Several Tigers were already talking about Ybarra’s souvenirs, but no one was going to say anything. No one wanted to get on Ybarra’s bad side. No one even knew when or where he acquired the ears. To be safe, the newcomers were starting to keep their distance from the point man. “It was better for all of us to stay out of his way,” recalled Kerney.
It wasn’t long after regrouping that the Tigers received another radio alert from Carentan: chopper pilots had just spotted two more clusters of huts in the valley, with people milling around. Some of the Tigers began cursing. They had just spent most of the day going from hamlet to hamlet, and now they were being ordered into the fray again.
Ybarra and Green were part of the first team to reach a row of huts that had not yet been searched—one of dozens of clusters of hooches scattered across the valley that didn’t appear on military maps. Following a routine, one man approached the entrance, rifle drawn, to look inside, while two others stood behind aiming their rifles at the openings. They searched four huts, and it appeared the villagers were gone.
While Trout and other team members walked the perimeter, looking for Vietnamese, Ybarra and Green stayed behind.
After carefully walking around each hut, lifting up bags of rice and other objects to look for weapons, they decided to go back into the huts. There were simply too many supplies for the people to be gone. As they crept into the largest hooch, they surprised a man who was lying flat under a table. Quickly, they pointed their rifles at him and motioned for him to rise. As he stood up, they noticed he was wearing a black-and-white-checkered scarf. Ybarra and Green had seen the scarves before, mostly on prisoners. This wasn’t a peasant. This was an NVA soldier.
Ybarra ordered the man to raise his hands, and as the prisoner lifted his arms over his head, Ybarra struck him on the side of the head with a rifle. When the man fell to the ground, Green dragged him outside and began kicking him. Soon both soldiers pounced on the man, beating him with their fists. As he lay motionless on the ground, Ybarra stood up and reached for his knife.
Suddenly Green stood up and backed away.
Before his friend could say anything, Ybarra reached down and lifted the man’s head back, exposing his neck, and in one motion slit the man’s throat.
For several seconds, the Vietnamese began kicking on the ground, grabbing his throat, making gurgling noises as the blood ran down his neck.
Ken was sickened. It was one thing to beat an enemy soldier, but Ybarra had killed the man without hesitation and in a manner that would mean an excruciating death. “Sam, what are you doing, man?” he asked.
Ybarra looked up but didn’t answer.
Green again prodded his friend. “What did you kill him for?”
After wiping his knife on the ground, Ybarra stood up and stared angrily at Green. “This ain’t the mortar platoon,” he snapped. “This gook would have killed you. You better learn to kill them first, or you ain’t never going home alive.”
Green stood silent for a moment. This wasn’t the guy he knew from Globe. Ybarra was crazy, especially when he was drinking. But he never knew his friend would just kill a defenseless human being so easily. Green knew Sam had been through a lot of bad shit in South Vietnam, but he didn’t know how bad until now. He didn’t know how far Sam had separated himself from the other Tigers, even the veterans. Soldiers go through several psychological stages when they are in combat: fear, anxiety, and anger among them. Sam was already well into the latter stage and becoming more enraged by the day.
When the other team members returned, they saw the body and the two friends standing nearby. For a moment, no one said anything. The newcomers looked at one another and then looked at their sergeants, Harold Trout and James Barnett, but they were quiet.
Carpenter asked Ybarra what happened. “I cut his throat,” he said.
Ybarra calmly recounted the capture and beating of the prisoner while Green remained quiet.
The other soldiers continued looking at one another, but no one was going to say anything more—not when the team leaders were silent.
Before leaving, they knew they had to get rid of the body. Prisoners were supposed to be taken to the rear for interrogation—not summarily executed. Under Trout’s orders, Carpenter dragged the body to the woods.
It wasn’t the first time Carpenter saw a prisoner killed. Before the Mother’s Day Massacre, the Tigers had captured a man with explosives near Duc Pho. Large and muscular, the prisoner looked to be Chinese. For two days, the Tigers beat him, while Carpenter tried to keep him alive. But for some reason, one of the soldiers got carried away and ordered the prisoner to run. As the man bolted, the soldier raised his M16 and shot the prisoner in the back. But the men had rationalized that the victim was undoubtedly the enemy, and they considered the shooting a killing, not a murder. Still, it was far from a source of pride, and usually unspoken.
Carpenter dug just deep enough into the ground to make sure the body would be hidden. He remembered the card he was handed when he arrived in country with the dos and don’ts of handling prisoners. Like most soldiers, he had discarded it, but he remembered the general message: You can’t degrade a prisoner. You can’t torture a prisoner. Most of all, you can’t kill a prisoner. If you were caught, you could be court-martialed and tossed in the brig.
But in a place like South Vietnam, it seemed strange to have rules.
In fact, rules of war had been around a long time, with some dating to medieval times and the code of chivalry. But few soldiers knew the history, and most didn’t give a damn. The early conventions beginning in 1863 in Geneva created the rules of war, but it wasn’t until the Geneva conventions of 1949 that most countries went along with the treaties. And by the time the Marines arrived in Da Nang in 1965, those countries involved in the conflict—the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam—had signed the accords. The Nuremberg trials—highly publicized prosecutions of Nazi war criminals between 1945 and 1949 that saw two hundred defendants tried for violating the rules of war and for crimes against humanity—showed that such treaties could be enforced.
Most of the grunts in Vietnam realized they were supposed to keep prisoners alive; the Tigers certainly knew, having been told by commanders to remove prisoners from the field by calling in choppers. Prisoners were good sources of information. Furthermore, the laws of war offered the slim chance of keeping Americans alive if they were captured. If one army knew the other was killing prisoners and civilians, it opened the door for the other army to follow suit.
Carpenter dragged the Vietnamese by the legs into the fresh, shallow hole and began pushing dirt over the body until it was completely covered. He backed up for a moment and looked at the grave before turning around and returning to the village. He didn’t always like what he saw in South Vietnam, but he learned a long time ago to keep his feelings in check. That’s how you’d survive.
It was the same with killing enemy soldiers. After he shot his first NVA, he expected to feel the “thrill of the kill”—the rush other soldiers described after the firing stopped. But there was only sadness. He kept thinking of his grandmother, who would always lead prayers before Sunday dinner at her southeast Ohio farm, her voice cracking as she talked about how the Good Lord had sustained her through the hard times, the spring floods and droughts. After his first kill, he realized that he wasn’t in her backyard playing war games during family gatherings. That he was now killing people. That he was now in a different world. “I couldn’t get her out of my mind,” he recalled. “I felt like I disappointed her, that I let her down in the worst way.”
In time, he found the killing became easier.
Sanchez and Barnett weren’t talking.
The team leader walked at the front of the line, while Barnett stayed in the rear. The soldiers in between could feel the tension, but they weren’t going to get involved. They had to reach the last hamlet before dusk and didn’t need distractions.
They had been walking the valley floor for nine ho
urs and were nursing cuts from the razor-sharp edges of elephant grass along the river. At any other time of year, the grass was tolerable, but in monsoon season the blades grew seven feet high and were coarse enough to cut like a knife.
By late afternoon, the deep scratches on their faces, hands, and arms were burning from the sun and sweat, and all the Tigers wanted to do was jump into the river. It didn’t help that some of the men were starting to show the early signs of jungle rot, a chafing that began in their crotches and inner thighs. The chafing from sweating and walking caused blisters and sores. The medics were already handing out pHisoHex, an antibacterial liquid soap, to keep the skin from infection.
Every now and then, Barnett, who was clearly in pain, would curse aloud, and everyone would stop to make sure he didn’t drop. He was lugging a twenty-five-pound M60 machine gun in addition to his eighty pounds of gear and had stripped off his shirt several hours earlier. His wide shoulders were baked from the sun and were already starting to blister.
As the team members reached a trail leading to the hamlet known as Hanh Thien, they could hear the familiar whirl of helicopter blades. Sanchez raised his hand, and the soldiers stopped and looked up. They could see it was a command-and-control chopper.
Not a good sign. This was the battalion commander.
Suddenly, from a loudspeaker onboard the craft, a voice shouted, “Stay there! Keep your positions!”
The chopper circled for a few minutes and then landed in a clearing about one hundred meters away. Three figures emerged from the doorway, and as they approached the team, Austin was in the lead.
Over the din of the whirling rotors, he began screaming at Sanchez and pointing to an old Vietnamese woman behind him. The men recognized her as the woman who was on the bicycle earlier in the day.
His face red and veins bulging in his neck, Austin shouted, “You’re a bunch of Genghis Khan barbarians! Who took her money?” Sanchez looked down and didn’t say anything. Neither did Sergeant Ervin Lee, who was second in command of the team. The other soldiers, including Carpenter, didn’t say a word. As much as they didn’t like what Barnett did, they weren’t going to turn on him. Austin took the woman down the line and asked her which one stole her money. When they reached Barnett, she began babbling and pointing at him.
Austin put his hands on his hips and faced Barnett. “Return her money, Sergeant,” he ordered.
Barnett froze. He wasn’t going to answer his commander or return the money. Austin moved closer and locked eyes with Barnett.
“I said give her the money.”
Slowly, Barnett reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the wad of bills. “She’s VC, Colonel,” he said, looking down.
But Austin didn’t respond. The woman had gone to the relocation camp, abiding by the Army’s rules, and immediately reported the theft to a guard. Within hours, Austin was told about her complaint. Austin wasn’t a soldier who easily breached Army regulations. He grabbed the money from Barnett’s hand and passed it to the woman. Austin then ordered Barnett to apologize. Barnett shifted uneasily. He couldn’t believe the order. Apologize. To a gook? He looked around and could see the other soldiers staring. He looked at Austin, mumbled something that resembled an apology, and turned away.
Barnett’s hands began to shake as he fought back tears. It was like he had just lost a fight in the backyard of the family’s old wood shack in Loretto, Tennessee. And now he had to face his father, who would be waiting for him with a stick of firewood. Lose a fight, and prepare for another ass kicking. That’s the way his father, James Sr., treated his namesake.
The older Barnett used to justify the beatings to relatives by saying he was just trying to make a man out of his son. You had to be tough, and you had to remind people that if they messed up, they would pay dearly for it. The old man was a deaf-mute, and no one gave him any breaks. During the Depression, he had to beg to get a job at a local textile mill, where he was sometimes the brunt of jokes because of his inability to communicate. But it didn’t stop him from taking swings at workers for making fun of him.
James Sr. would, in turn, take out his anger on his son. Sometimes he would try to make up for the beatings, which could be brutal. He would ask his son to go bass fishing on the Tennessee River, or hunting in the woods. James Jr. would reluctantly accept his father’s overtures but, inside, hated spending time alone with the old man.
He preferred instead to gather after school with his friends and two older stepbrothers, drinking and raising hell at a place called the Dairy Barn, a 1950s-style soda shop next to a parking lot in the center of the small town on the Alabama border. They would sit in their cars, radios blaring, downing beers.
In his youth, Barnett was considered handsome—jut jawed, with a boyish smile that belied an anger that could erupt at any time. People knew to stay away from him when he was drinking, recalled his friend Sonny Beckman. “He was friendly and good-hearted, but there was always that mean streak that would surprise you,” he said. “You didn’t know which Jim you were going to get.” More than anything, he joined the Army to escape his father. “He was tired of the old man and just wanted to get away,” recalled his friend.
Army journalist Dennis Stout ripped open an envelope placed on his desk and smiled as he read the letter. No more tagging along with Army units repairing roads or building schools. No more riding along with the top brass on public relations tours for visiting dignitaries. He was now going to be covering Tiger Force.
For weeks, the twenty-one-year-old specialist had been in Quang Ngai but spent most of his time with the line companies in search of feature stories about “hometown soldiers” who, among other things, handed out candy to South Vietnamese children in relocation camps. He was ordered to look for the positive side of the war—American soldiers fighting for freedom alongside the South Vietnamese against the Communist invaders. “Make the soldiers feel good” was the mantra of his newspaper, Diplomat & Warrior, the official organ of the 101st Airborne Division.
Stout didn’t disappoint his commanders. With his notebook in hand and a 35mm Canon camera around his neck, he had filed so many stories about brave grunts that he could now write them by heart. After almost two months, he knew what he could report and what he couldn’t. “Every story had to go through five censors in Saigon before being published,” he recalled. All the pieces were basically the same—all he had to do was change the names.
A paratrooper, Stout had arrived in Vietnam three months after the June 1966 battle at Dak To, and was initially assigned to B Company of the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry. For the first nine months of his tour, Stout was a line soldier who traveled with his battalion to numerous hot spots in South Vietnam. He was slightly wounded by shrapnel from a mine that killed a sergeant during a patrol west of Duc Pho and was recuperating in a hospital when he was told his newest assignment would be battalion public information officer. He wasn’t a journalist by training, but a commander had found out that Stout had tried unsuccessfully to freelance articles for outdoors magazines before joining the Army. Since he had more writing experience than anyone in his battalion, he was tapped for the public information job.
Stout’s new duties included tagging along with the dozens of U.S. and foreign journalists who were arriving each week in the country to cover the escalating war. He would also be charged with filing his own stories and taking his own pictures for the 101st Airborne weekly newspaper.
Stout had heard stories about Tiger Force, and to prepare had thumbed through back issues of Stars and Stripes, old news releases, and a few Army intelligence reports available to military reporters. He also already knew some of the Tigers from when they had been with the line companies, so he was confident he could get interviews right away. Stout excitedly penned a letter to his young wife, Marthann, who had just given birth three weeks earlier to their daughter, Denise. In the letter, he told her about his new assignment with the Tigers in a place known as the Song Ve Valley, and that he would be careful. �
��In some ways, I should have stayed at the base camp,” he recalled. “I had a new baby and two months to go in my tour. But I just couldn’t pass up the chance.”
Even before dawn, the Tigers were put on alert: A riot had broken out in Nghia Hanh, and dozens of people had escaped into the darkness. No one knew where the refugees fled, but most were believed to be from the Song Ve, and it was natural to assume they would return home.
Wood, who took the radio call from battalion headquarters, wasn’t surprised. He had heard for days from translators about how the people hated the camp. Surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed soldiers, the Nghia Hanh facility resembled a prison. No one was allowed to leave during the day without permission, and at night the gates were locked.
Worse, there was little food or shelter. Most of the refugees were forced to sleep outdoors in monsoon season because there were few wooden barracks and only two latrines. Surrounded by rotting garbage, people sat around waiting for handouts, and when the rice supply dwindled, the refugees broke into a storage shed on June 26. A riot ensued, and two twelve-year-old boys were shot to death by guards. To calm the crowd, South Vietnamese soldiers fired tear gas. The effect had been far from relaxing.
Wood could have predicted this was going to happen. He had read Army civil operation reports about the dismal conditions in various camps in Quang Ngai province, and of the sixty-eight camps in the province, Nghia Hanh was among the worst. During the past week in the Song Ve, Wood had taken time to talk to translators, who told him the people at Nghia Hanh were constantly hungry and suffering from malaria, dysentery, and infectious hepatitis.
He was also hearing about another alarming trend: many of the new refugees were joining the Vietcong. To Wood, it was obvious the people felt no allegiance to the government of South Vietnam. How could they? The government had done very little to reach out to them over the years. And now this.
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