Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  Immediately, the agent set three photos on the desk for Bruner to see and asked which was Doyle.

  Bruner looked down at the desk, staring at each photo, and then pointed to the one on the far right. “That’s him, the one with the bald head,” he said.

  Boehme then pulled out a document and began reading a description from medic Ralph Mayhew’s statement of Doyle shooting and then ordering the execution of a wounded farmer who cried for his life. Bruner shifted uneasily in his chair.

  Before the interview, he had made up his mind he wasn’t going to say anything. But now it was all coming back: the Tigers walking into a friendly village and Doyle, undeterred by a farmer’s pleas for safety from the Vietcong, raising his rifle and shooting the man. The bullet struck only the man’s arm, and Doyle tried shooting the man again, but this time his gun jammed. So he ordered his men to finish the job, and they obeyed.

  Bruner could see it all as if it were yesterday. The same men had turned their guns on the farmer’s younger brother, but Bruner had lifted his own rifle and threatened to shoot any soldier who shot the boy.

  If there was one soldier he could never forget, it was Doyle. If there was one soldier he despised, it was Doyle. William Doyle stood for everything that was wrong with the war.

  “Yes,” said Bruner, “I was there.”

  For the next hour, he opened up and talked about Doyle and the village—spelling out details.

  “You know, I’ve been trained by the U.S. Army to be a professional killer,” Bruner told the agents. “That’s what I’m trained to do. Now I don’t know what you’re trained to do, but that’s what I’m trained to do. And the difference is: I know who to kill. These people forgot.”

  The Bruner interview confirmed Apsey’s suspicions that battalion commanders knew what was happening in the field. He now needed a new roster—this time, with the names of all battalion officers in 1967.

  But before the spotlight could turn on the commanders, Apsey still needed to complete the basic investigation of the war-crimes allegations. How many more atrocities took place? Who was involved? Apsey needed to get to dozens more former platoon members and, in the process, keep this second phase of the investigation quiet. He didn’t know how far up the food chain this went, and if word got out, the entire case could be jeopardized. And Apsey needed to speed up all interviews. It was early 1974—one year since U.S. combat troops left Vietnam—and Apsey no longer had the luxury of time.

  On March 1, 1974, Henry Tufts returned to his office to find a file on his desk marked “Coy Allegation.” Once consisting of two pages, the file was now thick with weekly reports dating back to February 1971—a period of three years and a month.

  Tufts had been reading the reports all along, watching the case expand from a routine complaint to a full-blown investigation. But in the last year, he had been sidetracked. He was still trying to wrap up a massive reorganization of the CID that began in 1971 and was now steeped in drug cases exploding at Army bases in Europe and Asia. By the time the file once again reached his desk in late June, the Tiger Force case was the last major war-crimes investigation from Vietnam. It thus marked the end of a spate of investigations that had consumed the CID for years—a total of 242 investigations ranging from body mutilations to murder.

  Tufts read through the file and then picked up the phone to call the Presidio. This wasn’t the same case he reviewed a year ago. What happened? The Tiger Force investigation had grown considerably, and these weren’t just allegations anymore. They were real, provable war crimes—bad ones, among the worst he had seen. It was one thing for soldiers to lose control after a firefight and take out their frustrations on a civilian. Even then, a commander would put his foot down and the men would be brought to justice. But this was a small unit—a special force—that carried out crimes as a matter of routine, without any commander giving a damn.

  Beyond his own concerns, the Tiger Force case had the potential to be a major news story—one that could be embarrassing to a White House already reeling from an unfolding scandal known as Watergate. Though 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was preoccupied, CID headquarters was still obligated to keep the Pentagon in the loop on a case that was powerful enough to explode. Tufts immediately ordered a spreadsheet—an 81/2 by 14-inch report listing the allegations, a summary of statements by witnesses, and the investigators’ remarks. He asked for the personnel files of the battalion commanders. Lastly, he instructed his secretary to send a summary of the ongoing investigation to the offices of Howard “Bo” Callaway, secretary of the Army, and James Schlesinger, secretary of defense—a procedure set up by the Nixon White House.

  With the arrival of that summary, the final cover-up of Tiger Force began.

  CHAPTER 22

  Of two dozen requests for interviews, eighteen were on Apsey’s desk by the end of February 1974. And in those interviews, half supported the earlier confessions. Though it was a pain, Apsey’s persistence at asking agents to reinterview ex-Tigers was paying off.

  Two former Tigers at Fort Bragg, Cecil Peden and Manuel Sanchez, had changed their stories from the first time they were contacted. Peden, now a sergeant, didn’t remember any war crimes in November 1972. But he now swore under oath that he recalled standing by as Sergeant Robin Varney pushed the head of a prisoner into a bayonet held by Sergeant Ernest Moreland. Sanchez, who had professed to not know anything when interviewed in July 1972, now said he watched as the Tigers executed two prisoners he was trying to guard.

  Sanchez didn’t want to be a snitch. The military was his career. It allowed him to support his wife and three young children. Besides, the Army could be a cruel place, and he fretted about commanders retaliating against him for exposing the sins. He hadn’t even told his buddies at Fort Bragg he served in a unit known as Tiger Force. He wasn’t proud of his time with the unit. His wife, Mary, whom he married after returning home in 1968, knew not to ask him. When CID agents first went to him in 1972, he said he didn’t know anything about war crimes. He had locked that secret deep inside and tossed away the key. But doing so came at a price. “He would sit in his chair with this faraway look,” his wife recalled, “and just tell me he couldn’t talk about it.”

  Sanchez was showing the classic signs of PTSD. He rarely told family members about his nightmares, but he was constantly waking up, slipping from the bedroom to the living room, waiting in the darkness for the images to go away. With counseling, some veterans recovering from post-traumatic stress can openly recall terrible events without feeling the trauma. The frequency of nightmares decreases while the veterans seem to gain more control over their lives. Sanchez wasn’t ready to talk to a counselor—not now—but when CID agents visited him at Fort Bragg, he decided he couldn’t keep hold of his secrets anymore. He told the agents he would see them the next day, and that night he prayed for strength. “I have to meet with the agents in the morning,” he told Mary. “But I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  During the interview, he told them about the time he tried to keep two Vietnamese detainees alive, but the Tigers later shot them. “I’ll never forget,” he said angrily. “It was so wrong. I think about it all the time. And I can’t tell anybody. I can’t talk about it. I don’t even feel good telling you about it. I’m a soldier and I’m loyal to the Army. But I hate what they did. They did other stuff, but they knew better not to do it in front of me. I don’t murder people, man.”

  Other witnesses, some contacted for the first time, also opened up. Michael Allums, a former medic now living in Tampa, swore that Ybarra bragged about cutting off the infant’s head and showed him the bloody necklace worn by the baby. “I remember being repulsed by the whole thing,” he stated. He said he watched as Ybarra’s friend Ken Green repeatedly jabbed a prisoner in the neck with a knife before plunging the blade into the man’s throat.

  Benjamin Edge, a sergeant at Fort Hood, Texas, swore that Ybarra and Green beat and killed a prisoner with Hawkins and Trout present, and that Hawkins radioed h
eadquarters to report the death as an enemy kill.

  With a list in front of him, Apsey began numbering the allegations, locations, and approximate dates, and then checking off suspects and witnesses connected to each war crime. It was the only way to keep track. Every detail in every allegation was noted. The time had come to count the crimes.

  With most of the agents gone for the day, Apsey sat at his desk and began to feel faint. He had been working long hours in late March, and the grind was slowly wearing on him. He had trouble sleeping and was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

  Luise pleaded with him the night before to take some time off, but he just shook his head and stared across the kitchen table. He couldn’t put the case down. Not now. He was obsessed. He would think about the case in the morning while driving to the base and at night while heading home. Sometimes, he would fixate on the slightest difference in a story: Carpenter recalled that the shooting of the farmers was after sunrise; Miller thought it was a couple of hours later. He would agonize over the discrepancies at home, mulling over what he needed to do the next day to resolve the differences.

  Worse, he was ignoring his wife, a woman he deeply loved. They did everything together, planning their weekends around each other: trips to the beach and the movies, walks in the park. They met by chance in 1961 when Apsey saw Luise on a train in Frankfurt, Germany, and began talking to her. He mustered the courage to ask for her number, but she declined. In the past, he would have walked away, but not this time. On a whim, he scribbled down his number and handed it to her, and to his surprise, she called him a few days later. What began was a courtship that lasted three years until they finally married shortly before Apsey was transferred to the United States.

  The only time they had ever been separated in their ten years of marriage was when Apsey was in Vietnam—a painful period for both. Just before Apsey departed, Luise had undergone surgery for a tubal pregnancy that threatened her life. She was in a hospital for fourteen days and nearly died. After she returned home, the couple learned she would never be able to have children.

  Now, sitting at his desk in the longest CID investigation of his career, Apsey felt guilty. He had been coming home late, not touching the special meals she would prepare for him. She would talk to him, but he wasn’t listening. Yet he could not let go of his search for the truth.

  His fellow agents would kid Apsey about wrapping up the case, saying he had already surpassed the length of time it took to investigate My Lai. But lately, the ribbing had been getting to him. He didn’t need to be reminded about the case taking so long. Just trying to keep up with the suspects, witnesses, and war-crime allegations was trying enough. And the truth was, Apsey was harder on himself than anyone else.

  A group of other agents had gone out that night without inviting him. It’s not that they didn’t like or trust Apsey. But to the younger agents, he was boring. When they got off work, they wanted to get drunk and laid. The bars around San Pedro were hopping with officers and young secretaries looking for fun. It was the 1970s in Southern California: the birthplace of the sexual revolution. But Apsey was just too straitlaced. Though he was only thirty-five, he seemed like he was thirty years older. And these days, he was moving even slower.

  Perdue noticed his agent was working long hours. Before heading home that night, Perdue glanced down the hall and saw the lights still on in his agent’s office. He stuck his head inside the door. “Gus,” he said, “go home. It’s late. What are you going to do now that you can’t do tomorrow?”

  Apsey looked up but just shook his head. “Pretty soon,” he said. But Perdue knew it would be hours before the agent headed wearily home.

  CID agent Robert DiMario had spent years investigating soldiers for crimes against other soldiers—thefts, burglaries, even murder. But the veteran agent had no desire to probe into grunts accused of war crimes. To him, it was dirty work—holding another soldier responsible for killing Vietnamese. It was war, and that happens.

  So when he received an order to interview former platoon member Dan Clint, DiMario was angry. He had already interviewed the private twice before and sent Apsey the results: the former Tiger didn’t have much to say, other than that he disliked Ybarra. But Apsey wanted the agent to probe deeper with the same witness. Clint had spent at least six months with the Tigers and had to have seen some of the same atrocities as the others.

  DiMario knew he had to follow orders, so he left his office in Denver and drove 155 miles to see Clint at a motel in Oak Creek, Colorado, where he was staying.

  Instead of following normal procedures, DiMario said he wanted to get the interview over with. “Just do me a favor,” said the agent, looking directly into Clint’s eyes. “Just say you don’t remember anything.”

  Clint was puzzled but didn’t object. DiMario then went through a series of questions sent to him by Apsey, and Clint said he didn’t know anything.

  The former Tiger was just as glad to get the interview over with. Now a carpenter, he was building a town house in Oak Creek, Colorado, and just wanted to pour himself into his work. “It’s all I wanted to do—work and stay outdoors,” he recalled. The only person he kept in contact with was Harold Fischer, who had visited Clint in Colorado.

  But even when they talked, they never discussed Tiger Force.

  For Apsey, it meant yet another blank report. For every five statements with information to use in the case, there was another from a former soldier who claimed he didn’t see anything. On its face, that was puzzling, because these soldiers all served side by side. But on a deeper level, it made sense. Apsey and even his supervisors had noticed that a growing faction of CID agents was complaining about atrocity cases. Too much was being made of these investigations, and it was all because of My Lai and the antiwar protesters, they said. They couldn’t refuse to find witnesses, but that didn’t mean they had to press them for answers.

  Forrest Miller had just returned from the mess hall on April 5 when someone in a suit and tie barged into the barracks, calling his name. Miller could tell the man was CID just from his dress. “Don’t tell me: Tiger Force, right?” he said.

  Agent Gary West nodded his head. He had several questions for the sergeant and needed to get the responses back to Fort MacArthur before the next mail plane left the base.

  Miller knew the drill. He had been pulled into CID offices twice in late 1972 at Fort Bragg, and again just three months ago. At this point, he wasn’t going to hold back anything. It was clear the Army had already uncovered these shootings. Miller tried to fill in the blanks as much as he could: the farmers were huddled in a rice paddy and were about three hundred meters away. Satisfied by his answers, West went on to ask about another subject: the villagers who died in the bunkers outside Chu Lai. What happened to the women and children?

  Miller paused for a moment. He didn’t mind talking about the farmers, but this one bothered him. In his last interview, he had mentioned without great detail the Tigers stumbling upon bunkers, and children scampering inside. Now, the Army wanted more.

  Miller moved uneasily in his chair. There were a lot of bad things that happened in South Vietnam, and he was able to live with most of them. But this one tore at him. West asked, “Did you see grenades being thrown into the bunkers?”

  “Yes,” Miller responded. “I was there.” They never bothered to count the dead, he added, and in the end never found any weapons. In fact, they never turned up any evidence whatsoever that the people were Vietcong.

  Five days later, Miller’s interview and sworn statement—marked “urgent”—arrived at Fort MacArthur. Apsey had been bothered by several atrocities, but this one had nagged at him for one particularly grim reason: there were bunkers all over the province where Tiger Force patrolled. He knew the Tigers broke into small teams, often with one team oblivious to the actions of another. No doubt, other teams were coming across other bunkers. If Miller’s team could casually blow children and women apart in a bunker, what were the other teams doing?


  Ybarra jumped up from the couch, cursing at the television. He had just watched a news report of the North Vietnamese openly violating the peace accord by building roads in the South, with soldiers from the opposing countries exchanging gunfire. He usually ignored the news, except when it came to this; it didn’t matter if he was drunk or stoned on marijuana, he would turn up the sound on the television or radio for any news on Vietnam.

  The war, in fact, had been fading from the airwaves—eclipsed by the latest Watergate developments. With every newscast, a once confident president now appeared old and haggard, fighting to hold on to an office that was slipping away. The House Judiciary Committee was weeks away from voting on three articles of impeachment. Ybarra ignored all that, instead obsessed with a war that never ended, at least in his mind. The most recent reports of the North Vietnamese transgressions only reinforced his views. “You can’t trust those bastards!” he screamed, standing in front of the television like it was an enemy soldier.

  In early June, reservation police tipped off Ybarra that the Army CID had called them to find out if he was still living there—sending Sam into a rage. He had last heard from the Army in 1972 and thought whatever investigation they were conducting was over. Now, he was spooked again. Why were agents calling the reservation? “I got nothing to say to them,” he mumbled when his wife asked him what they wanted.

  By now, Janice Little was tired of his outbursts. Every time he blew up, she became scared, and a few times she bolted from their home with their two young daughters. She just wanted it all to end—the tension, the arguments. She loved her husband, but their marriage was failing. He had ballooned to three hundred pounds and rarely left their home. His drinking was out of control, and he was constantly smoking pot. Most days, he ranted about the peace treaty, the loss of lives, the way the Americans just gave up. He would always bring up Ken Green. He had been carrying the guilt of his friend’s death for seven years and couldn’t seem to shake it. “It’s my fault,” he would say. “He shouldn’t have died.”