When Apsey arrived at his office on January 12, 1973, there were already two phone messages on his desk. Both were from Special Agent Donald Needles, who worked out of an Army office in Columbus, Ohio. Both were marked “urgent.”
Apsey was aware that Needles was interviewing a former Tiger Force specialist who lived in Ohio and that the interview was supposed to take place in the morning. Apsey tried to reach Needles twice but was told both times the agent was still interrogating the same witness. That was a good sign. Most interviews in this investigation had lasted less than thirty minutes.
By noon, Apsey tried again. This time Needles picked up the phone. “I think you may want to come out here,” Needles said. “This guy’s talking. You’re not going to believe what he’s saying.”
It wasn’t like Bill Carpenter to slump into his seat and stare into space. Usually, he was quick to crack jokes with his young wife, Deb, or toss his baby into the air before going off to his sales job for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. But as he sat across from Deb and their six-month-old son on a cold January morning, he couldn’t stop thinking of the phone call he had just received a few hours earlier. He looked out the window at the snow now falling, at the gray leaden skies of southeast Ohio, and knew he better leave soon before the roads were impassable. The forecast called for three to six inches, and on the narrow country roads of Jefferson County, that could be treacherous if he waited too long.
He didn’t have to tell his wife why he was bothered or where he was going. She knew he had received a call from the Army CID that morning. He had risen from the table, kissed her and the baby, grabbed his coat, and headed out the door. As he had driven north through the rolling hills, Carpenter had tightly gripped the wheel of his car. The images were returning: Jungles. Tiger Force. Death.
Carpenter had spent the last six years trying to forget the year he spent in Vietnam. But the past had a way of creeping up, even startling you. He was young when he went to war, and it had been hard enough to learn how to kill, and then to watch as things got so crazy, so merciless.
The faces—that was the hard part. Remembering the faces of the dead. He wanted to just pretend it was all a bad dream. A phone call like this morning’s reminded him that it had been a nightmare made flesh.
As an Army reservist, he couldn’t ignore the request to talk to an investigator about Tiger Force. He had blown off the first call several months earlier by telling the agent he didn’t want to talk. But Carpenter knew that if a second request was made, he would have to comply or risk being called back into active service, something he most certainly did not want. He had a family and a three-bedroom home in the small rural town of Brilliant. He held down two jobs, one with the tobacco company and the other with the Brilliant police department as a second-shift patrolman. Carpenter didn’t want anything to jeopardize his new life.
A week ago, he agreed to talk to Special Agent Needles, and it had just started coming out, everything. Now he was on his way to tell the story again—this time, to Gus Apsey.
A cold wind whipped across the tarmac of Port Columbus International Airport as Apsey stepped off the plane. He knew the Midwest could be cold, but he didn’t realize how numbing the air could be in the middle of January. When he reached the terminal, he was greeted by Needles, who had arranged the meeting with Carpenter at a Holiday Inn in Steubenville, ten miles from Carpenter’s house. The drive to the coal-mining town—120 miles of boring flat farmland that eventually rolls into the hills of southeastern Ohio—went quicker than expected.
By the time they walked into the lobby, Carpenter was already waiting. Unlike some of the other veterans who grew their hair long, Carpenter was clean shaven and had a crew cut. He was slightly nervous but polite. The three checked into a room and plopped down in chairs as Apsey took out his pen and notepad and turned on a tape recorder. Apsey looked at Needles and then turned back to Carpenter.
“What made you want to talk to us?” Apsey asked.
Carpenter took a breath. “You know, the Tigers killed a lot of people while I was with them,” he said. “And I may have shot one or two myself that would not be considered justified killings.”
Though Needles had told Apsey that Carpenter was willing to talk, the lead agent was nevertheless surprised at the veteran’s candor. Apsey asked Carpenter about Ybarra. Was it true he murdered a baby during a mission in Quang Tin? Carpenter responded that he didn’t witness any such act but heard about it. Everyone knew that Ybarra was crazy and seemed to enjoy killing.
Apsey waited for Carpenter to say more, but for a moment, there was silence. It wasn’t easy for Carpenter. He had buried so much after the war—countless stories that he didn’t even tell his wife, his parents, his closest friends.
Apsey sensed that Carpenter was hesitating, but then, to his surprise, the former Tiger Force soldier began talking as if he had been rehearsing this moment for years. “One thing you need to know,” Carpenter said, taking another deep breath. “I was scared.”
He looked around the room as he collected his thoughts and then began. It was morning in the Song Ve Valley, and the platoon had just received fire from snipers but didn’t see where they were perched. Moments later, the unit came upon a rice paddy where ten unarmed farmers were in the field. Word was passed down the line to go ahead and fire.
Apsey interrupted. “Who gave the order?” he asked. Carpenter looked at Apsey. “It was our commander, Lieutenant Hawkins.”
For the next several minutes, Carpenter gave a detailed account of the men lifting their rifles, without any provocation, and firing at the farmers as they began to run for cover. “We killed about ten,” he said slowly, “and then stopped firing.” He went on to explain that the soldiers “knew the farmers weren’t armed to begin with, but shot them anyway because Hawkins ordered it.”
Apsey interrupted again. “Who was there during this incident?” he asked.
Carpenter responded, “The whole Tiger Force platoon.” Carpenter insisted he never fired on the farmers, knowing “it was unjustified. I just couldn’t do it.”
Next, Carpenter brought up the execution of an old man as he pleaded for his life near the banks of the Song Ve River. The man had just crossed the river carrying a crossbar with buckets at each end and geese inside. At the time, some of the Tigers were intoxicated. They had been drinking beer and shouldn’t have even been on night maneuvers. They were drunk. Carpenter said the old man, who was unarmed, was brought to Lieutenant Hawkins, who began “shaking the old man, yelling at him, telling him he was a son of a bitch, and generally cussing at him.” He said while the commander was screaming at the man, Sergeant Harold Trout walked up and clubbed the man on the head with the barrel of his M16. “I saw this old man fall to the ground, and at that time, his head was covered with his blood.”
Carpenter said he tried to reason with Hawkins to stop the beating, “but Hawkins pushed me away with his left hand, saying, ‘You chicken shit son of a bitch. If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you.’” At that point, Carpenter said Hawkins aimed his rifle at the man’s face and fired twice. “I knew the old man was dead, as half of his head was blown off,” Carpenter said quietly.
As he talked, Apsey put down his pen. As long as the tape recorder was running, he would transcribe the words later. For now, the investigator just wanted to listen. This is what he had been waiting for—to finally get a member of this unit to talk—and he wasn’t going to stop him now.
Carpenter began describing the afternoon he was walking with Sam Ybarra when the point man spotted a teenager running. Without hesitation, Ybarra lifted his M16 and shot the boy. He then walked over to the body and took off the boy’s tennis shoes. “That’s why he shot him,” Carpenter said to Apsey. “For his shoes.” And he recalled that when the shoes didn’t fit, Ybarra tossed them away and then sliced off the teenager’s ears.
And there was more. The execution of a prisoner west of Duc Pho. The shooting death of a wounded detainee by a team leader in the Song Ve Valley in July. The stabbing death and scalping of a prisoner by Ybarra in the same month. The bayoneting of a prisoner.
Carpenter grew quiet, and for a minute, no one said anything. Finally, Apsey broke in. “Did your commanders know?” he asked. “Did you ever think of telling them?” How, Apsey wondered, could a platoon carry out such actions without the knowledge of the top element?
Carpenter then said something that would stay with Apsey for the duration of the investigation. “We were told to kill everything that moves,” he explained. “It was standard practice for the Tiger Force to kill everything that moved when we were out on an operation.”
Apsey stopped him. “Are you telling me that all of the members of the Tiger Force killed everything that moved when they went out on a mission?”
“With a few exceptions, that is correct,” Carpenter said.
He said he still recalled the rallying cry that crackled over the radio from battalion headquarters: “You’re the 327th Infantry,” the voice said. “We want 327 kills!”
Apsey interrupted. “Who gave that order?”
Carpenter thought for a moment, then responded, “It came from Ghost Rider.” The same name used by the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Morse.
There was plenty of time to think about Carpenter’s statement during the four-hour flight to Los Angeles. Apsey was an experienced agent who had investigated atrocities but was startled by what he heard. Either Carpenter was lying or this unit was so egregious, no one wanted to tell the truth.
Carpenter had given him more than twenty names of suspects and witnesses. Apsey now knew who to talk to and what to ask. He would go back and contact the people who had already been interviewed and he would make sure agents knew what Carpenter said.
In addition, Apsey had to learn more about Carpenter and whether he was credible. The former specialist had described war crimes between May and November 1967. But alone, Carpenter’s statement didn’t mean anything. Under military law, accusations have to be substantiated—the equivalent of probable cause that a crime occurred. That means talking to other witnesses to corroborate the story. The suspect is then required to appear in what is known as an Article 32 hearing to determine if a court-martial is held.
Apsey was struck by the amount of work still to be done. He had already spent ten months on the case. The irony was that the investigation was revving up at a time the war was coming to an end. On the seat next to the tired agent was a copy of the Columbus Dispatch, dated January 28, 1973, proclaiming a peace treaty had been signed the day before in Paris. The war was over. But Gus Apsey’s battle had just begun.
When Apsey returned to Fort MacArthur, he turned over the tapes of his interview with Carpenter to the office secretary to be transcribed. He was now going to take the investigation solely into his own hands. He had learned a long time ago not to rely on other agents. You have to look your own subject in the eyes. You have to know everything.
As Apsey briefed Colonel Weinstein over the phone that morning, the commander asked where the case was going. The truth was, Apsey didn’t know. “I need some time,” he said. But how much? It was clear the investigation needed to be expanded, and that could take several weeks, or months. Normally, Weinstein wouldn’t have minded. He always pushed his agents to be thorough, not sloppy. But with the peace accords, most of the troops would be out of the country by March. The Pentagon was trying to wrap up the war—not prolong it.
Worse, because the war was ending, huge numbers of soldiers and officers would be leaving the Army. That meant they would no longer be under the jurisdiction of the military. Even if there were probable cause to charge them, they would escape the reach of Army prosecutors.
Weinstein and Apsey agreed the investigation needed to move forward without interruptions. That meant Apsey had to set priorities. He had learned years ago that the person most responsible for the actions of a fighting unit is the officer in charge. The first thing Apsey needed to find out was whether James Hawkins was still in the military. That question was answered almost right away when Apsey checked the roster sent to him by the Pentagon and saw that Hawkins was listed as a lieutenant in the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry. He had been promoted to captain and was now assigned to a student detachment at the University of Tampa in Florida.
While reading his notes, Apsey spotted the name Ervin Lee and found that the former soldier was now living in Bell Gardens, California—just twenty miles north of Fort MacArthur. Lee had been identified by Carpenter as one of the soldiers who watched as Hawkins shot the old man at the edge of the river. Since Lee was living so close, Apsey decided to call the former sergeant before traveling for any more interviews. Apsey was able to reach him and coax him into coming into Fort MacArthur several days later.
The onetime team leader quietly made it obvious he didn’t want to be interviewed. He had been living in the streets and just recently found himself an apartment. It was a long way from his hometown of Anniston, Alabama, but Lee had hoped living in California would help clear his head. It was just the opposite. He couldn’t sleep and would often walk the streets aimlessly. Though he had served in the Tigers for more than a year, he hesitated to talk about former soldiers whom he said answered the call when no one else did.
“What do you guys want with us now?” he asked, dropping down in a chair.
Apsey immediately slid Carpenter’s typewritten statement across the table, with Lee’s name underlined in bright red ink on the pages as a witness. Lee glanced at the documents and then turned away. Apsey then asked him, “Did you see the old man killed?”
Lee had two choices: he could leave or talk. If he left the office, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t be called again. He knew some of these CID guys were relentless. Maybe it was better to get it over with now.
Lee thought for a moment and then began to speak. He was one of the soldiers who escorted the old man to Hawkins, he told Apsey. Before walking away, Lee watched as Trout whacked the man on the head, and then a few minutes later, he heard gunfire. “Later, I heard that Hawkins had shot the prisoner.”
Lee said he didn’t know anything else about war crimes. Apsey suspected that wasn’t quite true, but rather than press Lee, he decided to wait until later. For now, he had reason to believe that Carpenter was telling the truth—at least about Hawkins killing the old man.
Apsey would interview one more witness before going to Florida. Leo Heaney was now a second lieutenant at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He was yet another name that Carpenter had disclosed, and the next day, after interviewing Lee, Apsey contacted Heaney. Two weeks later, Apsey met the officer at the fort’s CID office.
Armed with Carpenter’s and Lee’s statements, Apsey went into the interview loaded. Unlike previous interviews when he felt like he was fishing, he was now more confident. He said he knew about the murder of the old man and that two other soldiers identified Heaney as a witness.
Heaney was surprised. He knew that when Apsey contacted him by phone, the purpose was Tiger Force and war crimes. But he hadn’t actually expected something like this to surface six years later.
Apsey insisted the interview wouldn’t take long. Still, Heaney didn’t want to talk. Finally, Apsey pulled out a copy of Carpenter’s statement and handed it to Heaney. The veteran carefully began reading the pages and slowly slumped in his chair.
When he finished reading the typewritten pages, he returned the documents before folding his arms. Yes, he said, he knew all about the shooting. He said he had tried to reason with Hawkins to leave the victim alone. “I mentioned the fact that he was a harmless old man, and Hawkins said something to the effect, ‘If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.’” He had turned his back just before Hawkins pulled the trigger. “There was no justifiable reason the old man had to be killed,” Heaney told Apsey.
From the fifth floor of the Holiday Inn, Apsey had an excellent view of downtown Tampa. Outside his window, guests were lounging around the pool below, and spring breakers were making noise down the hall. All of it was wasted on him. Apsey had spent most of the morning writing the questions he would ask the former Tiger Force commander.
When Apsey heard a knock on the door, he covered the papers on a table, thinking it was Hawkins. But it turned out to be another agent, Donald Weaver, who had driven from the CID office at McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando to join Apsey in the interview.
Before the men could discuss the case, there was another knock. This time, it was Hawkins. Almost right away, the agents noticed he was fidgety. After sitting down at the table in the cramped room, Apsey immediately informed Hawkins he was suspected in a war-crimes case of murder, dereliction of duty, and conduct unbecoming an officer, and had the right to a military lawyer.
Hawkins pushed away from the table and looked at the two men in disbelief. He told them he didn’t know what to say. He agreed to come to the motel because he thought he was assisting the CID in a case. He had no idea he was a suspect.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t like this.”
“Do you want a lawyer?” Apsey asked.
Hawkins looked at Apsey and shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said.
Apsey quietly reviewed his list of questions and then looked up at Hawkins. “Did you shoot an old man in the Song Ve Valley in 1967 after you had been drinking?”
“No,” Hawkins responded matter-of-factly. “No, I did not.”
Apsey then slowly read aloud the statements of Carpenter, Lee, and Heaney. They said it was Hawkins who shook the old man mercilessly, and Hawkins who rebuffed attempts by soldiers to stop, and Hawkins who ultimately pulled the trigger. When Apsey finished reading the witness statements, he placed the papers down on the table and stared at Hawkins.
It was apparent that Hawkins was uncomfortable, shifting in his chair, looking confused, almost dazed. He began babbling that to the best of his knowledge, he never killed anyone needlessly and certainly didn’t remember killing an old man.
Hawkins asked about a lawyer.
Apsey responded, “You have a right to one. That’s your decision.”
Hawkins stood up and took a few steps toward the window, but then stopped. “I’m going to need time to decide,” he said. “At this point, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
After Hawkins left the room, Weaver turned to Apsey. “How much do you bet he doesn’t come back?” he asked. Apsey thought about the question for a moment and then responded. “How much do you bet he comes back,” he said, “but with a lawyer.”
The next morning, Hawkins knocked on the door of Room 501. He wasn’t alone. At his side was Captain Guyton Terry Jr., a judge advocate general (JAG). The two came inside.
Immediately, Apsey followed protocol by informing Hawkins he was a war-crimes suspect.
Before sitting down, Hawkins made it clear his lawyer wasn’t going to allow him to answer incriminating questions. He wasn’t going to be blindsided this time, he said.
Apsey asked Hawkins if he was going to cooperate by answering any questions.
“You can ask,” he responded.
Apsey looked at his list again and asked the question, “Did you shoot an unarmed older Vietnamese man in the Song Ve Valley in 1967?”
Terry whispered something to Hawkins, who then shook his head. “On the advice of my lawyer,” he said, “I’m not going to talk about that.”
Apsey then went on to ask him if he ordered the shooting of unarmed farmers in a rice paddy in the same valley in 1967.
Again, Terry whispered something to Hawkins, who said he was not going to answer.
Apsey then asked Hawkins a litany of questions about the routine torturing and killing of prisoners, the practice of cutting off ears and threatening to kill soldiers if they complained. After each question, Hawkins refused to say anything.
Apsey could see the interview wasn’t going anywhere. Finally, he asked if Hawkins’s superiors knew about war crimes carried out by the platoon. This time, Hawkins abruptly stood up and moved away from the table. He had enough, he said. He motioned to his lawyer. They were ending the interview, and without saying anything more, they walked out of the room. There was nothing Apsey could do to stop them.
Apsey filed his weekly report after returning to Fort MacArthur, and for the first time, the Coy Allegation, No. 221, was formally fleshed out. The report now included the names of Sam Ybarra, James Hawkins, and Harold Trout, and the phrase “other unidentified members of Tiger Force” who were under investigation for crimes ranging from murder to body mutilation. In short, the investigation was expanding to the entire unit.
In keeping with the routing system, the report was typed at Fort MacArthur and then sent to five places: Weinstein at the Presidio, CID headquarters, the offices of the defense secretary and Army secretary, and, finally, the White House.
The first call to Weinstein’s office after the report was filed was from CID headquarters. Tufts was going to keep a separate file on the case. He did not want any surprises, nor did he want details of the case to reach the media. In most CID investigations, the agents were often the last to know what was happening at the top. Under Tufts, that was certainly the procedure. He didn’t want his agents fettered by the politics that sometimes seeped into these cases, especially now. Tufts was painfully aware that the Nixon White House was paranoid about war-crimes cases breaking in the news. Nixon had been forced to perform damage control in the wake of the My Lai revelations by calling the atrocity an “isolated incident” on December 8, 1969. Tufts had been told time and again to keep the president’s office abreast of all potentially embarrassing cases. His two key contacts in the administration were John Dean, legal counsel to the president, and Charles Colson, special assistant to the president.
To keep track of the case, Apsey made a copy of the report about the farmers being killed and taped it to his office wall. Then he made a copy of a report on the killing of the old man crossing the river. He taped it next to the first report. One by one, he taped more reports to the wall, along with the names of the suspects.
Based on a blueprint of what he now knew, starting with Carpenter’s allegations and subsequent interviews supporting those accusations, Apsey would need to interview every Tiger Force member who served in the period of May through November 1967. That included going back and reinterviewing former and active soldiers who had already been interrogated.
Apsey went over the list. At least sixty-one had to be reinterviewed, and at least another thirty had yet to be located. Apsey would be assigned help, but not full-time. He was on his own.
The key would be getting soldiers to talk. Without a dead body, a war crime is tough to substantiate, especially when the events took place six years earlier. It takes credible witnesses to corroborate a crime. In My Lai, there at least had been graphic photographs of the victims. But even with the horrifying images, only one soldier was ever convicted, Lieutenant Calley.
What was frustrating to Apsey and his superiors was that this case, in many ways, had the potential to get much bigger. How big they didn’t yet know.
As he stared at the names on his office wall, Apsey’s eyes kept returning to the same one: James Robert Barnett. Why had he abruptly resigned after being interviewed about the case in 1971? What did he know? Apsey went into Earl Perdue’s office and closed the door.
“Look,” he said, “I got a funny feeling about this one.”
Puzzled, Perdue looked at his agent.
Apsey explained that Barnett’s sudden resignation was one of the first clues that the case involved more than just one soldier killing a baby. “I need to fly out there.”
Perdue waved his hand and agreed. He was already under orders to make this case a priority, and if his lead agent believed he suddenly needed to fly somewhere for a key interview, Perdue wasn’t going to stand in the way.
The next day, Apsey boarded a flight to Tennessee and, for most of the trip, pored over Barnett’s personnel file and other records. After serving in the Tigers, Barnett went on to put in three more tours, including a stint in Special Forces. He brought back a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and a bad attitude.
Apsey arrived and called Barnett’s home. To his surprise, the former officer answered. Apsey said he had some important things to talk about.
There was silence on the other line. “I thought I dealt with you people already,” he said in a deep drawl. The CID had already come to his base at Fort Campbell and asked him questions.
“I’ll make this quick,” said Apsey.
Barnett wasn’t happy.
“I don’t have much to say,” he told Apsey when the investigator appeared at the door. Back in his hometown, like so many other veterans, Barnett couldn’t get a good job—at least not right away. He had been driving a bulldozer and a truck to make ends meet. He was married, with a month-old son and more bills than ever.
Apsey had come to understand Vietnam vets and had learned not to push too hard (the surest way of ending an interview). “This won’t take long,” he said.
The two moved from the front steps to the living room. Apsey broke the ice by first saying that other Tiger Force members had spoken candidly about war crimes. Did those events, if true, have anything to do with Barnett resigning as a second lieutenant while stationed at Fort Campbell?
Barnett tensed up. He didn’t know what to say. More importantly, what were others saying? He slumped down in his chair.
“What’s this about?” he asked, his hands slightly trembling.
Again, in a reassuring voice, Apsey said he was trying to get to the truth. Barnett was no longer in the service and probably couldn’t be prosecuted anyway, though that wasn’t Apsey’s decision. Apsey went on to describe the attack on the rice farmers and the shooting death of the old man in the Song Ve Valley.
Barnett responded that he didn’t know anything about the farmers, and yes, he recalled the shooting of the old man but didn’t see it.
Apsey asked him about Ybarra and the baby. Barnett again said he didn’t see it but heard about it. Barnett turned away, his face red, and looked down. Apsey could tell Barnett wanted to say something, so he let the man take his time while he watched the strapping, six-foot, four-inch former soldier for any clues in body language. He could hear the big man breathing harder now.
“Okay,” said Barnett. “Okay. I want to say something, just for now, but I’m not going to repeat it under any circumstances. When we were out there, on patrol, it was generally understood that we would—well—kill anything that moved.”
Apsey immediately stopped writing. He wanted to hear this again.
“Anything?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, as far as we knew, the civilians had been moved out, and what was left in our areas of operations were strictly enemy or enemy sympathizers.” On nearly every mission, he explained, the platoon’s orders were to kill anything that moves. Men, women, anything.
Apsey asked Barnett if the platoon soldiers knew for sure the people they were killing were truly enemy soldiers. Barnett shook his head no.
Apsey returned to California with more information than he ever expected. Before he had a chance to type his report, he received a call: agents had located Barry Bowman, a former Tiger Force medic who was mentioned by Carpenter as a witness. Though he was no longer in the Army, the CID had traced Bowman to the small college town of Macomb, Illinois, where he was operating a bar.
When Apsey called, Bowman said he didn’t want to be bothered, especially by the CID. Nothing good could come out of talking to agents, he said. But Apsey insisted.
In less than two days, Apsey was knocking on Bowman’s door. At first, Bowman didn’t answer; he knew it was the CID and began having second thoughts about an interview. After several knocks, however, he walked to the door and let Apsey in.
“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.
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.