When CID agents came to his door, Kerney froze up. All they did was bring back bad thoughts, and he had tried so hard to forget. Surely there must be others they could talk to, he suggested. But after several minutes of questioning, Kerney admitted he knew Ybarra, though nothing about a baby being killed. “I just don’t know anything,” he said.
In the ensuing weeks, more soldiers were found, each one a near and useless carbon copy of the other: they were clearly distressed and edgy but drew a blank when it came to war crimes. “These guys are nervous. Something’s up,” one agent wrote Apsey. But one couldn’t base a case on shadows and nervous tics.
In November, Apsey decided to fly to New Orleans to interview Harold Fischer. Like so many other veterans, Fischer was clearly traumatized by the war. He had trouble sleeping and keeping jobs after his discharge, but had kept much of his troubles to himself. Shortly after he rotated out of Tiger Force, he had been shipped to a line company to finish his tour, but he was clearly distressed from his days with the platoon. When a lieutenant ordered him to skip a stand-down—a brief period of rest and relaxation—and return to the field, Fischer refused. When the officer insisted, he had picked up his M16 and fired at the lieutenant’s feet. Fischer was court-martialed for insubordination and spent sixty-one days in the military jail known as Camp LBJ. After returning to the United States, he began dropping acid and drinking. “I had to dull the pain,” he recalled. “I had nothing in common with the average person.”
Fischer was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to finish his last few months in service, when an antiwar protest sent him into a tizzy. “I just couldn’t take it,” he said. “It just triggered everything from the war.” He went on a long binge, drinking and smoking marijuana for days. After his discharge, he moved with a girlfriend to New Orleans, where he got a job selling used cars.
Fischer knew the CID agents would keep hounding him, so he agreed to meet Apsey on the tenth floor of the federal building on Loyola Avenue. First, Apsey showed the former private some photos of Tiger Force members, asking him to identify the ones he recognized. Fischer picked out McGaha and a few others. Apsey could see Fischer was nervous and didn’t want to talk, so he tried his usual approach of backing into the interview, starting with questions about Fischer’s military background.
Fischer twitched in his seat. He didn’t know what to say, or how much he could say.
Apsey realized he had to act quickly, before Fischer closed up entirely, so he directly asked the question: “Do you know anything about Ybarra cutting off the head of a baby?”
Fischer sat straight up in his chair. He had never expected this to come up. Never. Why now?
He told Apsey he had nothing to say. Apsey dived back in without pause: “Do you have knowledge of such an incident?”
After several tense seconds, Fischer looked down. He couldn’t even deal with the war on his own. Why would he want to talk to the CID about it? How was this going to help him at this stage in his life?
But Fischer was also pragmatic, and he could tell that Apsey wasn’t going to go away. He would be back.
So, slowly, Fischer began to recount what had happened five years earlier. After a sweep of a village, Fischer explained, he had passed by Terrence Kerrigan, who had appeared flustered. Fischer had asked him what was wrong, and Kerrigan had responded by saying, “Sam just cut a baby’s head off.” Fischer could see that Kerrigan was upset and had never forgotten the expression on his fellow soldier’s face.
Apsey interrupted Fischer by asking him if he saw Ybarra cut off the baby’s head. Fischer shook his head no. All he would say was that Ybarra was capable of such an act. In fact, though he kept his fear to himself, Fischer was afraid about telling the whole story because he believed Ybarra would hunt him down and cut his throat for saying anything. Ybarra, he imagined, still blamed him for Green’s death, and five years later, Fischer still had nightmares about the Indian with the pockmarked face and black, angry eyes. He had to be careful. Fischer had seen Ybarra leaving the hut. He had immediately looked inside and seen the baby’s headless body. There was no question Ybarra carried out the despicable act. But he wasn’t going to tell Apsey. He had said enough, maybe even too much.
Apsey asked if there were problems with this unit. Was there anything wrong with Tiger Force, or anything Fischer was trying to hide?
Fischer was quiet. He had been thinking about what he had said. He took a deep breath. “There were the ears,” he said, “the ears.” He added that other things happened, but he couldn’t talk about it.
Apsey tried to press Fischer for more details. “What else can you remember?” he asked, stressing the importance of telling the truth. But by now, Fischer was starting to shut down. He was through with the interview, whether Apsey liked it or not.
Fischer rose from his chair, left the room, and walked to the elevator. Apsey gathered his stuff and walked out into the balmy New Orleans afternoon.
When Apsey returned to Fort MacArthur, he immediately pressed the Pentagon for any information on the whereabouts of Terrence Kerrigan. Within days, he received his answer: his witness was living a half hour away, out of the Army in Pasadena. After several phone calls, Apsey reached Kerrigan and coaxed him into coming to the base for an interview on December 12.
Kerrigan didn’t want to go to the base. He was living with his mother and spent most of his days smoking joints and drinking. He now walked with a limp—the result of injuries he had suffered after being struck by a car near Fort Bragg in 1970. He had spent nearly a year in the hospital and was now addicted to painkillers.
Kerrigan had originally joined the Army to get the benefits to go to college, but now everything was on hold. He tried going to UCLA but dropped out after a semester. He tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. He would open his books and stare at the pages. One night, he tossed a textbook to the floor and quit. He left his home and went to a bar, where he immediately got into a fight.
The good-natured, clean-cut guy who loved to surf had died. People were stunned just by the difference in the way Kerrigan looked: deep-set eyes, long, stringy hair and mustache. “He wasn’t the same boy who went to Vietnam,” said his mother, Joan Kerrigan. He shared one story with his mother: the death of a baby in a hut. And every time he heard a baby cry, he would turn to her and say he didn’t want children.
Kerrigan hesitated to shake Apsey’s hand. He was scared and, at the same time, defiant. Right away, he said he didn’t feel comfortable talking about his former platoon and wanted to leave.
Apsey didn’t beat around the bush.
“I’m not going to go away,” he said.
Kerrigan looked up. Apsey then leaned over the table, confronting the former private directly: Did Sam Ybarra murder a baby after a sweep of a village in Quang Tin?
Kerrigan stared at Apsey with surprise and then turned away. “I don’t remember,” he said. The former point man kept him alive and showed him how to turn his fear into hate. There was no way he would turn on Sam.
Apsey reached over and grabbed a piece of paper from his desk. It was Fischer’s statement. Kerrigan looked at the document and then tossed it back on the desk. His face flushed with anger, he snapped, “I can’t close out the possibility that this incident happened.”
Apsey asked him what he knew about the incident, but Kerrigan jumped up, announcing, “I’m not saying anything more.” As Kerrigan left the room, Apsey asked him if he would be available for one more interview. Kerrigan angrily pointed his finger at the agent. “This is all bullshit!” he screamed. “I’m not going to tell you anything about Tiger Force. Nothing. Do you hear me?”
Apsey sat there wondering what it was that these men were so scared of. Or who.
CHAPTER 21
When Apsey arrived at his office on January 12, 1973, there were already two phone messages on his desk. Both were from Special Agent Donald Needles, who worked out of an Army office in Columbus, Ohio. Both were marked “urgent.”
> Apsey was aware that Needles was interviewing a former Tiger Force specialist who lived in Ohio and that the interview was supposed to take place in the morning. Apsey tried to reach Needles twice but was told both times the agent was still interrogating the same witness. That was a good sign. Most interviews in this investigation had lasted less than thirty minutes.
By noon, Apsey tried again. This time Needles picked up the phone. “I think you may want to come out here,” Needles said. “This guy’s talking. You’re not going to believe what he’s saying.”
It wasn’t like Bill Carpenter to slump into his seat and stare into space. Usually, he was quick to crack jokes with his young wife, Deb, or toss his baby into the air before going off to his sales job for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. But as he sat across from Deb and their six-month-old son on a cold January morning, he couldn’t stop thinking of the phone call he had just received a few hours earlier. He looked out the window at the snow now falling, at the gray leaden skies of southeast Ohio, and knew he better leave soon before the roads were impassable. The forecast called for three to six inches, and on the narrow country roads of Jefferson County, that could be treacherous if he waited too long.
He didn’t have to tell his wife why he was bothered or where he was going. She knew he had received a call from the Army CID that morning. He had risen from the table, kissed her and the baby, grabbed his coat, and headed out the door. As he had driven north through the rolling hills, Carpenter had tightly gripped the wheel of his car. The images were returning: Jungles. Tiger Force. Death.
Carpenter had spent the last six years trying to forget the year he spent in Vietnam. But the past had a way of creeping up, even startling you. He was young when he went to war, and it had been hard enough to learn how to kill, and then to watch as things got so crazy, so merciless.
The faces—that was the hard part. Remembering the faces of the dead. He wanted to just pretend it was all a bad dream. A phone call like this morning’s reminded him that it had been a nightmare made flesh.
As an Army reservist, he couldn’t ignore the request to talk to an investigator about Tiger Force. He had blown off the first call several months earlier by telling the agent he didn’t want to talk. But Carpenter knew that if a second request was made, he would have to comply or risk being called back into active service, something he most certainly did not want. He had a family and a three-bedroom home in the small rural town of Brilliant. He held down two jobs, one with the tobacco company and the other with the Brilliant police department as a second-shift patrolman. Carpenter didn’t want anything to jeopardize his new life.
A week ago, he agreed to talk to Special Agent Needles, and it had just started coming out, everything. Now he was on his way to tell the story again—this time, to Gus Apsey.
A cold wind whipped across the tarmac of Port Columbus International Airport as Apsey stepped off the plane. He knew the Midwest could be cold, but he didn’t realize how numbing the air could be in the middle of January. When he reached the terminal, he was greeted by Needles, who had arranged the meeting with Carpenter at a Holiday Inn in Steubenville, ten miles from Carpenter’s house. The drive to the coal-mining town—120 miles of boring flat farmland that eventually rolls into the hills of southeastern Ohio—went quicker than expected.
By the time they walked into the lobby, Carpenter was already waiting. Unlike some of the other veterans who grew their hair long, Carpenter was clean shaven and had a crew cut. He was slightly nervous but polite. The three checked into a room and plopped down in chairs as Apsey took out his pen and notepad and turned on a tape recorder. Apsey looked at Needles and then turned back to Carpenter.
“What made you want to talk to us?” Apsey asked.
Carpenter took a breath. “You know, the Tigers killed a lot of people while I was with them,” he said. “And I may have shot one or two myself that would not be considered justified killings.”
Though Needles had told Apsey that Carpenter was willing to talk, the lead agent was nevertheless surprised at the veteran’s candor. Apsey asked Carpenter about Ybarra. Was it true he murdered a baby during a mission in Quang Tin? Carpenter responded that he didn’t witness any such act but heard about it. Everyone knew that Ybarra was crazy and seemed to enjoy killing.
Apsey waited for Carpenter to say more, but for a moment, there was silence. It wasn’t easy for Carpenter. He had buried so much after the war—countless stories that he didn’t even tell his wife, his parents, his closest friends.
Apsey sensed that Carpenter was hesitating, but then, to his surprise, the former Tiger Force soldier began talking as if he had been rehearsing this moment for years. “One thing you need to know,” Carpenter said, taking another deep breath. “I was scared.”
He looked around the room as he collected his thoughts and then began. It was morning in the Song Ve Valley, and the platoon had just received fire from snipers but didn’t see where they were perched. Moments later, the unit came upon a rice paddy where ten unarmed farmers were in the field. Word was passed down the line to go ahead and fire.
Apsey interrupted. “Who gave the order?” he asked. Carpenter looked at Apsey. “It was our commander, Lieutenant Hawkins.”
For the next several minutes, Carpenter gave a detailed account of the men lifting their rifles, without any provocation, and firing at the farmers as they began to run for cover. “We killed about ten,” he said slowly, “and then stopped firing.” He went on to explain that the soldiers “knew the farmers weren’t armed to begin with, but shot them anyway because Hawkins ordered it.”
Apsey interrupted again. “Who was there during this incident?” he asked.
Carpenter responded, “The whole Tiger Force platoon.” Carpenter insisted he never fired on the farmers, knowing “it was unjustified. I just couldn’t do it.”
Next, Carpenter brought up the execution of an old man as he pleaded for his life near the banks of the Song Ve River. The man had just crossed the river carrying a crossbar with buckets at each end and geese inside. At the time, some of the Tigers were intoxicated. They had been drinking beer and shouldn’t have even been on night maneuvers. They were drunk. Carpenter said the old man, who was unarmed, was brought to Lieutenant Hawkins, who began “shaking the old man, yelling at him, telling him he was a son of a bitch, and generally cussing at him.” He said while the commander was screaming at the man, Sergeant Harold Trout walked up and clubbed the man on the head with the barrel of his M16. “I saw this old man fall to the ground, and at that time, his head was covered with his blood.”
Carpenter said he tried to reason with Hawkins to stop the beating, “but Hawkins pushed me away with his left hand, saying, ‘You chicken shit son of a bitch. If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you.’” At that point, Carpenter said Hawkins aimed his rifle at the man’s face and fired twice. “I knew the old man was dead, as half of his head was blown off,” Carpenter said quietly.
As he talked, Apsey put down his pen. As long as the tape recorder was running, he would transcribe the words later. For now, the investigator just wanted to listen. This is what he had been waiting for—to finally get a member of this unit to talk—and he wasn’t going to stop him now.
Carpenter began describing the afternoon he was walking with Sam Ybarra when the point man spotted a teenager running. Without hesitation, Ybarra lifted his M16 and shot the boy. He then walked over to the body and took off the boy’s tennis shoes. “That’s why he shot him,” Carpenter said to Apsey. “For his shoes.” And he recalled that when the shoes didn’t fit, Ybarra tossed them away and then sliced off the teenager’s ears.
And there was more. The execution of a prisoner west of Duc Pho. The shooting death of a wounded detainee by a team leader in the Song Ve Valley in July. The stabbing death and scalping of a prisoner by Ybarra in the same month. The bayoneting of a prisoner.
Carpenter grew quiet, and for a minute, no one said anything. Finally, Apsey broke in. “Did your commanders know?”
he asked. “Did you ever think of telling them?” How, Apsey wondered, could a platoon carry out such actions without the knowledge of the top element?
Carpenter then said something that would stay with Apsey for the duration of the investigation. “We were told to kill everything that moves,” he explained. “It was standard practice for the Tiger Force to kill everything that moved when we were out on an operation.”
Apsey stopped him. “Are you telling me that all of the members of the Tiger Force killed everything that moved when they went out on a mission?”
“With a few exceptions, that is correct,” Carpenter said.
He said he still recalled the rallying cry that crackled over the radio from battalion headquarters: “You’re the 327th Infantry,” the voice said. “We want 327 kills!”
Apsey interrupted. “Who gave that order?”
Carpenter thought for a moment, then responded, “It came from Ghost Rider.” The same name used by the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Morse.
There was plenty of time to think about Carpenter’s statement during the four-hour flight to Los Angeles. Apsey was an experienced agent who had investigated atrocities but was startled by what he heard. Either Carpenter was lying or this unit was so egregious, no one wanted to tell the truth.
Carpenter had given him more than twenty names of suspects and witnesses. Apsey now knew who to talk to and what to ask. He would go back and contact the people who had already been interviewed and he would make sure agents knew what Carpenter said.
In addition, Apsey had to learn more about Carpenter and whether he was credible. The former specialist had described war crimes between May and November 1967. But alone, Carpenter’s statement didn’t mean anything. Under military law, accusations have to be substantiated—the equivalent of probable cause that a crime occurred. That means talking to other witnesses to corroborate the story. The suspect is then required to appear in what is known as an Article 32 hearing to determine if a court-martial is held.
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