To the soldiers, Trout looked like he was trying to keep up with Hawkins, downing beer after beer. They were like two country boys at a backyard barbecue. “He was acting funny—more brave than he actually was,” said Miller. “After three beers, he was wiped out.”
Hawkins and Trout started ranting about having to be in the Song Ve and “became loud and boisterous,” recalled Sergeant Leo Heaney. Ybarra and Green, who had already guzzled several beers apiece, were also stumbling into a foaming incoherence.
Wood, who had been watching the men drink for hours, grew concerned and just hoped the Tigers would not need to fight the enemy that night. The best thing they could do was sleep. But as the sun set over the valley, a call came over the radio: Your break is over. Gear up. Get ready to go out on maneuvers.
Darkness set in, but Dao Hue knew the trail by heart.
The sixty-eight-year-old carpenter had walked the dirt path that wound around the river for most of his life, but it was getting harder. Because of pains in his joints, he had to frequently stop on trips to other villages.
At sunset, he left the hut he shared with his niece, Tam Hau, in what remained of Hanh Tin in the center of the valley, to walk to a hamlet a mile away to get geese from a peasant who had been trapping them along the river. He and his niece were glad to be back in the valley. Dao had escaped to the mountains while other family members were rounded up and whisked away in choppers to Nghia Hanh. For the past three days, Dao and others who had eluded the American dragnet had spent hours in the hot sun with their machetes, cutting bamboo and thatch from the brush. Even though he was in great pain, he wanted to use his skills to help rebuild the huts the Americans had incinerated.
Dao, whose wife died three years earlier, didn’t like leaving his niece alone. But if he didn’t get the geese, they might have to wait another day to eat. They had consumed their supply of rice, and it wasn’t safe to harvest what was left in the fields.
He found the villager and accepted two geese in exchange for promises to help the man build a hut. Dao placed the dead animals in two baskets hanging from the ends of a shoulder bar he brought from his hut and began the trek back home. Instead of walking the trail, he decided to wade across the shallow end of the river to avoid any chance of being seen by VC or Americans.
Wood couldn’t believe the orders: cross the river and set up an ambush. It was reckless to do this after drinking all afternoon. And to cross the Song Ve at night? Too many things could happen. Night patrols were dangerous enough with snipers along the riverbanks and pungi sticks planted in the ground along dikes and hidden by the rice plants. Sharp enough to pierce a man’s foot and covered with enough human feces to infect a victim within hours, the sticks had been plaguing the line companies ever since they arrived in Quang Ngai.
For days, Wood had been avoiding Hawkins, but he knew he had to try reasoning with the platoon commander now. He jumped up and walked over to Hawkins as he was putting on his rucksack.
“You can’t do this,” he said, arguing that the men had been drinking and couldn’t possibly function at their best on a night maneuver. Hawkins, clutching his carbine .15 rifle, ignored Wood and instead turned to the men. “Let’s saddle up and ride,” he bellowed.
Wood was undeterred. He jumped around Hawkins to face him again, saying the ambush was a stupid and dangerous move. But the tall, lanky commander—towering over the five-foot, nine-inch Wood—brushed by his forward artillery observer and headed toward the river with several others in tow.
Wood just shook his head and, instead of protesting again, went to the rear of the column. “I was second from last in line, feeling that this was the safest place to be considering the condition of most of the members of Tiger Force,” he recalled.
They began wading across the waist-high water, but instead of keeping quiet, the men began talking among themselves, their voices rising in the darkness. Wood was furious. He felt that Hawkins should have been controlling the soldiers but instead was joining in with them.
Within a minute, Sergeant James Haugh surprised everyone by tossing a grenade in the water, the explosion loud enough to be heard across the valley. Some of the men burst out laughing, and now Wood knew the platoon was in trouble. For days, the VC and North Vietnamese had been infiltrating the valley. The sole reason the Tigers were on this maneuver was because of intelligence reports showing the enemy was expected to move rice in sampans down the river. The success of any ambush depended on the element of surprise. Drunk soldiers fooling around with explosives was a formula for disaster.
As the Tigers reached the other side, Leo Heaney picked four soldiers for a team to provide security while the rest of the men set up the ambush. As Heaney led the team down a trail, he came face-to-face in the darkness with Dao Hue. Heaney grabbed the old man. “He was terrified and folded his hands, and started what appeared to me as praying for mercy in a loud, high-pitched tone of voice,” Heaney recalled.
Heaney could tell Dao was harmless but didn’t have the authority to let him go, so he brought him back to the area where the Tigers were setting up the ambush. The sergeant watched as Dao trembled, pleading in Vietnamese to be left alone.
Standing a few feet away, Trout was annoyed. The old man shouldn’t even be in the valley. Without warning, Trout stepped forward and clubbed Dao on the head with the barrel of his M16. The old man flew to the ground, moaning, blood running down the side of his face.
Hawkins, who heard the commotion, rushed over and saw Dao on the ground. “Shut this old fucker up or I’ll kill him,” he insisted.
Carpenter jumped to Dao’s defense. “The old man’s just a farmer. He can’t hurt anyone!” he shouted. But Hawkins pushed Carpenter away with his left hand, admonishing the soldier for speaking up. “You chicken shit son of a bitch. If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you,” Hawkins told him.
Medic Barry Bowman stepped forward to treat Dao, but Hawkins thrust his rifle up to the old man’s head and pulled the trigger. There was a blast and Dao fell backward to the ground. Hawkins pulled the trigger again. At first, Carpenter thought he was the one who was shot because he was hit by pieces of the old man’s skull and flesh, but quickly realized it was Dao. He looked down and saw the old man was dead. “Half of his head was blown off,” he recalled.
Bowman, who was also hit by the pieces of flesh, was stunned, and for several minutes was quiet. He had joined the Army as a medic to help save lives and was now wondering what was happening.
Wood ran from the riverbank and bolted toward the men as they stood around Dao’s body. “What happened?” he asked as he neared the group. Before anyone could answer, Trout ran up behind Wood and struck him on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. As Wood fell down, he heard someone fire a round over his head.
Feeling dizzy, Wood got back up and walked toward Hawkins. “I got one,” Hawkins said, smiling. Wood turned around, still groggy, and staggered away, realizing that it had been Hawkins—his commander—who had fired a shot over his head.
Before he had a chance to confront Hawkins and Trout, shots were fired near the river. The commotion had caught the enemy’s attention, and now the Tigers were in trouble. Their position was known, and there were more enemy soldiers in the valley than Tigers. For the next hour, they were forced to fend for themselves along the river, running from enemy fire and dodging grenades. “Luckily,” said Carpenter, “no one was killed.” But it was now obvious to him and Wood that Tiger Force was being led by a nut who would have allies, and that even if they survived, bad things were bound to be on the way.
CHAPTER 9
In the morning, Wood kept his distance from everyone. Usually, he pored over maps with team leaders, but he was in no mood to talk, and he wanted nothing to do with Hawkins.
When the Tigers gathered up their gear and began walking in the direction of Hanh Tin, Wood stayed in the rear. He was still seething over the killing of the old man near the river. It was an unjustified shooting, but more than that,
it was stupid. It gave the platoon’s position away, leading to a firefight. If Hawkins was trying to keep the prisoner quiet, there were other ways.
“He’s not fit to lead anything,” Wood told Carpenter that morning.
Even the commander’s drinking buddies from the night before had some concerns. Already, the Tigers were making snide remarks behind his back, several calling Hawkins “Jingles” because when he walked his pants would make noise from the many objects stuffed in his pockets.
As the platoon reached the outskirts of the hamlet, the soldiers could see a cluster of huts. Hawkins ordered the men to halt. He went down the line, picking several men to set up a perimeter around the area, with each one responsible for guarding a three-hundred-meter area. Anyone walking in or out of the area would be stopped, detained, and questioned by translators. The Tigers were determined to keep people from building more huts. “This is a free-fire zone,” Hawkins said. “No one is supposed to be here.”
Wood walked to the front of the perimeter where Hawkins was standing, but Wood didn’t acknowledge him. The morning fog had already burned away, and the translators were in the hamlet talking to a few remaining villagers, getting them ready to be evacuated, when a Tiger spotted two women walking toward their position. “Two approaching!” the guard shouted. Hawkins looked over and told the men to open fire. As soon as he uttered the words, Wood blurted out with a hand raised, “No, hold your fire. Hold your fire.”
Hawkins wheeled around, his face flushed, and angrily snapped, “You don’t countermand my orders. This is my platoon.”
Wood turned to Hawkins. “They’re openly approaching our position. It looks like they want to communicate with us.”
With the men waiting, their weapons drawn, Hawkins lifted his rifle, aimed at the women, and began firing, followed by another Tiger Force soldier. The two women fell to the ground, one screaming.
Wood couldn’t believe what he had just seen. He pivoted around and faced Hawkins, who had just lowered his rifle. “What the hell are you doing?” he screamed. “These were just two old women!”
Without waiting for a response, Wood and two medics rushed to where the women fell. One was shot in the leg and arm; the other did not appear to be hurt but was shaking and crying on the ground.
As the medics leaned over the women, Wood rose and ordered a radio operator to call for a medevac. No one protested the command.
Wood was beside himself. He stormed to the opposite side of the hamlet. He was done with Hawkins. He was going to report everything when he got back to Carentan. There was no way Hawkins should be leading a platoon, and if the commanders didn’t relieve him of duty, Wood would ask to be transferred.
“This isn’t good,” he told Carpenter later. “This isn’t good. This isn’t good for the Tigers. You tell me how a guy like this ends up becoming a commander.”
As the sun set over the mountains, the Tigers slipped off their gear and settled down in the brush. There was not much left to do. Other than the two elderly women who were targeted, no one else had approached the perimeter. It was getting too late to move, and it was better to set up camp along the river just outside the entrance to Hanh Tin.
Just before dark, Wood and six others walked away from the camp, each stopping to dig a foxhole in the dry red soil around Hanh Tin—spaced seventy-five meters apart—with two Tigers posted along a large bend of the river. If the Tigers were going to get ambushed, it was going to be at night and they wanted to be ready.
For several hours, it was quiet, and many of the Tigers dozed off. One thing Carpenter noticed before falling asleep was the brightness of the moon, casting shadows on the valley floor as if it were a sun instead of a satellite. “It was like nothing I had seen in a long time,” he recalled.
Sleeping in between Trout and Bowman, Carpenter was startled awake by shots. He jumped up and grabbed his M16 when he heard someone shout, “We need a medic!” He and Bowman ran fifty meters to the perimeter, where they saw a Vietnamese male in his early twenties rolling on the ground, holding his leg. Covered in blood, he was crying.
Bowman could see the man was seriously wounded. He opened his medic kit to look for bandages as Trout arrived. The team sergeant asked what happened, and one of the soldiers on guard said he shot the man because he had approached the perimeter. Trout stared at the man on the ground and could tell he needed a medevac. But there was no way he was going to call in a chopper and give the Tigers’ position away. As Bowman began wrapping bandages around the man’s leg, Trout slipped next to the medic and removed a .45-caliber handgun from his side. He then thrust the gun in the medic’s face. “C’mon, Doc, break your cherry,” he said.
Bowman knew what the sergeant meant. But that would mean crossing a line—one he didn’t want to cross. He and Trout had been on maneuvers several times, and he knew the veteran sergeant wanted his soldiers to be tough. But this was different. This was murder. The man rolling around in the dirt in pain wasn’t carrying a weapon. The men didn’t even know if he was an enemy soldier. He could have been a villager returning home like so many others. “I couldn’t do it,” he recalled. “It was against everything I believed.” He’d become a medic to save lives, not take them.
Trout shrugged his shoulders and pointed the .45 at the man, calmly firing three shots into his chest and head. Bowman stood speechless, too afraid to protest, too afraid to say anything.
For a minute, the men stood and stared at the man’s body, twitching in the dirt. “No one bothered to check the body for an ID card,” Carpenter recalled.
Wood, who arrived as the sergeant was pulling the trigger, didn’t know what to say to Trout. Though he didn’t always agree with the veteran, he respected him. Now he had watched the sergeant execute a wounded man. And Trout had done it in front of so many of the soldiers who looked up to him.
The medics were huddled in their own group along the riverbank, uncharacteristically quiet. Normally they would borrow supplies from one another and chat about what transpired with their teams. But no one wanted to say anything. They had heard about the killing of the old man by the river and the shooting of the wounded Vietnamese by Trout.
Teeters just wanted out of the Song Ve. Nothing good was happening here. Since joining the Tigers in February, he had never seen anything like this. Something was happening in Tiger Force that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was no secret that everyone was pissed off. No one wanted to be in this hellhole. The heat was wearing on everyone, and so was the jungle rot.
The tension was keeping the men awake at night, and to carry out the day’s mission, Teeters and other medics were passing out Black Beauties, amphetamines that would jack up the soldiers but also increase their stress—a dangerous combination. Now Teeters was dipping into the bag himself—it seemed the only way to get through the days.
He wondered whether he would ever get back to Oregon, particularly the pines and streams where he fished with his father, Don. He kept thinking more and more about his home—his mother, Gayle, and two brothers—something he knew he shouldn’t do. Don’t lose your head. Don’t think too much. “Man, this is fucking nuts,” he said to the others.
A soldier on edge isn’t necessarily bad. The brain and body adapt to war: the senses become sharpened to every noise, every flicker of light, every smell. But when soldiers are artificially stimulated and are lacking sleep, they become agitated at the slightest thing. They are too tired to process every sound, sight, and smell. They become overwhelmed by their surroundings, and without rest, they are no longer capable of making sound decisions. The Tigers were teetering on the edge.
Lying under a cover of leaves, Nyugen Dam peeked out to make sure there were no soldiers. He had been hiding under the thick green underbrush, but with no one in sight, he rose slowly and walked a few feet to the water’s edge to wait for another villager. Across the river, he saw his friend wading toward him, his head barely visible above the moonlit water.
Nyugen was irritated afte
r waiting for hours and whispered to the man to hurry. Even after sunset, it was dangerous to be in the open. The American soldiers could be anywhere. As the two reached the riverbank, Nyugen grabbed a shovel hidden in the brush.
They crept along a dike and then to the edge of the hamlet where the soldiers had been earlier in the day, ever watchful of lights flickering in the darkness—a sure sign the soldiers were near. For the villagers, the only safe places were the old bunkers in the foothills. The Vietcong knew the locations of the underground shelters, but they weren’t bothering the villagers, at least not now. Not with the Americans in the valley.
With each step, Nyugen and his companion could smell a familiar odor lingering in the night air. The man cupped his hand over his nose as he neared the tree line. Next to the remains of a hut was the body of the Vietnamese shot by Trout several hours earlier. Nyugen and his companion had known the smell of death before. They had buried fellow villagers and family members in the past.
Nyugen stood for a moment and stared at the corpse, the face unrecognizable and the shirt soaked in dark blotches of blood. Hours earlier, he had seen the body from a distance but was unable to move closer in fear of being spotted by the soldiers. He did not see the execution but heard the shots from the foothills.
It was hard to recognize the dead villager, especially in the darkness. It would be impossible to bury him in the nearby rice paddy, because the water would push the corpse back to the surface. Nyugen walked fifty meters to a clearing, bent over, and rubbed the soil between his fingers. It was dry, red clay—good enough to support a shallow grave. He handed the shovel to the other man and told him to dig a large, round hole, but not too deep. The man began digging while Nyugen walked back to the body.
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