an Army lawyer. He later described what he was told to the Toledo Blade. The lawyer told him, in effect, that wrongdoing had occurred, that they knew it, but that prosecution was not in the best interest of the Army. The case was closed. Six Tiger Force soldiers, including an officer, were allowed to quietly resign during the investigation to avoid prosecution.

The only person formally disciplined in the entire affair was Sergeant Gary Coil, the man who had filed the complaint in the first place. >> “This isn’t, uh, this isn’t the type of warfare that most Americans think that, uh, that their fellow Americans, uh, pursue. But, um, so I… I wanted to make sure that it was, uh, documented as, as meticulously as I could. And this is the story, uh, of Vietnam veterans told by Vietnam veterans. I used, uh, you know, hundreds of, of sworn, uh, statements, sworn testimony, uh, that, that, uh, active duty GIs and recently returned veterans gave to Army criminal investigators. So, it’s, it’s the veterans in their own words.”

Let me play for you what John Kerry said back in 1971 when he returned from Vietnam and he joined with other Vietnam veterans to talk about, uh, the kind of war they had experienced. Here’s what he said.

“Not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It’s impossible to describe to you the feelings of the men who are reliving their experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relive the absolute horror of what this country in a sense made them do. Uh, they told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, raised villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

All these years later, this book you’ve been working on for 10 years based upon these documents buried at the National Archives confirm what John Kerry was saying then.

“Yes, uh, all the atrocities that Kerry mentions by name there, uh, I… I found evidence of, of all of those, uh, those types of crimes represented in the, the records of this Vietnam War Crimes Working Group in the, the government’s own files. So, at the same time that, um, you know, that, that, uh, Kerry and, and the veterans that, that he, uh, was referring to there were, were being smeared as, uh, as fake veterans or as liars, the military had all these records that, that proved that these were just the, the very crimes that were going on in Vietnam.”

And the military had these records in 2004 when John Kerry was being swift boated.

“That’s right. Uh, you know, these records, uh, existed then. There was proof at the time that the military, uh, they knew about it and they, they didn’t disclose it to the public and it was still, you know, under wraps when he was running. I mean that the military definitely didn’t want these records out there. I… I talked to, uh, several members of, of this Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, this Pentagon task force. And I asked one of the, the colonels who he ended up retiring as, as a general, uh, and he said that at the time he thought it was right that these records, uh, need to be kept secret. It was for the good of the country, for the good of the war effort. But in the years since he recognized that, uh, that he thought it was the wrong thing to do. Uh, I talked to him during the Iraq War and he said, ‘You know, perhaps if these things had been aired at the time, if we’d been honest with the American people and open with these records, then maybe we wouldn’t have had, uh, Abu Ghraib, uh, you know, the, the, the torture scandal there.’ He, um, he, he came to see it as a, as a real failure on his part.”

For nearly 28 years, the Army’s findings sat buried. The investigation files were classified. The names of the suspects were never made public. And the families of the victims in the Song My Valley had no idea that anyone in America even knew what had happened to them.

Then a reporter at the Toledo Blade named Michael Sallah got a tip about a military officer who had died and left behind a collection of confidential CID files. Sallah and his colleagues, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr, spent eight months reviewing thousands of classified documents from the National Archives. They tracked down former Tiger Force soldiers across the country.

They flew to Vietnam using old military grid coordinates and radio logs to find survivors in the Song Ve Valley. In October 2003, they published a four-part investigative series called “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths.” It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The series named the perpetrators.

It named the cover-up. It named the officials who had received the reports and done nothing. Sergeant William Doyle, one of Tiger Force’s most prolific killers, a man who told the Toledo Blade, “We killed anything that walked. It didn’t matter if they were civilians,” was tracked down and interviewed. He told the New York Times he regretted only that he hadn’t killed more.

When the Pentagon was asked to respond to the investigation, they announced a review. They declined to formally reopen the criminal case. No new charges were ever filed. In the Song Ve Valley, survivors and their descendants still tend mass graves. They know who was buried there. They don’t know why the men who put them there were never held to account.

Tiger Force’s story sits alongside My Lai in the history of American atrocities in Vietnam. But there’s a crucial difference. At My Lai, Lieutenant William Calley was convicted. He served 3 years of house arrest. Tiger Force killed across 7 months. The Army’s own investigators substantiated the crimes. And the answer they gave was silence.

Historian Nicholas Turse, who later wrote Kill Anything That Moves, a landmark examination of civilian killings in Vietnam, said the Tiger Force case really didn’t stand out in the archives. Not because it was small, but because there were so many others like it. That may be the most disturbing sentence in this entire story.

The question Tiger Force leaves behind isn’t just about the men who pulled the triggers. It’s about the system that created them. The command structure that let it continue. And the government that buried it for three decades. The full Toledo Blade investigation is still online. The names are still there. The testimonies are still there.