When the Huey landed at Chu Lai, Bruner was instructed to report directly to battalion headquarters, where Captain James was waiting for him.
At first, he hesitated. It had been two weeks since Bruner was in the captain’s office, and he was still seething over the way he was treated. It was James who ignored the sergeant’s request for transfer, James who didn’t give a damn about the way Doyle and Hawkins were treating civilians.
Without saluting, Bruner stepped into the office and sat down. James looked up from his desk and barely acknowledged the sergeant. “Report to B Company,” he said. “You’re out of the Tigers.”
Bruner was tempted to say something about the way the Tigers were acting in the field, but he caught himself, stood up, and walked out the door. Finally, it was over. He would never forget the likes of Doyle, Hawkins, and Ybarra. In his own mind, they were fighting their own sick kind of war—and now pulling in the others, even against their will. He could see the anxiety in the young kids and knew they weren’t strong enough to keep their own bearings. It was simply too scary out there for them not to go along.
With four Tigers dead in just a few days, the hatred and fury would only act as a wicked undertow, sucking younger soldiers further into the darkness. There was no one there to stop it. This wasn’t about Communism or freedom or politics. This was about pure hatred. “It was just murder,” he later told his family. “It was plain, flat-out murder.”
Bruner had joined the Tigers after they had been well into their campaign and had always been an outsider. But coming into the platoon late had given him a clearer picture of the unit. He firmly believed the Tigers should have been pulled from the field a long time ago. They were beyond burned out. They were beyond combat fatigue.
As he walked by an airstrip on his way to his new headquarters, he bid farewell to the chopper pilot who brought him back to the base. “Where you heading?” he asked. The pilot pointed to several soldiers waiting to board the helicopter. “I’m taking them into the field. Some are going to be new Tigers.”
Bruner shook his head. He wished he could have warned them before they volunteered, but they were going to learn on their own.
When he hopped off the chopper, Rion Causey was anxious, his stomach in knots. The skinny, blond-haired twenty-year-old was a Tiger by chance. He and another medic had flipped a coin to see who would be replacing Bowman, and Causey won.
Getting into the Tigers was, he felt, better than some other options. “I just thought it was safer to be with them than with a line company,” the South Carolina native recalled. It was October 1, and he had been in country for only a week.
For Causey, joining the Army was part escape, part adventure. He didn’t have to enlist. He was already enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a dorm room waiting for him, when he decided to pull the plug on campus living. Watching the news reports about Vietnam had been stimulating at a time when he was restless. College seemed like the right thing to do for his father, a schoolteacher, but not for Causey. He didn’t care about a deferment. Going to Vietnam was an invitation to another world.
Looking around the camp, Causey noticed most of the platoon members were brooding. Ybarra was by himself in a corner, talking aloud, and Barnett was mumbling about how the Tigers were going to “even the score” and “get them back.”
Causey just listened. He knew before he joined the platoon that the Tigers had lost several soldiers but didn’t know the depth of their despair and bitterness. “What I remembered,” he said, “was they were bloodthirsty. There was no other way to describe it.”
The bonding among combat soldiers is deep and pervasive—and the Tigers were no exception. They saw themselves in those ponchos and body bags, and were now going to get even. For civilians, it’s difficult to understand the bonding among soldiers, but it’s deep and visceral. When a fellow soldier is killed, anger and a sense of revenge take over. Four comrades went down in two days: Green, Beck, Varney, and Ingram. Soldiers believe revenge can lead to some cathartic release, but it doesn’t work that way. The lust can never be satisfied, no matter how many Vietnamese the soldier blows away. Like a drug addict, he must kill more and more. For some soldiers, the situation gets worse because they’re overwhelmed by a sense of guilt—they survived, but not their comrades—so, to purge those feelings, they must kill more.
It wasn’t until noon before the platoon received its assignment—a vague call about a village eighteen kilometers due west of Chu Lai. Several Tigers ran over to the radio to listen to the voice breaking up on the other end. The order was unmistakable: clear the village. Twenty of the forty-five Tigers would be going. The assignment had nothing to do with reconnaissance, with searching for a hidden enemy camp. It was strictly destroy. This time, the enemy was in the open.
From the air, the village was easy to see: two trails crisscrossing the center of a collection of huts, peasants scattered about, carrying bundles on their backs. Nevertheless, because of the thick foliage, the choppers were forced to find a clearing a kilometer away. Once the soldiers jumped off the Hueys, there was little time to lose.
Ybarra led the way. He found a trail and began walking in the direction of the village, occasionally moving so far ahead he would have to be reined in by a team leader. Ybarra wasn’t the only soldier anxious to get there. The whole group was supposed to have been joined by C Company soldiers, but they had decided not to wait. Their stopwatch was their heartbeat.
After walking for nearly a half hour, they began to see a few scattered Chieu Hoi leaflets on the trail and knew they were close to the village. Ybarra was supposed to stop and wait when he reached the perimeter; instead, he kept walking straight ahead, oblivious to the potential dangers from snipers. Some of the soldiers behind him yelled for him to stop, but he kept moving forward.
Suddenly, Fischer and others heard the firing of an M16. As they ran toward the front of the line, they saw Ybarra, rifle raised, firing and screaming as peasants ran in all directions. Other Tigers joined in the attack, shooting into the huts. One soldier unclipped grenades and dropped them into a well, and then took his gun and began shooting water buffalo in a pen. A mother cradled a baby nearby, and an old man huddled against the well. Team leaders began screaming for the soldiers to cease firing, but the men didn’t stop. Fischer watched in disbelief. No warnings were given. None of the villagers had raised a rifle. There were no weapons. He remembered turning his head away, unable to watch.
Barnett, who had spent three clips firing into every hut, finally ran out of ammunition. So did Ybarra. The soldiers stood with their rifles raised. The firing stopped. There was no sign of movement. Without delay, Ybarra and others ran over to the huts and began flicking their lighters. In the past, they would have waited, first conducting a detailed search. No longer.
Barnett ran up to Hawkins. “We better try to find some weapons,” he said. “We got a lot of bodies, but we’re not finding any weapons.” Hawkins turned to him and snapped, “Don’t worry about the weapons. We can get them later.”
As the Tigers gathered near the trail to leave, Fischer fought his way through the thick black smoke, turning over bodies to see if there were any survivors. Just as he reached the center of the village, he could see the Tigers leaving. They weren’t going to wait for him to treat the wounded.
Not all of the Tigers were ready to leave, though: Ybarra, Kerrigan, and two other Tigers told the others they would catch up. They ran over to where bodies were on the ground. Each soldier leaned over a body and, after removing knives from their belts, began frantically cutting off ears.
The Tigers waiting near the trail looked back and saw Ybarra and the others standing over the bodies. The newcomers wondered what the men were doing, but the veterans knew.
Like clockwork, Morse was on the radio, demanding to know what happened in the village. The answer: the village has been cleared, numerous VC dead. Morse was elated, praising his recon unit. “That’s why you’re the Tigers,” he said before signing off.
By evening, the Tigers regrouped and set up camp. Causey hadn’t accompanied the unit that cleared the village but was told that tomorrow he would be assigned to Barnett’s squad. He didn’t know much about Barnett but could tell by his accent that he was a southerner and, by his demeanor, that he was edgy. He was snapping at everyone over nothing and was constantly pacing. No one could talk to him.
By the time the morning radio transmission came from headquarters, Barnett was already geared up. There really was no specific plan; Morse wanted the Tigers to set up patrols—once again, with destruction as the objective. No village should be standing. If you find enemy positions, call in an air strike and move on. It was that simple.
Barnett and Causey broke away with two other Tigers and headed on an eastward trail leading to the town of Diem Pho, and they were expected to pass through dozens of hamlets along the way, though none of them were supposed to be inhabited, Hawkins reminded the team.
They walked for what seemed to be hours, passing several burned-out huts but no villagers. After checking in with Hawkins by radio, Barnett led the men down a slope until they reached a stream with a cluster of huts on the other side. From the distance, Barnett could see there were people in one hut and motioned for his men to follow and stay quiet.
Quickly, Barnett crossed the stream, jumped up on the bank, and ran to the hut. With his rifle pointed inside, he shouted in Vietnamese, “Dua Tay Len, Dua Tay Len,” ordering them to raise their hands. Seven males exited the hut with arms in the air—some teenagers, some elderly. Causey could see the terrified look in their eyes. One Tiger checked the hut for more people and weapons but came up empty; another called on the radio to a team leader. “What do we do?” he asked. “We have seven people, no weapons.”
The response was swift. “They’re not supposed to be there.” Barnett didn’t need to hear anything else. He ordered the Tigers to line up the Vietnamese against the hut and then yelled, “Fire!” Barnett and the two Tigers opened up, but Causey couldn’t shoot. Though he was a newcomer, he knew the difference between combatants and noncombatants. What he was witnessing ran counter to everything he learned as a soldier and as a human being.
Barnett called battalion headquarters on the radio with his report: seven VC killed after a “brief engagement” with the enemy. His team was headed back to regroup with the rest of the element.
The Tiger teams returned to camp and tossed off their rucksacks. For the first hour, no one spoke, most of the soldiers simply too tense. Eventually, team leaders walked off by themselves and began talking out of earshot of the other men. Minutes later, Barnett headed back to the center of the campsite and told his team it was a “kill day” for everyone. The newcomers didn’t know what that meant, but Ken Kerney did. Kerney had been on patrol with his own team when they had entered a hamlet and surprised the people by opening fire. He hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on his M16, not on unarmed civilians, not on women and children, but others had. Just like Barnett’s team, the soldiers left the bodies and burned the huts.
Kerney didn’t know how long he could stay restrained. It was easy to hate the Vietnamese for what happened to the Tigers over the past two weeks. It was easier to hate them for everything that happened since he joined the Tigers in May. And it was even easier to assume every Vietnamese was the enemy. They looked different. They talked different. Easier to assume they were less civilized, maybe even uncivilized, and their lives were less valuable.
In the past, he could talk to other Tigers about these inner conflicts and find that others felt the same way, and those discussions had been a way to keep sane, to purge the bad feelings. Now, Kerney wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know whom he could trust anymore. He knew that if he complained about the killing, he might get a bullet from another Tiger.
That was the dilemma for many Tigers who disagreed with the leaders. They could stand back and helplessly watch the slaughters, or they could go along.
As the men sat around the campsite, Kerney looked over at Ybarra, who had retrieved several bloodied, severed ears from a ration bag and, holding up a shoelace, was trying to string the first ear onto the lace. “Shit,” Ybarra said as he tried to poke a hole in the flesh. Not far away, Kerrigan was trying to make his own necklace.
Ybarra looked up, his eyes growing dark, and stared at Kerney so long that Kerney had to look away.
The radio call came early in the morning: intelligence reports indicated that a Vietcong leader organizing ambushes on American troops was living with his wife in a village fifteen kilometers southwest of Chu Lai. The orders were to surround the hut and capture him. There was a sense of urgency in the commander’s voice. The VC operative was being blamed for setting up scores of ambushes on line companies and may have been responsible for dozens of casualties. “You find him,” said a voice over the radio.
The Tigers didn’t need prompting. Trout and Barnett agreed to lead a team—the first time in quite a while they found themselves on the same squad. The village wasn’t on any map, but the soldiers were given the grid coordinates. They were also told a South Vietnamese intelligence officer was being sent to the village to meet them at the entrance. Within a half hour of getting the call, the six-man team left the camp and headed east on a trail that would take them to the general area.
Trout and Barnett didn’t talk much on the way. Trout considered Barnett a coward who went out of his way to keep from walking the point and who, in firefights, tended to move to the rear. Barnett, on the other hand, thought Trout was a loudmouth who was quick to criticize soldiers he didn’t like.
Despite poor directions, the team managed to find an inhabited village near a slope that matched the description given by headquarters. Just as promised, a translator was waiting at the end of the trail.
After walking a short distance, the translator pointed to the hut where the VC was believed to be living. The Tigers went to the doorway and found a woman inside cradling an infant. The translator asked when her husband would return, but she said she hadn’t seen him in days.
Trout was angry but decided to wait. He ordered the team to camp at the edge of the village, hoping to spot the man coming home. The soldiers watched the hut all night and saw nothing.
At dawn, the team walked toward the hut again, and this time, they saw a man running from the rear of the structure. The translator shouted for him to stop, but he escaped into the brush. Two of the Tigers ran after him but lost him beyond the trail. Trout was furious. He turned to his men and ordered them to burn down the hooch. After dragging the woman and her baby outside, the soldiers lit the thatch and watched as it went up in flames. Holding her baby, the woman began screaming for the soldiers to stop. The more she screamed, the more Trout grew annoyed. He turned to a medic and ordered him to give her a sedative. As two soldiers pulled her to the side, an elderly woman peering out of her hut ran over to the woman and carefully took the baby out of her arms. By now, two soldiers were jamming pills (the sedative Darvon) into the woman’s mouth and forcing her to swallow. Within minutes, she was stumbling as she unsuccessfully tried to walk away.
Trout grabbed the woman by the hand and ordered the men to stand by. He then dragged her into a hut, and for several minutes the men waited. Other villagers came out of their huts, confused and angry at the soldiers. After ten minutes, Trout emerged again, dragging the woman by the arm. He told the men to gear up and then turned to Barnett. “Grease her,” Trout said.
Barnett looked at Trout. He had no problem killing unarmed teenagers and men. But for some reason, he cringed about carrying out the order. This was a young mother. Even in his anger, this was going to take some strength. As the men were leaving the village, Barnett raised his rifle and aimed his M16 at her chest from five meters away. She looked confused, her eyes glazed, seemingly unable to comprehend what was about to happen. Barnett pointed at her chest and squeezed the trigger.
Hawkins was irrelevant. No one respected him. No one listened to his orders. But for the first time in weeks, the soldiers had been so busy on search-and-destroy missions that they didn’t have time to dwell on the commander or his mistakes. The Tigers were operating in small squads, answering mostly to their team leaders, and they preferred it that way.
One morning, Hawkins called for a platoon meeting, but only Doyle and a couple of others were listening. The commander lashed out, “I’m still in charge here.” But no one gave a damn. There were no real rules and regulations anymore. Half the unit had grown long, scraggly beards and had cut the sleeves off their uniforms. Kerrigan, Ybarra, and several others were openly wearing necklaces of ears, and others were carrying severed ears in pouches. Whenever the smell of rotting flesh was too strong, Ybarra would toss away his current necklace and make a new one from ears he carried in a ration bag filled with vinegar.
For the Tigers, the severing of ears wasn’t only for souvenirs—a practice by other soldiers in the war. Now, they were mutilating bodies to deal with the rage and, in many cases, simply discarding the ears and scalps. Corpses were being repeatedly stabbed in a frenzy. Noses and fingers were being cut off. “Going berserk” is a phrase used to describe soldiers who fly into an incredible rage after long periods of trauma and combat. The soldier believes that somehow, by carrying out his anger in a bloody, dehumanizing way, “the gook” can never hurt him or his comrades again. This kind of savagery—a form of overkill—goes beyond taking body parts for souvenirs.
Most of the men had lost a great deal of weight, their faces gaunt, ribs protruding when they peeled off their shirts. At least a dozen were hooked on amphetamines and constantly pestered the medics for daily allowances.
During a sweep south of the Que Son in late October, the sight of the Tigers approaching a hamlet one day startled several soldiers from the 196th Light Infantry Brigade on patrol. To the men in the 196th, the Tigers not only looked like hell—they looked like they had come from some horrid circle of the underworld itself. The 196th stayed away as the Tigers passed. The brigade had passed numerous units in the province but none like this. “They didn’t want anything to do with us,” recalled Causey.
One morning, Hawkins received a call from battalion headquarters. On most days, it was a routine request for a body count, but this call was different: a helicopter was on its way to pick him up and bring him back to Chu Lai. The rest of the Tigers would stay in the field and wait for orders.
After arriving at Chu Lai, Hawkins jumped off the Huey and headed directly to battalion headquarters. One of the first officers to greet Hawkins was James. There was little love between the men. James had been hearing rumors of Hawkins’s incompetence in the field and had been talking to others about relieving Hawkins of his command. But the operation was in full swing, and it was too late to break in a new leader.
James explained the reason for Hawkins’s visit. Officers from the MACV were scheduled to arrive the next day, and Hawkins was expected to join the commanders at the briefing.
After meeting with James, Hawkins went to the officers’ club. He had been in the field for weeks and wanted to unwind. For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, he sat at a table drinking. When the battalion command officers arrived, hours later, Hawkins was still there. James and other officers sat down and began talking, when an alcohol-fortified Hawkins interrupted. To their surprise, he began ranting about the “command structure” and its lack of knowledge in the field. He told the men that they didn’t know what it was like to be in the field under constant enemy surveillance, never knowing whether you were going to make it out, that they knew nothing about what the war was really like.
At first, the officers didn’t say anything, allowing him to vent—but he didn’t stop. “He kept cussing and acting obnoxious,” James said. “I had to get him out of there.” James jumped up from the table and told Hawkins “he was out of line.” As Hawkins continued his tirade, James lifted the lieutenant out of his chair and led him out the door. “If he had stayed there any longer, he would have been court-martialed,” he said.
The two went to the officers’ barracks, where Hawkins plopped down on James’s cot and passed out. The next morning James was awakened by loud screams, and when he jumped up, he saw Hawkins thrashing in the cot. “I can’t see!” Hawkins yelled, furiously rubbing his eyes. James ran over to him and could see that during the night Hawkins had thrown up, and the vomit had hardened over his face and eyes. James splashed water on Hawkins’s face to help open his eyes. By the time they went to breakfast, James realized that Hawkins had to go.
Harold McGaha was a captain who acted like a grunt. While he could rub shoulders with other officers, he was more comfortable with line soldiers. When the infantrymen returned from patrols, he was always questioning them about the VC—their movements and habits. He particularly liked talking to the Tigers. For a small unit, they seemed to have a high kill rate—and to the commanders, that spelled success.
Since arriving in Vietnam on June 7, the tall, muscular captain from the mountains of southwestern North Carolina had wanted to lead a combat unit, and it didn’t matter whether it was a platoon or line company—anything was better than sitting behind a desk. McGaha would spend his mornings outside his barracks doing push-ups, sit-ups, and performing kata—a system of karate kicks and punches designed to develop quickness and agility. He preferred shooting his M16 at the range to the daily battalion briefings, but for an S-2 intelligence officer, the meetings were mandatory. He absolutely hated paperwork.
When McGaha learned that commanders were getting ready to ax Hawkins, the twenty-seven-year-old captain quietly lobbied for the job. He had been in the Army since October 13, 1958, and had been steadily moving up the ranks. He wanted someday to command his own battalion. A successful command could mean a promotion. And that would make his wife, Fannie, proud, as well as the rest of his family in Franklin. He was already becoming a hero of sorts in the small town in the Smokies, from which he was receiving a steady stream of cards from schoolkids.
When McGaha mentioned to other officers that he was going to put in for the Tigers, he was warned by several of them to think long and hard about the move. The Tigers were a tough bunch and had been on their own too long.
McGaha shrugged at the notion that he couldn’t handle the job. He was cocky enough to believe he could lead this platoon. And besides, he wasn’t going to be the Tigers’ commander for the duration of the war. “I just need to put in my time,” he told other officers. “Just put in my time.”
McGaha knew this wasn’t going to be an easy assignment, but he was well aware of the priority the Army was placing on Operation Wheeler. And he had a chance to be a part of it. Most of all, he didn’t want to disappoint Morse. He looked up to the battalion leader as a mentor—a commander who wasn’t afraid.
On November 1, he was sent into the field to take over the platoon. Meanwhile, Hawkins was reassigned to the rear. He would never again lead the Tigers.
After landing in the operations area, McGaha trotted to the command post where the Tigers were waiting. As he neared the soldiers, McGaha was taken aback. They were gaunt and skinny, with beards and dark circles under their eyes. He immediately thought they had been in the field too long. Several were pacing, oblivious to the new leader. Others were staring him down.
He didn’t flinch, even after he noticed that several were wearing what he recognized as human ears. It wasn’t a secret at the base that some soldiers were mutilating bodies, but he wasn’t going to make a big deal about it. He heard rumors the Tigers were “taking ears,” but so what? That meant they were killing Vietnamese. He locked eyes with everyone who was looking at him. “I’m Captain McGaha!” he yelled to the group. “We got a lot of ground to cover, don’t we?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Let’s go.”
McGaha already had a plan. From a map he studied just minutes before taking off, he knew there were several hamlets in a row, just a kilometer from the landing zone. From the daily reports and grid coordinates, he could see the Tigers had not swept through the hamlets.
To show he was in control, McGaha took the lead. Slowly, the Tigers rose and followed, mumbling about the new commander and where he was taking them. Clutching his map, McGaha found a trail, eager to impress the Tigers that he knew how to get around. He was going to set up camp a couple of kilometers away and then get ready for the morning orders.
Before sunset, he found a small clearing and told the men to set up camp. After they removed their gear, McGaha pulled team leaders aside to talk. They immediately saw that he was different from Hawkins. He was gung ho but not convinced he was in a Howard Hawks Western. He was sober and could even read maps. Those were good signs.
One of the first problems the team leaders brought up was Ybarra. The point man had been openly threatening to kill Fischer, blaming him for the death of Green. Several soldiers had tried to reason with Ybarra, but he ignored them.
McGaha listened intently and then made it clear: they were to keep their eyes on Ybarra, but they should not hold him back. “We need him,” he said, adding, “but just don’t let him go off crazy.”
That wasn’t easy. That night, Ybarra disappeared. When the other soldiers looked for him to stand guard for his four-hour stint, he was gone.
Furious, McGaha wanted to send a team to look for the point man, but team leaders assured him Ybarra would return. Ever since Green’s death, he would sometimes leave at night, only to return at dawn. On this night, it was no different, except when he returned, he was carrying an object on the end of his rifle—a human scalp. Team leaders just looked the other way, but McGaha was still seething. He walked over to Ybarra and pointed a finger. “I don’t care about what you’re carrying,” he said. “I don’t give a shit who you kill. But don’t ever leave camp without telling me. You do it again, I’ll ship you back to Chu Lai.”
Ybarra stared back, and for a moment, it looked like the two soldiers would start swinging. But to everyone’s surprise, Ybarra turned away. At least for now, McGaha was the leader.
Even before sunrise, the Tigers were up and walking. McGaha wanted his first mission to be successful, and that meant creating the element of surprise. Unlike Hawkins, this platoon leader wanted to lead the column, walking just inches behind Ybarra. The soldiers stopped at the edge of the clearing before reaching the huts. McGaha was ready. So were the other Tigers. Barnett aimed his M60 machine gun at the first hut. Ybarra, Kerrigan, and others carefully raised their M16s, waiting for the order. McGaha raised his right hand and motioned to fire.
The Tigers opened up and, for the next minute, blasted away at the thatch, and suddenly, the soldiers could hear the screams of people. Some tried to run out of the openings of the huts but dropped in the fusillade. A mother carrying a baby tried to crawl from a hatch in the rear of a hut but was immediately gunned down, the infant falling from her arms. It was a slaughter.
McGaha quickly ordered the men to stop, but they didn’t. Instead, they continued moving closer to the huts, firing. Unable to watch anymore, some of the medics turned away. Short of stepping in front of their bullets, there was nothing McGaha could do. It wasn’t until every hut had been blown apart that the firing finally stopped.
The platoon leader peered through the smoke and could see more than a dozen bodies lying in the dirt: babies, women, and children. Some of the adults were on top of the children in what looked like desperate attempts to shield them from the assault. While team leaders bent over the bodies looking for any signs of weapons or enemy maps—anything to show this was a VC village—McGaha watched. After several minutes, Barnett reached for the radio and called headquarters. “We got sixteen dead VC,” he said. After hanging up the receiver, Barnett approached the platoon leader. “No weapons,” he confessed.
At the other end of the hamlet, Kerrigan, Ybarra, and others were leaning over bodies, knives in their hands. McGaha watched as Ybarra reached down, grabbed the lower portion of an ear, and, holding a knife, began cutting the flesh, bit by bit, until he was able to yank the rest of the ear from the head.
McGaha wasn’t going to say anything. His job was to keep moving, to sweep through the next hamlet. “Let’s go,” he said. As the Tigers began forming a line, Ybarra had moved on to a new body and started kicking the face of a villager on the ground. At first, McGaha thought the Vietnamese was alive and the soldier was trying to finish the job. But as the platoon leader approached the point man, he noticed the man on the ground wasn’t moving. “Ybarra,” said McGaha, “what are you doing?”
Ybarra didn’t answer.
Later, the platoon commander learned his point man wasn’t trying to kill the Vietnamese. Ybarra was trying to kick out the teeth of the dead villager for gold fillings.
Carpenter perked up at the command over the radio: “You’re the 327th Infantry,” said the voice. “We want 327 kills.” The early-morning message was meant for the entire battalion. Seven weeks into Operation Wheeler, command wanted the soldiers to keep the body count spiraling upward on the charts.
“Do you want them before or after breakfast?” said a Tiger who overheard the report.
After talking to team leaders, McGaha agreed to break up the platoon into smaller teams—two to three members—with Doyle, Trout, Barnett, McGaha, and Haugh each leading his own squad into an area around Thang Binh, roughly ten kilometers from the coast. McGaha told the Tigers to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible, and if they saw any hamlets, they were to burn the hooches. Leave nothing standing.
Not far from the campsite, Doyle and his team followed a trail running just east of Than Moi, where they found three elderly peasants outside a hut. No words were exchanged, nor did the soldiers give the villagers time to react. They simply lifted their rifles and began shooting. Seconds later, the three old men lay shredded on the ground.
Another team consisting of Barnett and Causey entered a hamlet just west of Than Moi, where Barnett surprised a man outside a hut who was believed to be a bona fide Vietcong. The man had no weapon. “You motherfucker, we caught you!” Barnett screamed. Before the Vietnamese could move, Barnett opened fire from just a few feet away.
The other teams were within a kilometer of each other and could occasionally hear the gunshots of the other teams. Over the radio, Causey and Fischer heard a familiar phrase repeated again and again: “VC running from hut,” followed by a specific number of VC killed in each encounter. There were at least eight transmissions that day carrying the same message. But no one knew whether the dead were VC. And no team was offering an account of actual combat between VC or NVA and the Tigers.
Before sunset, the soldiers began filing back into their makeshift command post. Causey’s nerves were shot. Each day, he had to psych himself up to go on patrol. Sometimes he played mind games when unarmed Vietnamese were killed while fleeing for their lives. Just tell yourself, It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. But he knew, deep down, it did. This wasn’t war. It was murder. He realized others were playing the same mind games with themselves, especially the ones who didn’t want to go along.
Kerney had watched the total breakdown of a unit. He remembered in June when there was a camaraderie and sense of goodwill. Back then, the Tigers were badasses, but they weren’t murderers. There were too many good guys in the unit, checks and balances. But a dark force had taken over the platoon in the last few months, impossible to describe, and to watch people collectively descend into mayhem and murder was too much for any person to witness. For Kerney, the guilt was overwhelming. He was watching the killing but did nothing to stop it. If he tried, he would have risked his own life. “So we watched it and didn’t say anything,” he recalled. “Out in the jungle, there were no police officers, no judges, no law and order. Whenever someone felt like doing something, they did it.” What scared him was that there was no one to stop these assaults, that the leaders were actually encouraging it.
The Tigers were in a rage mode and were shutting down. When this happens, the soldier undergoes a unique set of physiological changes that few people understand outside combat. The midbrain—that part of the brain responsible for breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure—takes over for the forebrain, the part that processes information. The survival instinct takes over, and the soldier relies more on reflex than reasoning. In combat, this is good, because soldiers kick into a survival mode, and they kill. That’s what they’re supposed to do. But they’re also supposed to have strong leaders to set limits. Good soldiers use discretion. Good soldiers stay in control.
Harold Fischer and Dan Clint (who had just returned to the Tigers) volunteered to go on guard detail so they wouldn’t have to join the rest of the men. Clint, who had been gone since September, noticed how much his friend had changed. Fischer was deeply depressed. He didn’t want to be with the Tigers, whose uniforms, Clint noticed, were covered with black, dried blood. Fischer was hiding his surgical blades because the Tigers were stealing them to cut off ears. By now, just about everyone was carrying shriveled lumps of flesh in ration bags, openly and proudly. And Ybarra had increased his stash of teeth with gold fillings.
Fischer was clearly losing it. Clint had to keep his friend calm. Neither soldier was going to be leaving the unit anytime soon. Instead of allowing his friend to dwell on the insanity, Clint started talking about something they loved: music. Clint reminisced about their days at Fort Campbell when they drove to Nashville to see the Monkees in concert. At the base, they would spend hours listening to Beatles albums.
“What are the Beatles doing now?” he asked Fischer.
For a moment, Fischer thought about the question, then piped up, “Yeah, Sergeant Pepper. It’s their newest album.”
Clint shook his head. He had arrived in South Vietnam in May—a month before the album was released. He hadn’t heard anything about it. “Is it any good?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Fischer, “it’s different than anything they’ve ever done.”
Fischer began humming the first song on the album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and then slowly broke into the lyrics, the words fresh in his mind: “It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play . . .”
Fischer began singing other songs from the album, just like he did in the days before leaving for South Vietnam. Clint smiled as he listened. For a short time, the madness went away.
For eleven consecutive nights, the Tigers called in their body counts. “What I best remember about that time,” Causey recalled, “was that no one who was killed had any weapons. I don’t remember any enemy soldiers.” Fischer said the Tigers didn’t know how many they were killing but were only reporting estimates. “They didn’t want to report every death,” he said, because the lack of weapons seized would raise too many suspicions. “We’ll never know how many were killed,” he said. By this point, Causey said he came up with his own count of 120 murdered—all unarmed, and mostly males between the ages of sixteen and seventy—but that was just his own count. “Who knows how many others?” he mused.
Kerney said the Tigers had a sick joke for anyone who questioned the lack of weapons: “We would just say they were carrying getaway sticks.”
The magic number of 327 kills was reached on November 19 when a Tiger shot a villager “running from a hut,” according to the records. No weapon was found. Their goal achieved, the Tigers remained in the field, hoping to add to it. Their chance came quickly when they received an urgent radio message that part of the line company known as the Cutthroats was under fire. The Cutthroats hadn’t taken any precautions when coming upon four huts on the side of a mountain and were ambushed.
A seven-man team of Tigers checked the coordinates. They were within a half mile. With Ybarra leading the way, the team found the trail heading west. As they moved closer to the area, they could hear gunfire. Stalking on their own, the Tigers hadn’t run into a line company for weeks.
When they came within twenty meters of the tiny hamlet, the soldiers could see the other Army unit soldiers on the ground, spread around the perimeter and firing into the huts. The Tigers hit the ground and began firing their M16s and an M79 grenade launcher into the huts.
It didn’t take long before the enemy fire ceased. The Tigers moved closer and, with some of the line company soldiers, began searching the huts. Kerrigan stood outside the doorway of one hooch while Ybarra bolted inside. In the corner was the lifeless body of a young mother shredded by bullets. Next to her was an infant, still alive and crying. Shortly after Ybarra ran into the hut, the crying stopped.
Kerrigan inched closer to the doorway, then peeked inside. Ybarra was kneeling over the infant’s body, a knife in his hand and the baby’s severed head on the ground. Kerrigan watched as Ybarra placed a bloodied band on his wrist. Kerrigan quickly turned around and walked away.
He hurriedly passed by Fischer and, with trembling voice, recounted what he had just seen. “Sam just cut a baby’s head off.” Fischer walked to the hut and, as he reached the doorway, brushed by Ybarra, noticing the point man was wearing a bloodied bracelet. When Fischer went inside, he saw the baby’s headless body.
Sickened, he turned around and left.
Cutthroat line company soldier John Ahern had been in Vietnam since July 7 but had never heard of anything so vicious. He watched as Ybarra passed by wearing the bracelet, a Buddha band placed on children to bring good luck.
Ahern had heard stories about the Tigers but hadn’t believed them. Soldiers from his company had killed civilians caught in the cross fire, but never like this. It was an unwritten rule to turn the other way, but he couldn’t keep it to himself. Two nights later, while gathered with other company soldiers, he pulled aside his close friend and fellow line soldier Gary Coy.
“I’ve seen rotten shit during this war. Bad shit. But I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, his voice quivering. He then recounted the story and the blood on Ybarra’s hand.
Coy shook his head. He had never heard anything like this. They spent most of the night talking about the brutality of the war and how people were caught between both sides. Before they dozed off, they made a pact: Whoever survived the war would tell the people back home about the innocent civilians who were killed. They would tell the people back home about how a soldier beheaded a baby.
What they didn’t know was whether anyone would believe them.