By the next day, Apsey had dissected the report, searching for clues that would lead him to possible suspects. He had already placed a call to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where CID investigators had initially taken the statement from Gary Coy. The commander’s office at the fort—the home of the 101st Airborne Division—called back: Coy was no longer based at Campbell. They would try to locate him.
In reading the report, Apsey noticed that Coy told investigators about another witness, Private John Ahern, who was killed in action in March 1968. Otherwise, there was nothing.
While Apsey waited for someone to call back, he decided to phone the Army records center at Suitland, Maryland, a massive repository with some files dating back to the Civil War. He knew that all battalions kept morning reports—a daily roster of all people serving in the units at a specific time. If he could get these records, he could find out who was in the battalion in November 1967. But he would also have to be lucky. Many of these reports from Vietnam no longer existed. Some had been deliberately destroyed; others were still overseas. He put in his request, knowing it could take weeks to get the relevant records—if they existed.
He noticed on the bottom of the first page of the report was the name “Tiger Force”—the unit to which the suspect was assigned. The report said Tiger Force was “similar to a ranger unit,” but nothing else. Apsey grabbed a directory of combat units in Vietnam from 1965 through the present but found no listing for Tiger Force. He began asking other agents in the office about a unit known as Tiger Force but drew blanks. Apsey assumed it was a platoon, since so many of the ranger units were broken into such smaller groups, and that perhaps the name “Tiger Force” had been an unofficial designation. The report indicated that Coy was not part of the unit but assigned to Company C of the same battalion to which Tiger Force belonged. Apsey decided to call the military historian at Fort Campbell, but even after reaching him, Apsey was unable to get an answer. There was, apparently, no such record of a unit known as Tiger Force, at least after a cursory search of the archives. The historian promised to do a more thorough search and call back.
Now Apsey was in a quandary. How could he investigate a unit that didn’t exist on paper? And if it did exist, what was it? By the end of the day, he briefed his immediate supervisor, Captain Earl Perdue, who was just as perplexed.
The call several days later from the Army’s records center provided some hope: the morning reports of the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry had been located and would be shipped to Fort MacArthur.
But the call from Fort Campbell wasn’t as promising: Coy was stationed at Camp Sukiran in Okinawa, and any questions that Apsey had for him would have to be typed at Fort MacArthur and then sent via mail to a CID agent at the Okinawa camp. The answers would be sent—again via mail—to Apsey. It wasn’t a great way to conduct an investigation, but Apsey didn’t have a choice. In the meantime, he would continue to try to find someone who knew something about Tiger Force.
Every week, Colonel Henry Tufts, the commander of the CID, reviewed all active war-crimes cases in the event someone from the White House got wind of an investigation. Tufts had promised the White House there would be no more surprises like My Lai. A tough, cigar-chomping fifty-four-year-old lawyer who worked from a command center in the old Navy building in Washington DC, he demanded his agents jump quickly. Ever since congressional hearings in a Detroit motel in November 1971, the American public and U.S. House members such as Morris “Mo” Udall and John Conyers had pressed the government to look into stories of soldiers brutalizing Vietnamese people. During those hearings, dozens of soldiers, including a former Navy officer named John Kerry, had testified before a congressional panel that some soldiers were taking out their frustrations on civilians, torturing and killing them, sometimes mutilating their bodies. Investigators were ordered to look into every accusation raised during the hearings, no matter how frivolous and vague. When the Coy case was thrown in Tufts’s lap, there were sixteen active war-crimes cases.
By April, Captain Perdue received the first phone call from CID headquarters asking about the Coy Allegation. That was unusual for the CID; normally status reports were enough. Unsure why CID command was pestering him, Perdue began pressing Apsey for an update. But there was nothing new for Apsey to report. He was still looking for the soldier named Sam.
After two weeks, the morning reports arrived from Suitland. Usually the records of a battalion show the various units that make up the overall structure, starting with companies and then the smaller platoons. Apsey found reference to three companies—A, B, and C—but nothing about Tiger Force.
Apsey called military historians at other bases and placed calls to CID headquarters at Fort Belvoir. No one knew anything about the platoon.
It wasn’t until May that Apsey received another box of records from Suitland that shed some light on the unit. Enclosed were pages of another war-crimes investigation. Unlike most allegations of atrocities, these hadn’t begun with a formal complaint but with a news conference staged in downtown Phoenix in December 1969. Under the glare of television lights, former military journalist Dennis Stout had appeared before the cameras, hands trembling, with his lawyer, Gerald Pollock, standing close by. Stout said he had been keeping a deep secret but wanted the truth to come out before it was too late. He said he was in South Vietnam two years ago and was still haunted by the gang rape and murder of a woman and the shooting of two villagers who were seeking refuge in the Song Ve Valley by American soldiers who were part of the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry (he never mentioned that some of the soldiers belonged to a platoon in the battalion known as Tiger Force). He said he was just trying to find positive stories about the grunts in 1967 when he had watched the atrocities. He went on to talk about other war crimes. After hearing about the press conference, Congressman Udall had ordered the Army to investigate. Within days, CID agents started looking into the allegations, focusing on two line companies in the battalion.
Apsey began sorting through the witness statements. Most of the soldiers refused to talk, and others said they couldn’t remember anything. But as Apsey sifted through the papers, he saw that Gary Coy had been one of the 112 soldiers interviewed in the case. Though Coy said he didn’t know anything about Stout’s allegations, he had told CID agents about the beheaded baby. Sam, he said, belonged to a platoon known as Tiger Force, a unit of paratroopers from the 101st Airborne who were selected for special operations. Apsey had something to grab on to.
The Stout investigation had been closed on February 9, 1972, because the agency could not “prove or disprove” the allegations. But because of Coy’s mention of the baby, the CID had opened a separate case file—the Coy Allegation file that now sat on his desk. Apsey went back to the records to find the agent who first interviewed Coy in 1971 and learned that Frank Toledo was still at Fort Campbell. The veteran investigator had long moved on from the case but agreed to go over his own records of his interview. He vaguely recalled the story of the baby but said he would need some time to organize his thoughts.
Within a few days, Toledo got back in touch. The only name he had in his records was Sam—no last name—but he said he would check interviews he had conducted with other soldiers.
When Toledo called back, he had the answer. He had interrogated an officer, James Robert Barnett, on March 10, 1971. As part of the interview, Barnett said the only Sam he knew was Sam Ybarra, who had served with Tiger Force from April 1967 to January 1968. Barnett, who was a member of Tiger Force for most of 1967, said he didn’t recall Ybarra murdering a baby.
Toledo had another tip for Apsey. The name of the sergeant who supervised Ybarra was a veteran by the name of Harold Trout. And Toledo passed on one more interesting development in the case before hanging up: Barnett had surprised his commanders at Fort Campbell by abruptly resigning a month after the CID interview, telling fellow soldiers that he feared “going to jail” for something as big as My Lai and that he wasn’t going to stick around to take the fall. “I
’m getting out,” he had told them. He had been acting strange during his final days at Fort Campbell, saying he wasn’t going to be a scapegoat, fellow soldiers had said.
Apsey began to wonder if maybe the baby was just the beginning.
Shortly thereafter, Apsey received word that CID agents had finally tracked down Coy. But the news wasn’t good. Not only did Coy fail to add anything to the story but he changed his account. The twenty-four-year-old sergeant now said he didn’t actually see the soldier kill the baby but heard about it from his friend. That changed everything.
Apsey was angry. He had already invested several weeks into this case, and now a witness was flip-flopping. He decided he would get back to Coy, but first he wanted to turn his attention to Sam Ybarra, whose last known base was Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Apsey sent a message to the fort, requesting Ybarra’s records and an immediate interview, and within a few days received his answer: Ybarra was no longer in the Army. He had been dishonorably discharged in April 1969 after a spate of disciplinary problems, including marijuana possession and insubordination, and was now living on an Indian reservation in San Carlos, Arizona. There was no mention of war crimes in his file.
For all intents and purposes, Ybarra didn’t have to talk to investigators—particularly not for war crimes. That was the advantage of being out of the military, and most soldiers knew it. In the My Lai case, the Army had held up the discharge of the main suspect, Lieutenant Calley, specifically so that he could be tried in a military court. But maybe, Apsey mused, this case wasn’t just about Ybarra. There was some bigger mystery here—he could feel it in his bones. There was James Barnett’s sudden resignation a month after questioning by CID agents. And then there was the truly exceptional difficulty of even tracing the history of the unit. He was investigating a ghost platoon that nobody knew. A soldier changing his story. A soldier quitting under ominous skies. “I had a gut hunch about this case,” Apsey recalled. “I couldn’t put it down.” Gus Apsey had never learned how to coast. His work habits were rooted in his background. Several years after his father was killed, his mother—to the young boy’s surprise—married an American GI who moved his new wife and stepson to the United States in 1952. Young Gus, who couldn’t speak any English, was lost. His mother enrolled him in a public school in northern Virginia, but he fell behind. He pleaded with his mother to send him back to Austria, and eventually she relented and allowed him to live with his grandparents in Innsbruck. There, he went to Jesuit schools, which were known for instilling discipline and a strong sense of social justice that would stay with him the rest of his life. It was in these schools that he found a sense of peace and purpose. “I guess more than anything, they taught us to do the right thing,” he recalled. At eighteen, he returned to the States to live with his mother and stepfather.
Gus Apsey’s sense of justice was soon to be sorely tested.
Sam Ybarra was startled by the knock on his door. No one visited his dilapidated home in the San Carlos Indian Reservation, especially this early in the morning. Ybarra told his wife to see who was there.
Janice Little cracked open the door and was greeted by two men on the front steps, one flashing an Army badge and introducing himself as a CID agent from a field office in Arizona. “We’d like to see Sam Ybarra,” he said.
Little returned to the bedroom to tell her husband, but he had overheard the conversation and wanted nothing to do with the CID. He told his wife to tell the agents to go away.
Since returning to the reservation in 1969, Ybarra had just wanted to be left alone. He had tried to work jobs, but somehow he would always find a way of showing up late—or not showing at all.
Ybarra had not told anyone on the reservation about his dishonorable discharge. No one was going to know what happened. Like other family members, Little was oblivious to her husband’s military record, but not his drinking and drugging. “At first, it really wasn’t so bad,” she recalled. “But then, it got worse. The more I got to know him, the more I realized that he had serious problems.” At first he didn’t drink until late afternoon, but now he was downing beers in the morning and constantly smoking marijuana, often until he passed out.
When the agents drove away, Janice asked her husband why they were at the door, but he just shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. She wasn’t going to press him.
She had known him for a few months and was still learning things about him. They met in a diner at the reservation in 1972. She was a waitress when she noticed him walk through the door in his Army uniform. He sat down in a booth and asked for her to wait his table.
For weeks, he came in every afternoon, placing the same order: cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry shake. Soon after they began living together, she noticed his heavy drinking. “What I learned,” she said years later, “was that he was drinking to forget.”
In May, Apsey was sorting through the mail when he noticed an envelope with the return address for the CID offices in Arizona. Without wasting any time, he ripped open the envelope. He knew it contained the results of an interview with Sam Ybarra and couldn’t wait to read the statement.
What he found was a terse response: Ybarra had refused to talk—no further information. Apsey was disappointed. He had hoped the interview would have cleared up questions about the case.
As he continued sifting through the mail, Apsey came upon an envelope from Fort Bragg, stamped CONFIDENTIAL and bearing his name. When he opened the contents, he saw the papers also pertained to Ybarra. It was a psychological profile, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.
The report had been written in 1969 by an Army psychiatrist who evaluated Ybarra after he refused to go into a bunker during a mortar attack in South Vietnam a year after leaving Tiger Force. He was described as a volatile and bitter soldier who threatened officers with bodily harm. He could be vicious and unpredictable, and was in no condition to go into battle. In short, he was trouble.
Apsey was intrigued. For some reason, Sam Ybarra had been considered a leader in Tiger Force—this much Apsey had already discovered. So why did Ybarra fall apart when he was transferred in 1968? Why did he fit into the Tigers but not other units? What was it about the Tigers that allowed a soldier like Ybarra to thrive?
Apsey was seasoned enough to know that if the Army had zealously worked this case a year ago, agents might have been more easily able to find witnesses to shed light on Ybarra and Tiger Force. Now he would have to play catch-up.
Apsey found that Harold Trout was still in the military, stationed in Europe at Camp Wildflecken, a former German military training base taken over by the U.S. Army at the end of World War II. That meant Apsey would have to depend on CID agents in Germany. He followed the same routine he had for Coy by typing out questions designed to gauge how much Trout really knew. Within ten days, the agents found Trout, interviewed him, and then sent his responses back. Trout said he recalled Ybarra but nothing about the murder of a baby. In fact, he insisted no war crimes occurred under his watch. That wasn’t surprising to Apsey: no soldier in his right mind would confess to war crimes occurring under his supervision, since by doing so he would open himself up to prosecution. But what did surprise Apsey was that Trout had actually kept his own detailed notebook of every soldier who served in Tiger Force in 1967 and that copies were turned over to CID agents. The notebook represented the only record of the platoon’s members—and a big break in the investigation. Apsey now had names.
Using Trout’s notebook, Apsey took the names of the soldiers from Tiger Force and matched them to the military serial numbers in the morning reports. He then sent the numbers to the Pentagon to find where the men were currently based. Over the next few weeks, Apsey sent dozens of additional requests to Army personnel, demanding locations of soldiers and immediate interviews by the local CID offices. In some cases, the soldiers were at bases as far away as Korea and Taiwan. In others, the Army had no data and would have to do several weeks’ worth of tedious hand searches through thousands of records j
ust coming back from Vietnam.
Nevertheless, one by one, the names and locations of former Tiger Force platoon members were sent to Fort MacArthur. One of the first soldiers to be found was Forrest Miller, the former Tiger Force medic, now at Fort Bragg. When agents pulled him aside and began to ask him about Ybarra, he threw up his arms and said he didn’t want to talk. Tiger Force was a long time ago, Miller declared, and he just wanted to get on with his military career. Why not, he suggested, talk to the former commanders? “I didn’t see anything, and I don’t know anything,” Miller told agents Joseph Reiner and Frederick Lepfien. Before the discussion was over he even went a step further, claiming he didn’t even know Ybarra.
Agents also located Ken Kerney, who was then out of the Army and renting an apartment in Chicago. He was uneasy, even nervous about talking.
Kerney’s mother had told the agents where he was renting. Only she knew where her son was living, which is how he desired it. Kerney didn’t want anyone to know, especially the Army. Right after his discharge in 1969, he had burned his uniform. When he had returned to his home in suburban Chicago, he tried to settle down for the sake of his mother. He had hooked up with a high school sweetheart, gotten married, and begun working at a computer company. On the outside, everything had seemed right. But inside, his stomach had been in knots and he couldn’t control his thoughts. He had to be by himself. No one else understood—not his wife, not his mother, no one. “Get the hell out,” he said to himself, and that’s what Kerney did. He left his wife and began hitchhiking across the country, getting drunk and getting stoned. When he finally returned to Chicago, he found a small apartment and picked up a job tending bar at a rock club.
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