Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

“This won’t take long,” the investigator promised.

  Bowman escorted the agent into the kitchen but again said he was reluctant to say anything. “What are you guys looking for?” he asked.

  Turning on his tape recorder, Apsey said he would get right to the point. He knew that the events in question took place six years earlier. But it was important that Bowman remember. Apsey then described an incident in which Tiger Force soldiers shot and wounded an unarmed Vietnamese man at dusk in the Song Ve Valley. Witnesses said that Sergeant Trout ordered Bowman to execute the man, but the medic refused. So Trout ended up doing the honors.

  Bowman was angry. He didn’t need the intrusion, he said, nor did he need to relive the war. Apsey said he wasn’t blaming Bowman but just wanted the truth. “Did this happen?” Apsey asked.

  Clenching his teeth, Bowman repeated that it didn’t do any good to talk about this all these years later. “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  Apsey listened, then said he wasn’t going to go away. “I’ve put a lot of time into this case.”

  Bowman looked at Apsey across the kitchen table and could tell the agent was intent on finding out what happened. Bowman could either refuse to talk, hoping the agent would move on to others, or open up.

  “I’ll talk to you,” said Bowman, “and then this is over.”

  Slowly, Bowman went on to describe how someone shouted for a medic after several shots were fired. Bowman said he walked over and found the man on the ground, seriously wounded. “Trout was there and he said to me something like, ‘C’mon, Doc, break your cherry,’ which meant I should kill him because I hadn’t done this sort of thing because I was rather new in the outfit. I declined this and then Trout took my .45-caliber pistol and shot and killed the Vietnamese.” It was “a mercy killing,” said Bowman. But to Apsey, there was no such thing as a mercy killing. Ending the life of a wounded civilian was a violation of Army regulations and the Geneva conventions.

  Before the interview ended, Bowman confirmed three other incidents: the old man being killed by Hawkins near the river; a prisoner being beaten and shot by Private Floyd Sawyer after the man was ordered to run; and an old man being shot twice in the head by Private James Cogan after being pulled from a hut. Carpenter had told Apsey about the killings, and now Bowman was reluctantly corroborating them.

  After nearly two hours of questioning, Bowman ended the interview. He was through talking and made it clear to Apsey that he didn’t want agents ever coming to his home again.

  By now, Apsey was starting to see a pattern in the former Tigers. They were troubled and, in some cases, nervous wrecks. What he didn’t know was that Bowman and others were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD—a condition afflicting thousands of Vietnam veterans but years away from being identified by mental health experts. By 2000, nearly one in every six veterans of the war was afflicted by the disorder, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The trauma of what they experienced was so painful, they shoved it down deep inside, but the psychological symptoms—flashbacks, nightmares, and depression—reminded them almost daily of what they left behind. Many turned to drugs and alcohol to ease the pain. They didn’t want to talk about the war, especially to a CID agent investigating war crimes.

  When he returned to Fort MacArthur, Apsey was concerned about getting to former platoon members before they had a chance to talk to one another. His fear was that once they talked, the case would shut down.

  He immediately tried to get to Cogan. The combat engineer had been with Tiger Force during much of the Song Ve campaign. But after checking with the Pentagon, Apsey found out Cogan resigned from the Army a year earlier. If Apsey had known earlier that Cogan was a suspect, he could have “flagged” the soldier, the legal tool that the Army had used in the case of My Lai to halt a soldier’s discharge. Now it was too late. Apsey tried to reach the former platoon member but never got beyond his mother. “Leave him alone,” she told Apsey. She said her son was undergoing “medical treatment for a mental problem” brought about by the war and had experienced difficulty trying to adjust to a normal life.

  Again, this was the reason the Army should have aggressively pursued this case when they received the initial complaint in 1971, Apsey concluded. Barnett had resigned and so had Cogan. How many others were out there who had also dropped out? Apsey immediately notified the commanders overseeing Trout and Hawkins to hold up their discharges if they tried to leave the Army. He didn’t want anyone else to get away.

  Without wasting any more time, he turned his attention to Floyd Sawyer, who was accused by Carpenter and Bowman of beating and shooting a prisoner. Sawyer was still in the Army and assigned to Fort Lewis, the sprawling base near Puget Sound.

  Shortly thereafter, Sawyer was pulled into a base office, where Apsey was waiting for him. Though the interview was long, it didn’t break any ground. Sawyer corroborated the shooting of the villager by Cogan, saying the men even joked about it because it took two shots to finish off the elderly Vietnamese. But he became defensive when they asked him about his own case. He insisted he never beat the prisoner and only shot him because he was trying to escape.

  Apsey informed Sawyer that two other former Tigers said the opposite: Sawyer senselessly beat the prisoner and even tied him up with a detonating cord, threatening to blow him up before shooting him. When Apsey pressed further, Sawyer clammed up. No more questions, he insisted.

  Days later, Apsey decided to reinterview Kerrigan, but the former Tiger had refused to take the investigator’s call. Kerrigan knew what Apsey wanted—and it wasn’t good. There were already enough demons in Kerrigan’s life. He couldn’t stop them. The noises. The voices. Memories of the jungle and the faces of the dead. Those horrible faces.

  “What happened to me?” he would ask his friends. But no one knew—least of all Kerrigan.

  He bolted from his mother’s house after getting Apsey’s message and started walking. Just when he had forgotten the images, they were coming back. His heart began to beat harder and he picked up his pace. As a surfer, he remembered the power of the riptide—the currents pulling him out to sea, no matter how hard he swam against the waves. He was now being pulled into the same vortex.

  There was no way he could talk to Apsey. He didn’t want to go into that world again—the one where he had killed so many Vietnamese, spraying the hooches with his M16 and screaming like a madman. “What happened?” he would mumble to himself.

  Kerrigan, like so many other Tigers, was starting to see himself as he really was in Vietnam. That he sank into a level of anger and brutality that now made him feel so ugly and alone. So many times, he thought he was the only one who felt this way. That somehow it was just him. What he didn’t know was that so many others were feeling the same.

  No one knew as much about the Tigers as did Harold Trout. He had trained the grunts, especially after so many Tigers were lost in the Mother’s Day Massacre. And while Hawkins held the rank, it was Trout who had spent an entire year with the platoon. It was Trout who had kept records of the platoon’s missions and personnel, noting when they were killed or wounded. If anyone could shed light on what went wrong, it was he.

  In October, Apsey received information that Trout was no longer in Germany but was at Fort Benning, Georgia. Apsey had been anxiously waiting for him to return to the States. Now he had his chance to meet the former platoon sergeant he had been hearing about for months.

  Before contacting the CID office at Fort Benning, Apsey prepared a list of questions for the thirty-six-year-old sergeant. He wanted to give Trout a chance to respond to the accusations, now being made by five soldiers.

  On October 17, 1973, Apsey flew to the base in western Georgia and met Trout. A stocky soldier with a crew cut and an iron-grip handshake, Trout showed little emotion as Apsey began the interview by informing his subject he was under investigation for murder, aggravated assault, dereliction of duty, and conduct unbecoming a soldier.

  Trout
listened and then waved a hand, signaling the interview was over. He had been through this before in Germany, but the CID agents asked only about war crimes in general and Ybarra and the baby. Now Trout could see that he, too, was a target. He wasn’t going to say anything until he spoke to a lawyer.

  Trout was escorted to the fort’s judge advocate general’s office, where he was met by Army lawyer Captain Robert Taylor. After a brief conversation, Taylor said he was representing Trout and his client wasn’t going to cooperate. From now on, he was off-limits.

  Frustrated, Apsey decided to shake out witnesses by trying a “shotgun” approach. Instead of sending requests to field agents one at a time, he mailed separate copies of case summaries—including revealing information from Carpenter, Barnett, and Bowman—to two dozen field CID offices. That way, the witnesses would know the local agents sent to interview them weren’t just fishing. And it would be more difficult for former Tigers in the military to plead ignorance if faced with specific, corroborated allegations, especially with the threat of being charged with obstruction.

  Within a week, the reports started coming back from field agents—this time, with results. One of the first to cross Apsey’s desk was a statement from Forrest Miller, the former medic, now based at Frankfurt, Germany. When first interviewed in November 1972, Miller had said he didn’t see any atrocities. Now, after agents rattled off a laundry list of war crimes, Miller broke down. Sure, he remembered Ybarra. Who couldn’t? And yes, he collected ears, but he wasn’t the only one; many did. They wore them as necklaces and carried them around like keepsakes.

  As far as Hawkins, Miller had vivid memories of the Tiger commander passing down the order to shoot the ten farmers in the field and, days later, the smell of the rotting corpses and water buffalo.

  But Hawkins wasn’t the only one who ordered Tigers to kill civilians, Miller said. Sergeant William Doyle was another one. The team leader was a “sadist” and a “killer” who was quick to order the executions of unarmed villagers. He once told a Vietnamese teenager to leave the area and, as the teen walked away, fired a fatal bullet into the boy’s back. “He was even grinning about the killing,” Miller said.

  To the best of his memory, most of the atrocities took place in the Song Ve Valley, where there was very little oversight by superiors. He recalled a moment when Tiger Force members ran across two brothers who appeared to be blind being led by a young boy. The brothers were led to a field and shot to death.

  Another report was sent back from a CID agent who tracked down former Tiger medic Ralph Mayhew in Oregon. Though reluctant to be interviewed, Mayhew described one event that would stay with him the rest of his life. After entering a village, he said, he watched helplessly as Doyle confronted a Vietnamese farmer who was not hurting anyone. Doyle began striking the man with a rifle. “As Doyle was beating him,” he said, “the Vietnamese fell to his knees in a praying position and spoke tearfully in his language. I didn’t like the sight of it, so I turned away.” Moments later, Doyle ordered his men to open fire on the man. “It was,” said Mayhew, “cold-blooded murder.”

  With her husband hunkered down at the kitchen table for another night of studying, Joyce Wood quickly grabbed the phone so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Monday night was usually a good time for Donald Wood to catch up on his required reading for law school, but this was a call that he had to take.

  On the phone was CID agent Christopher Olson from Cleveland with an urgent request. He needed to see Wood as soon as possible. “We can be there tomorrow,” the agent said. Since Wood lived in Findlay, Ohio, just ninety miles southwest of Cleveland, the agents could arrive at Wood’s apartment on Main Street before noon.

  Wood asked why CID investigators were coming, but Olson was vague. “It’s an investigation that goes back to Vietnam,” he said. “Do you recall a unit known as Tiger Force?”

  Wood was caught off guard by the question. “Why are you asking?” he replied. The agent said he would explain everything tomorrow in person.

  Wood hung up the phone. His wife asked him what the call was about, but he just shrugged. “They just want to talk to me about Vietnam,” he said.

  He went back to the kitchen table but could only stare blankly at the words of his textbook. Tiger Force. He had tried so hard to forget his time in Vietnam. When the years didn’t erase the memories, the alcohol would, at least temporarily, ease the pain. He had gone to Ohio Northern University law school in hopes of moving on in his life. But how could he forget? The screams, the gunfire. His incessant battles with a platoon commander who was hell-bent on wiping out everything: villages, huts, people.

  After returning from the war, Wood would sometimes hop into his car, press the pedal to the floor, and drive one hundred miles per hour on country roads. His wife and friends would tell him to be careful: he was going to kill himself. People thought he was a daredevil, but what they didn’t know was that the adrenaline rush helped him forget—even if just for a moment.

  The last time Wood had talked with anyone about the Tigers was in 1968, when he had made good on a promise to unload to someone at Fort Bragg about the unit’s actions in the Song Ve Valley. Haunted by the memories, he had walked into the inspector general’s office and opened up to a JAG. Nothing had happened, nor did he expect it. But he wanted someone to know, as if somehow, once he said something, the nightmares and night sweats would stop. That he would be able to forget.

  Now it was January 22, 1974, and the Army was coming to his home. What had changed? All night long he wondered.

  The next morning, he opened the door of his apartment for the CID agents, Olson and Gary Kaddatz. The two had told Apsey the day before that they were meeting with Wood, but no one had expected anything significant from this interview. Apsey simply didn’t want to leave any stones unturned, and that meant talking to everyone who rotated in and out of the unit between May and November 1967.

  Wood was anxious to know what the CID wanted and wasn’t surprised when they told him it involved war crimes, specifically those carried out by the Tigers. “Why is this coming out now?” he asked. The agents responded that they were carrying out orders, and this was an active investigation.

  Wood was undeterred. “Did you know about my complaint?” he asked.

  The agents looked at each other. “We are here to ask you some questions,” said one of the agents. Did he know about the killing of the old man near the river?

  Wood responded that not only did he remember but he had tried to stop Hawkins from carrying out the field operation because the Tigers were drunk. “I argued with Hawkins about the order,” he recalled, “protesting that this is dangerous.” But it didn’t matter to Hawkins, Wood explained. The two didn’t get along—never did. Wood told them about an instance when he tried to stop several Tigers from firing on two elderly women walking toward their position. Hawkins told the men to shoot, but Wood tried to counter the order. Because Hawkins was the commander, they fired, injuring one and just missing the other.

  Wood said that he went to Lieutenant Stephen Naughton, then a battalion officer, to complain about Hawkins’s actions in the field, but nothing was done. Wood said he also complained to an executive officer at battalion headquarters, but again, nothing happened. Not only did he raise these concerns in the field, he said, but after returning to the United States, he complained to the inspector general’s office of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. “What you need to know,” he insisted, “is that I tried to get people to listen.”

  Apsey was startled at the report from Ohio. For two years, Wood had been just another name on the Tiger Force roster. Suddenly he was a key witness. It wasn’t so much that he recalled atrocities that made him crucial to the case. And it wasn’t so much that he had challenged Hawkins. Far more than those actions, Wood had broken the platoon’s code of silence and gone to commanders to complain. If that was true, it was a significant development. It was the first time since taking over the case that Apsey had learned of an effort to
bring this to a higher command. And worse, the pleas were ignored. If top officers knew a platoon was systematically killing unarmed civilians and looked the other way, those commanders could also be charged with war crimes, specifically dereliction of duty.

  “My God,” Apsey said as he looked over the Wood interview. He would have to tread lightly. But Apsey couldn’t ignore Wood’s story. To do so would be derelict on his part. And it would go against everything he believed in.

  Gerald Bruner walked into the CID office at Fort Bragg on the morning of February 12, opened up a metal chair, and sat down. The career soldier knew all about the Tiger Force investigation and didn’t want any part of it. He had been through this before—two years earlier—and told an agent then what he was going to tell agents now: he had nothing to say.

  The day before, a CID agent visited Bruner at the base to request the sergeant come into the office to answer questions about Tiger Force. Bruner was puzzled, because he had been interviewed in September 1972 and had never heard back from the CID. He assumed the investigation had ended with the war.

  Now married with a daughter, Bruner had become disillusioned with life in the Army. He was stuck in a desk job that he hated and was drinking every night, partly to forget Vietnam. He had served four tours in nearly a dozen jobs, including a year as a sniper.

  “I already talked to you guys,” he groused as he sat across from Special Agents Alan Boehme and James Davis.

  But Boehme was determined to follow through on the orders he received from Apsey. Boehme explained that it didn’t matter if soldiers had been previously interviewed—they were being called in again.

  Bruner declared that was fine, but he didn’t like being interviewed—period, and didn’t like the CID. He said they weren’t around when he needed them years ago, and he didn’t need them now.

  Boehme assured Bruner that the agents were not trying to get him into trouble but that they had reason to believe Bruner served with another sergeant who was a war-crimes suspect. “Do you know an individual by the name of Doyle?” the agent asked. Bruner replied that he remembered the name but not much else. “I served with a lot of people over there,” he said.