Wood did not like the Vietcong. They were Communists and they could be terribly oppressive to the people, stealing their rice and threatening their families. But he had also learned from talking to translators and refugees that the VC were offering a more equitable land reform than the leaders in Saigon, and the VC were not forcing everyone to leave his or her home. They were basic promises that created clear bonds.
The whole thing was a vicious circle, getting worse and worse. But Wood and the others had to carry out the orders passed on to them from battalion headquarters and Colonel Austin, even if, to a seasoned field officer, the mission was foolish and unbefitting the Tigers. After all, this was a Special Force created to conduct surveillances of the enemy—a reconnaissance platoon with a short but celebrated history. He joined the unit to be a part of that excitement. And as a forward artillery observer—the man who calls in air strikes based on enemy positions—he knew he had an important job. But it was clear to him that the role of the Tigers was changing. The soldiers were now being ordered to function as enforcers for the Army commanders, not to serve as frontline spies and commandos. They were no longer the eyes and ears, but the fist. The Tigers were being let out of their cage.
CHAPTER 7
Despite the thousands of leaflets dropped on the valley and the evacuation that followed, the villagers simply weren’t leaving. The battalion had already forced five thousand residents to Nghai Hanh, and the Tigers rounded up forty-three more before burning the huts, but that still left an estimated two thousand people unaccounted for. To Austin and other battalion commanders, this was a disappointment. They had already issued a news release touting the success of the evacuation. Now they ran the risk of the MACV finding out the truth. In particular, no one wanted General Westmoreland to know that the mission in the Song Ve was not going as planned. He was a stickler for results and had very little patience for failure.
It was time to kick into another mode. After requesting permission, Austin and his officers agreed to declare the once populated area of the valley—four miles wide by six miles long—a free-fire zone.
It was an extreme measure but well within the Army’s tactics. The way it worked was simple: with the declaration, U.S. troops were free to attack enemy targets in civilian areas, the usual safety precautions intended to minimize collateral damage put aside. This put the onus on civilians to get out; otherwise, they risked getting killed in the cross fire.
U.S. troops had to get the free-fire approval from their commanders and South Vietnamese provincial leaders. Legally, it was the only way to attack. But under no circumstances did troops have the right to deliberately fire on unarmed civilians, regardless of whether an area was a free-fire zone.
The MACV was willing to embrace free-fire zones in the Song Ve because of what was happening in the larger Quang Ngai province: the North Vietnamese Army was successfully infiltrating and setting up base camps. Despite intensive bombing, the enemy was actually gaining strength, and some thought it was just a matter of time before they would attack the American troops in the Song Ve. Indeed, two weeks earlier, the VC had waged a surprise mortar attack on an ammunition depot at Carentan, injuring several soldiers. Judging from other attacks in the Central Highlands, commanders agreed the enemy had the ability to strike anywhere, anytime. They also agreed a response was necessary. The free-fire request was approved.
As the Huey hovered overhead, Dennis Stout took a deep breath and looked down on the large sections of scorched earth, the river, and the sea of green below. From conversations with his translator, Nguyen Van Phoc, Stout had learned the Song Ve was a revered place to the Buddhist farmers, partly because their ancestors were buried there and partly because of the rich soil and abundant water. Though most of the topsoil in the province was replete with limestone, the valley was just the opposite: rich in nutrients and highly fertile.
At Stout’s request, the pilot circled to give the journalist a bird’s-eye view of the tree-covered foothills surrounding the valley and rising one thousand meters. He was struck by the breathless expanse of rice paddies rolling gently for miles in all directions.
As the Huey touched down in a clearing, two bearded soldiers wearing tiger-striped fatigues and soft-brimmed hats approached the chopper doorway. Without saying a word, they quickly escorted Stout to the edge of the river, where a team was huddled around a map as a sergeant drew up points along the grids. They watched carefully as the team leader instructed the soldiers to keep their eyes open for any stragglers. They were not going out there to make friends. Their job was to clear the valley, then burn the huts. That’s all.
As Stout approached the team, some soldiers looked up and nodded, while others ignored him. Newcomers didn’t mind reporters because they had never been exposed to them, but some veterans were leery. They had been with journalists in the field, and that always meant extra work. You had to make sure they were keeping up with the patrol, and you had to protect them if things heated up. They were baggage.
As the team walked toward the nearby foothills, Stout was told to stay in the middle of the line and not to veer anywhere else. The middle was always the safest. Those in the front usually ran into ambushes and booby traps first, and those at the end of the line would sometimes get picked off by snipers sneaking up from behind.
It wasn’t long before the team leader began complaining about the Song Ve. The platoon should be hunting VC, and instead they were stuck looking for villagers. “They were pissed off,” recalled Stout. “That was my first impression of the Tigers.” The blisters on their feet were starting to break into open sores, and the men were constantly complaining of the overwhelming smell of manure blowing from the rice paddies, where the villagers used animal and human waste to fertilize the fields. Two of the newcomers had carelessly pulled leeches from their legs earlier in the day, leaving wounds so deep the medics were worried about infections setting in.
Private Gary Kornatowski was already hobbling from the cuts in his shins left by the nasty green creatures. When he took off his boots earlier in the day, he had noticed his legs were covered and had quickly begun pulling off the leeches with his hands. The whole country was a collection of vampires, large and small.
As the team passed by piles of blackened thatch beyond the river, Stout asked the soldiers what happened. “We torched everything. We don’t want the gooks coming back,” the team sergeant responded.
No sooner had Stout asked the question than they spotted two Vietnamese running down a hill toward the soldiers, waving leaflets. Stout could clearly hear them yelling, “No shoot, GI, no shoot, GI!”
He froze. Stout expected the soldiers to wait for the peasants to reach them before questioning them. They looked like civilians and weren’t carrying any weapons. He watched as two of the soldiers raised their M16s at the peasants, and figured it was just a precaution.
Suddenly Stout was startled by the instant, rapid sounds of the M16s. The peasants fell in a spray of bullets. “It happened so fast,” recalled Stout. “They just shot them. I couldn’t believe it.” He looked at the other three soldiers who didn’t fire their weapons, and could see the puzzled looks on their faces. One of the men turned around in disgust and blurted out, “Sarge, what happened?” The team leader glanced at Stout before motioning for the soldier to come over to talk to him privately.
Stout stared at the two men as they huddled, and knew he wasn’t supposed to hear what they were saying. As their voices rose, Stout could hear the sergeant saying the words “free-fire zone. It’s a damn free-fire zone, and you don’t question that.” Moments later, the men walked back and joined the rest of the team. Stout looked at the bodies and saw the leaflets in their hands. No guns or ammunition were found.
As the Tigers began to walk in a patrol line, Stout’s mind kept churning. That didn’t make sense. He knew the peasants clearly weren’t VC. And after spending nine months with a line company—wounded three times—he knew when to fire at a target and when not to. But the T
igers were experienced soldiers, he mused. They must know what they’re doing.
For the rest of the day, as the team walked through the foothills, Stout was quiet. He didn’t take any notes, nor did he bother to ask any questions. He had thought about finding a soldier to profile but didn’t bother.
By sundown, the entire platoon regrouped. The day’s patrols were over. As the soldiers broke out their C rations, they began to talk. Stout learned that the only two villagers spotted by the teams that day were the two killed by his team. All other team members came up empty.
As they ate, several soldiers walked over to Stout and introduced themselves, joking that they wanted their pictures taken and stories written about “all the VC they were going to kill.” Stout tried to be friendly—even snapping a few photos of the Tigers—but was still subdued. He didn’t know what he would report about the day’s events. Maybe it was better not to write anything. One thing was for certain: the next time they went out on patrol, he didn’t want to be with the same team. Those guys were too trigger-happy. Stout wasn’t sure how he would bring it up to Lieutenant Naughton, but before the end of the night, he was prepared to ask to be reassigned. He was done with this valley. But so were the Tigers.
Before the platoon finished their rations, a radio call came from battalion headquarters: the choppers were on their way to pick up Tiger Force. “We’re heading back to Carentan,” said Naughton. Since after the Tigers’ most recent sweep there was now little perceived activity in the valley, the battalion commanders were going to redeploy them to a cluster of villages one thousand meters west of Duc Pho.
As they waited for the choppers, some of the soldiers talked about taking a shower and then tossing their uniforms in a bonfire, the accepted practice for soldiers in the bush. That way, the men were guaranteed a new set of clothes because no one carried extra uniforms on patrol. Besides, there was no other way to clean fabric soaked with two weeks’ worth of sweat, blood, pus, and urine.
Later, the men would head to the whorehouses near Duc Pho and get drunk. Stout had no intention of joining the soldiers. All he wanted to do was go back to his tent.
From a ledge in the mountains, Lu Thuan and several villagers watched as the choppers flew out of sight, the lights receding into the blackness. Carefully, they scanned the valley floor, searching for any movement or even a flicker of light. There was nothing.
The men gathered closer and began to talk. They asked one another whether it was safe to go back to their homes.
Now that the hamlets were burned, there seemed to be no reason for the soldiers to return. But Lu wasn’t so sure. His uncertainty was shared by others, and the villagers agreed to wait in the mountains until morning.
For several more hours, Lu Thuan thought about his family and whether they were still alive at Nghia Hanh. He wondered whether he would ever see his two children. For nearly two years, bombs had dropped everywhere in Quang Ngai—everywhere but the Song Ve. Lu couldn’t understand why the Army turned its attention to his valley. His people were just simple farmers.
As dawn broke, he and the others gathered once again and looked down on the valley. There were no trucks or choppers. So far, no soldiers.
Some of the men proposed going back to rebuild their huts. Lu argued that it was too soon to know whether the Americans would be back. The helicopters could swoop over the valley at any time. There was no hurry as long as they still had rice, though admittedly, they only had enough to last two weeks.
But Lu could tell he was not going to convince those men who had already made up their minds. Some of the men agreed to stay with Lu, but most returned to the crevices along the ridge where they had been hiding, gathering their clothes and bags of rice. With the sun rising over the foothills, dozens of them walked slowly down the ridge toward the river, toward home.
Sitting at his desk, Dennis Stout stared at his black Underwood typewriter. After punching a few keys, he stopped. “What am I going to write?” he muttered to his translator, Nguyen Van Phoc. After spending a day on his new assignment, he had nothing—at least nothing the Army would publish. He had tried to think of a story during the helicopter ride to Carentan, but the images kept returning of the young men waving leaflets, gunned down on the hill.
Just a month earlier, he had witnessed the rape and execution of a woman by several soldiers in a bunker west of Quang Ngai City. Disgusted by the incident, he informed a chaplain about the atrocity but was told to go back to his job. It was too late to do anything, and it was, the chaplain argued, an isolated incident.
Stout had tried his best to get over it. He had to move on; otherwise, it would consume him. So he had argued with his editor for a new assignment because he didn’t want to cover the same company, and his request was granted—he got the Tigers.
With paper littering the floor—balled-up pages of previous attempts to write something—Stout finally called it quits. If his editors wanted a story to fill the paper, they could take one of his surplus Warrior of the Week columns—vignettes written weeks in advance from field interviews with grunts.
He rose from his desk and turned around to talk to his twenty-one-year-old South Vietnamese translator. Nguyen was sleeping in a nearby cot. In the past six weeks, they had become close, sharing stories about their families and what the two men wanted to do after the war.
Stout debated waking him up so he could tell Nguyen about what he had seen earlier in the day. But he stopped himself. Why bring it up now? Let the man sleep.
Stout walked outside his tent and turned on a transistor radio, tuning in to the American Forces Vietnam Network radio broadcast from Saigon. He had hoped to listen to some music to get his mind off the day’s events, but instead he got the news about Lyndon Johnson’s meeting with Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey. There was hope their talks would somehow be the first step toward a peace agreement for Vietnam, but it was clear from the report that nothing was going to happen.
Stout had already learned how to parse what he heard on the radio. Johnson and Westmoreland were telling reporters that the end of the conflict was within reach, and the enemy was losing its will to fight. It was, Stout was realizing, just the opposite. He had been in Vietnam for nearly a year, and the fighting was escalating, not decreasing. He had spoken frankly to South Vietnamese soldiers who told him that thousands of North Vietnamese Army regulars were infiltrating Quang Ngai every month. From the air, you could see their new bunkers and encampments going up, and American soldiers were running into NVA troops every day in the mountains west of Duc Pho.
Staring up at the stars, Stout wanted to be home. Back with his wife and daughter, and far away from this hot, brutal place where nothing seemed real. Uneasily, he was starting to loathe his life in the military. He was raised in a house where the men served—without question. His grandfather fought in France in World War I. His father fought in the South Pacific in World War II. His uncles fought in the war, too, and they weren’t bashful about it; indeed, that’s all they talked about at gatherings. His brother had already served in South Vietnam in the Navy, and just a week after high school graduation, Stout had walked to the recruiting office in Phoenix and signed the three white sheets of paper that had eventually landed him here. While Stout had signed up to be a helicopter pilot, he never got out of the infantry. He always suspected someone mixed up the paperwork. Well, it was that kind of war.
Stout turned off the radio and went back into his tent. He tried to sleep, but after several hours of staring at the ceiling, he gave up.
Not far away, some Tigers were restless. Sanchez tossed and turned but couldn’t sleep, so he sat up with a notebook to write another letter to his girlfriend. Two things bothered him: Barnett and word that other Tigers had killed two civilians that day.
He was not surprised that Barnett had flipped out. His fellow team member was always close to the edge, and Sanchez was getting tired of it. It was probably better, he thought, that they didn’t serve to
gether. More troubling was the killing of the two Vietnamese who were clearly unarmed. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” he wrote Mary. “We never did things like that. Most of the time, we leave the civilians alone.” He told Mary he was having second thoughts about serving in the Tigers. “Maybe I just need to get out,” Sanchez concluded.
In another tent, Green was trying to finish a belated Father’s Day letter to Melvin Green. A few hours earlier, he had told Ybarra to go on to Mama San’s without him. He needed a break from Sam. His old friend was changing in a troubling way.
Green liked being a Tiger. He even had a new nickname: “Boots,” he told Melvin, because he would fall asleep without removing his shoes—his way of wanting to be ready. After all, the Tigers were a far cry from the mortar platoon. Deep into enemy territory, they were always in danger of being hit.
He told his father not to worry, though, because he wasn’t going to be in South Vietnam much longer. He had already been there almost a year. “I hope my boat is ready to be used,” Ken wrote. “I really miss running around the lake. But I’ll be back at it again. Sorry this is short. You don’t have to write back. I’ll be home before I would get it,” he said. Green didn’t share his concerns with his father.
The light in Harold Trout’s tent was still glowing. He had finished a letter to his wife, Brigette, and reached for a worn notebook—one he had been carrying since joining the Tigers in March 1967. Few of his fellow soldiers knew that Trout would regularly compile a roster of the Tigers—their ranks and their positions. It was his way of keeping track.
In many ways, he considered the Tigers his unit, even if he wasn’t an officer. He knew more than the officers and was older than everyone in the unit except for Sergeant Doyle. Everyone wanted to be on his team, partly because he never showed fear—a trait noted in his evaluations. He hated the Vietnamese and made no bones about it. He would kill every last one of them if he had to.
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