Tiger Force

by Michael Sallah

  One key interview was with the former battalion surgeon. Dr. Bradford Mutchler was asked whether he ever heard rumors about the Tigers collecting ears, gold teeth, and scalps. “Yes,” he answered. “It was something that no one really talked about in the open. It was something that you just kept trying to sweep under the rug and forget because you really didn’t want to know if it was true or not.”

  As far as free-fire zones, he said, battalion leaders routinely declared large areas as free-fire zones, especially in the Song Ve Valley. The order “to kill everything that moved” was given all the time. “As the battalion surgeon, I attended all of the mission briefings. I heard that order, or similar orders, given at every briefing.” Mutchler was then asked what the order meant. “In my opinion, it meant kill whatever was in the area,” he said. “If it moves, kill it.”

  Stephen Naughton had been tracked down in Harker Heights, Texas, on February 5. The former platoon leader, now a civilian, admitted that Donald Wood came to him twice—once at Carentan and later at Fort Bragg—to talk about atrocities carried out by Hawkins and others. Naughton said he, in turn, contacted a colonel in the inspector general’s office at Fort Bragg to pass on Wood’s complaints. But he said he was told “to forget it. That I would just be stirring things up.”

  A man was sitting in his apartment kitchen in Saint Petersburg, Florida, when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver, and the voice on the other end asked if William Doyle was home. The caller then identified herself as Bonnie Sapp, a CID agent. Doyle wanted to slam the phone down but knew it was now too late. It was February 1975, and the Army had been looking for him for three years.

  He had picked up their trail back in Guam when agents began snooping around a fishing village where he was living, but he had managed to stay one step ahead. He assumed they wanted to know about his participation in a secret operation known as the Phoenix Program. (Hatched by the CIA, the covert operation was set up to assassinate Vietcong supporters, after Doyle left the Tigers.) But whatever they wanted, Doyle knew it probably wasn’t good news for him, so he had ducked into the shadows.

  He was angry. He had always prided himself on his ability to outsmart his adversaries. Sapp wouldn’t say how she had found him, but it didn’t take long before Doyle figured it out. Just weeks earlier, he had checked himself in to a mental ward at the Bay Pines Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Saint Petersburg. He admittedly had been close to a breakdown, partly from years in Vietnam, partly from the unresolved issues of a troubled childhood. Because his name was in the system, his admittance in the facility had tipped off the military to his whereabouts.

  Doyle asked Sapp why she wanted to question him. She would say only that allegations were made against him from his time in Tiger Force.

  “Tiger Force?” he asked incredulously. “What do you want to know?”

  Again, the agent said it was better to meet in person. He agreed but gave her a warning. “I’ll tell you now,” Doyle said, “I don’t discuss things that happened during the war. The only thing I’ll say is that while I was in Vietnam, I did everything I could, and killed anybody it was necessary to kill to keep Americans alive.”

  The following day, Sapp and another agent showed up at Doyle’s apartment. Before asking any questions, they read Doyle his rights under military law, which meant he was under investigation but not under arrest. The suspected crimes: murder and aggravated assault. He had the right to remain silent and to call a lawyer.

  Doyle sneered at the agents, saying he had nothing to offer. Each time they asked him a question, he answered with a “no comment.”

  At one point the CID agents brought up the name of the man who fingered Doyle during the investigation: Bruner. Doyle immediately jumped to his feet, his face red, and began spewing obscenities. “Bruner was a wiseass!” he shouted. “He couldn’t be depended on! He was always trying to make peace, instead of making war.”

  Most of the people accusing the Tigers didn’t even know what it was to fight a war, he sneered, including the CID. “Tiger Force was my kind of unit, I can tell you that,” he said. “We fought the war the way we thought it should have been fought.”

  After three hours of additional “no comments” and obscenities, the agents finally gave up. They turned off their recorder and rose to leave. Doyle was quick to stand. “I can tell you this,” he said. “Don’t ever bother me again. I’m finished.”

  Several hours later, he received another call from a man who identified himself as a CID agent who knew about the case. The agent told him investigators would probably be returning but that Doyle should keep his mouth shut. The agent didn’t want to tell Doyle much, other than to say there was “a faction of CID agents who were against the investigation. They’re trying to protect you guys.” Doyle was surprised and told the agent he appreciated the heads-up.

  “Are you guys going after Hawkins?” he asked.

  The agent then spelled out the whole case, based mostly on the fact sheet and summaries prepared by Apsey. Doyle listened. When the agent finished, Doyle asked for Hawkins’s phone number. The agent didn’t hesitate and, against Army regulations, passed on the number and even Hawkins’s address at Fort Rucker.

  No sooner did Doyle hang up the phone than he called Hawkins. The two had not talked since Vietnam. Doyle was one of the few soldiers who had stuck up for Hawkins in the field, and Hawkins knew it.

  Doyle told him everything. Hawkins said he was well aware of the investigation, because his own career was on the rocks. He had been informed it could be years before he was promoted—if at all. He could even go to jail.

  By the end of the conversation, Doyle was seething. In his mind, he and Hawkins never did anything wrong in Tiger Force. Doyle announced he “wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone.”

  He had taken shit from people his entire life. Beneath the tough exterior, Doyle was a wounded man. Pounded by a drunken, enraged father, he was protected by his mother, who would step in between the young boy and his abuser while she was alive. She was his protector, his savior. She died in a car accident when he was in grade school, and he lost anything decent in his life. The hurt and, later, the rage was uncontrollable, so much so that he turned it inward. For years, he blamed himself and, later, blamed the world. Dropped into South Vietnam, he found the perfect place and the perfect people to take out his wrath.

  The day after CID agents visited his home, he began making a barrage of calls to the Pentagon. He demanded to talk to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and didn’t give a damn how long it took to reach him. After the calls bounced around the labyrinth bureaucracy, he managed to reach a secretary who worked in Schlesinger’s office. Doyle began ranting about the Tiger Force investigation, saying the Army was trying to railroad “good soldiers who answered the call” and that he was one of them. He said the Tigers did nothing different than what the soldiers did during the Phoenix Program. Doyle knew that Schlesinger had at one time been director of the CIA in 1973, taking the place of Richard Helms, who oversaw the program. “I want to know why all of a sudden these are war crimes,” he said to the secretary. “I was in the Phoenix Program, and I know damn well you all knew what the hell we were doing the whole time.”

  He demanded to speak to Schlesinger, but the secretary said she would make no promises. She would take Doyle’s name and number.

  Doyle was still angry after he hung up the phone. He wasn’t sure whether he would ever get a response, but at this point, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to stay in the country. He needed to get the hell out again, this time to the Philippines. He had spent time there during R & R sessions and liked it. Americans were left alone. He could disappear.

  In a military career that spanned twenty-four years, Gerald Morse had done everything right. He had successfully attended the command general’s college, served in Korea, where he earned two Purple Hearts, and led a battalion in one of the most contested regions of Vietnam. Two years after the war, he had been sen
t to Heidelberg as part of a contingent to the Army’s 7th Army. From all indications, he was on a track to become a general.

  On the afternoon of March 17, 1975, Morse was returning from a training exercise when two CID agents approached him. They said they needed to talk to him about Tiger Force.

  Morse agreed to chat but wasn’t pleased. He reminded the agents that he had already been interviewed by the CID about this case in 1972 and didn’t know anything then. What made them think he knew anything now?

  But the agents, Gary Lawrence and Ellis Collins, reminded him that the interview he was referring to was three years ago and that a lot had changed. One of the agents pulled out a card and began reading Morse his rights. Morse hadn’t expected this. He had always been a gung ho officer who excelled under fire without a hint of scandal. “You are under investigation for dereliction of duty,” said the agent. “You have the right to a lawyer.” Morse didn’t flinch. He said he would waive his rights to a lawyer and told the agents to fire away.

  The first question: “What was your radio call sign?”

  “Ghost Rider,” he said, “everywhere I went. Whether in a helicopter, vehicle, or stationary.”

  “Did you ever say you wanted a body count of 327?”

  “I don’t recall anything about that,” he responded. “That was so long ago.”

  “Did you offer a promise and award or any other type of recognition to the person or the unit which made or surpassed the 327th kill during Operation Wheeler?”

  He fired back, “Absolutely not.”

  Asked why Morse changed the names of the companies from A, B, and C to Assassins, Barbarians, and Cutthroats, Morse responded, “This was done as a means of bringing togetherness and esprit within the units.” He explained that he needed to breathe life into the battalion to fight the enemy. He defended the use of free-fire zones but said the idea was not to kill unarmed civilians. There were times when villagers would be discovered in such areas, but he insisted the troops weren’t ordered to kill them.

  “Was it justified to shoot and kill any Vietnamese who was unarmed and running from your troops in free-fire zones?” an agent asked.

  “That’s a hard question,” Morse replied. If there was a triple-canopy jungle and visibility was limited, he said, he could understand a soldier would be “justified in shooting.” But again, he insisted that it would “not be justified to shoot and kill an unarmed fleeing person.”

  There was one last question: “There have been reports of many atrocities, body mutilations, murders, mistreatment of prisoners and civilians committed by members of your battalion and particularly by the Tiger Force. Can you explain why none of these reports came to your attention while you were the commander?”

  Morse turned directly to the agent. “I believe that if such things had happened, the personnel involved would have been less than stupid to inform me, knowing that I would have took action to court-martial them. . . . I find it hard to believe that any such war crimes occurred in my battalion.”

  On a warm, late April afternoon, Apsey hiked along a trail in San Pedro Valley Park until he came to a grassy hill overlooking a meadow blanketed by wildflowers. He removed a Canon from his bag and crouched to capture an image of the rolling landscape.

  It was one of his favorite places for nature photography and one of the few spots where he could escape an investigation that had dominated his life. Usually he was able to focus on his hobby, looking for the best angles and lighting. But even amid the flowers and sunshine, he was unable to relax.

  For months, he had been trying to find time to visit here to shoot some photos but had been too busy. He was already feeling alone. Fellow agents weren’t asking him about the investigation anymore, and agents in CID offices elsewhere didn’t want to get involved. He wasn’t exactly an outcast, but he knew he wasn’t popular among some agents just by their reactions when he called for routine assistance.

  At times, the stress was overwhelming, and he was slowly showing symptoms of diabetes: shortness of breath, light-headedness, fatigue. He wasn’t helping his condition by smoking more and spending the balance of his time at work and not at home. It was impossible to separate himself from the case. He had returned last month from Arizona and couldn’t shake the image of an emaciated Ybarra, sunken eyes, staring up from a couch in the darkness of a filthy shack. The faces of the others—Barnett, Bowman, Carpenter, Kerrigan, Fischer—as they spoke of what had happened those years ago were images too pitiful to forget.

  Unlike the rest of the country, they didn’t have the luxury of putting the war behind them. Just a week earlier, on April 23, President Ford announced America would not help the South Vietnamese in their efforts to fight back the North Vietnamese who were on the outskirts of Saigon. He was not about to send troops to refight “a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” It was time, he said, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

  Of course for Apsey, it was one thing to forget the war but another to dismiss the crimes—no matter how he felt personally about the soldiers. After spending three years on the case, he was convinced that despite a brutal conflict in which things went awry and innocent people were killed, this was a nightmare unit that had again and again and again lashed out at defenseless people, many of whom were caught in a war they never wanted. In the end, there was no excuse for what Tiger Force did. And there was no excuse for the commanders who knew things were spinning out of control but did nothing to stop the killing. These were not fog-of-war killings, Apsey told his superiors. These were premeditated murders by members of a unit who were on a brutal rampage. If you can look the other way on these actions, then anything goes. You won’t even need rules of engagement. You won’t need a military code. You won’t even need CID agents spending years on war crimes.

  God knows, he knew the consequences of his work—and the explosive information that was about to be written in his final report. He knew people could be charged and careers could be ruined. Worse, if this ever reached the American public, it would be a national disgrace. American soldiers killing women and children, scalping villagers, kicking out the teeth of the dead, and wearing necklaces of human ears? It was understandable for a unit to lose control once, maybe even twice. These were eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds in a confusing war. But this was different. “This is my job,” he would tell his wife when he brought his work home. “I’m getting tired of it, too, but I can’t just take the easy way out.”

  Apsey knew the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were far worse than Americans in the treatment of their own people. More than six thousand civilians were executed at Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968 in one of the worst spates of war atrocities.

  But Americans should have a higher standard, the highest. We were supposed to be humane, to be tough, brave soldiers—not killers. Ultimately, it wasn’t up to Apsey to enforce standards. That would be carried out by the Army’s justice system. But he at least had to do his job by pointing out the breaches. Otherwise, he was no better than the officers who chose to look the other way.

  Apsey never forgot the Jesuits who taught him about the power of a higher good—the grace of God interceding in the lives of people. He tried to stay away from applying his own morality to cases. But with Tiger Force, that was difficult. Beyond the mechanics of the investigation, he saw evidence of a deep, underlying struggle between good and evil. It wasn’t so much a fight for power. That was too easy. It was a battle over whether platoon commanders and soldiers would succumb to their own dark instincts. They needed to be held accountable. Otherwise, the crimes would happen again and again.

  Through their own words, the former Tigers had told Apsey everything he needed to write his final report. But what they never gave up was the reason for their fall from grace. At times, they gave clues through the tension and tears, but nothing more. They never confessed that somewhere between the ambushes and booby traps and humping in the glaring sun, they lost hope. Somewhere in the blackness of t
he night, they lost faith. And in the end, there was nothing to separate them from the devil.

  Apsey peeked over the stacks of records, photos, and military maps covering his desk as Woodrow Eno entered his office. They had been collaborating by phone and now were finally meeting to talk over the progress of the final report. Apsey turned off his tape recorder and stood up to greet the twenty-eight-year-old Army lawyer who was assigned by the Presidio to review the investigation. Eno appeared fresh in his crisp uniform, in contrast to Apsey, who looked tired and haggard, the ashtray on his desk filled with cigarette butts and the floor covered with crumpled paper.

  He rarely left his office these days, instead spending endless hours examining records—allegation by allegation—searching for the strongest testimony in each case. For each allegation, there was a separate stack of records, including sworn statements, maps, and suspect photos. The stacks carpeted his desk, his floor, and the tops of his cabinets. He now struggled to find a way to charge soldiers for the shooting of the farmers.

  Based on interviews with Carpenter, Miller, and Allums, he was convinced that the assaults took place and that Hawkins had overseen them. But he wasn’t sure which members of Tiger Force fired their weapons.

  Eno sat down and picked up the spreadsheet. He made it very clear that unless people were proved dead, there would be no murder charges. That seemed so obvious it was unclear why Eno had said it. But he explained that he was hesitant to press assault charges in the case of the farmers because no one had bothered to check on them after the shootings. Sure, Apsey had assumed they were dead; so had some of the soldiers. But were they?