Going after commanders in a war-crimes case was rare during Vietnam. To do so after the war was unheard-of. Not only did the passing of time make it more difficult to present testimony and evidence but the political will to press such a case was questionable. The war had ended two years earlier. Despite the peace treaty, by January 1975, NVA troops were pouring over the borders in a blatant violation of the agreements signed in Paris. The South Vietnamese government had been pleading for money and arms, but U.S. lawmakers were reluctant to even touch the subject. Though President Ford was willing to provide some assistance, Congress had refused every funding request.
Despite the changing climate, Apsey was prepared to challenge any effort to shut down the case. He had come too far. If anyone tried to tell him to end the investigation, he would ask for the order in writing.
In early December 1974, he called the Pentagon and requested immediate locators on all officers in the battalion between May and November 1967 to see who was still in the service. He couldn’t personally interview all the commanders; some undoubtedly would be stationed overseas. He also knew that officers had a tendency to talk to one another and compare answers. So again, Apsey was forced to employ the “shotgun approach,” just as he had done with the grunts: the CID would question all the officers at once.
He had been a part of more than one hundred investigations but never one that would reach so high. He knew he would receive support from Weinstein and Perdue, but still, Apsey was a career serviceman, and he was now focusing on people who wore more stripes than anyone he knew.
He remembered what his mentor Frank Sugar once told him: “It doesn’t matter how many stripes they’re wearing. You apply the law. No one is above that. Do you hear me? No one.”
After six frustrating weeks of checking the mail, Apsey received locators on eighteen officers in mid-January 1975. The only one missing was Harold Austin, the former executive officer who later became battalion commander. Agents told Apsey that Austin was out of the military and believed to be somewhere in Thailand. They would keep looking for him.
There was one name on the list that Apsey circled: Gerald Morse. The former battalion commander known as Ghost Rider was now stationed as a full colonel in Heidelberg, Germany. No doubt, his time as a battalion commander had helped lead to his promotion. Apsey would save that interview for last.
There were many questions Apsey needed to ask, but perhaps the most important one involved a definition. A free-fire zone was based on the premise that the United States was in a friendly country and needed permission from the South Vietnamese government before opening fire or ordering an air strike on a specific village. The targets had to be military.
What Apsey found was that in numerous incidents, the Tigers were taking the phrase literally—freely firing on civilians. Apsey suspected battalion commanders knew that the free-fire zones were being abused and looked the other way.
And there were other questions, too. Did the commanders know about body mutilations? Did they ever question why the Tigers never brought in prisoners? Did any soldiers ever bring war crimes to their attention? He knew that some commanders would not have had any supervision over the Tigers. But he also knew the command structure over a battalion was small enough that the officers often knew what was going on throughout the unit. All the officers had to attend daily mandatory briefings, including the battalion surgeon, executive officer—and chaplain.
Within weeks, the responses from commanders came back. And they were just as Apsey predicted: the officers expressed ignorance about civilian deaths—the routine execution of prisoners and unarmed villagers. But in their responses to free-fire zones, the officers offered a snapshot of a battalion obsessed with body count—and of officers who rarely ventured into the field. Again and again, Apsey read similar accounts. Major James McElroy, who served under the battalion’s executive officer, told agents that “if movement was seen in a free-fire zone, whether identified as armed or not, it could be fired upon.” Another officer, Captain Jerry White, said that in a free-fire zone, the soldiers “could fire at will.” And Captain Joseph Westbrook told agents that if a Vietnamese was killed in a free-fire zone, “he was considered a combatant.”
One key interview was with the former battalion surgeon. Dr. Bradford Mutchler was asked whether he ever heard rumors about the Tigers collecting ears, gold teeth, and scalps. “Yes,” he answered. “It was something that no one really talked about in the open. It was something that you just kept trying to sweep under the rug and forget because you really didn’t want to know if it was true or not.”
As far as free-fire zones, he said, battalion leaders routinely declared large areas as free-fire zones, especially in the Song Ve Valley. The order “to kill everything that moved” was given all the time. “As the battalion surgeon, I attended all of the mission briefings. I heard that order, or similar orders, given at every briefing.” Mutchler was then asked what the order meant. “In my opinion, it meant kill whatever was in the area,” he said. “If it moves, kill it.”
Stephen Naughton had been tracked down in Harker Heights, Texas, on February 5. The former platoon leader, now a civilian, admitted that Donald Wood came to him twice—once at Carentan and later at Fort Bragg—to talk about atrocities carried out by Hawkins and others. Naughton said he, in turn, contacted a colonel in the inspector general’s office at Fort Bragg to pass on Wood’s complaints. But he said he was told “to forget it. That I would just be stirring things up.”
A man was sitting in his apartment kitchen in Saint Petersburg, Florida, when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver, and the voice on the other end asked if William Doyle was home. The caller then identified herself as Bonnie Sapp, a CID agent. Doyle wanted to slam the phone down but knew it was now too late. It was February 1975, and the Army had been looking for him for three years.
He had picked up their trail back in Guam when agents began snooping around a fishing village where he was living, but he had managed to stay one step ahead. He assumed they wanted to know about his participation in a secret operation known as the Phoenix Program. (Hatched by the CIA, the covert operation was set up to assassinate Vietcong supporters, after Doyle left the Tigers.) But whatever they wanted, Doyle knew it probably wasn’t good news for him, so he had ducked into the shadows.
He was angry. He had always prided himself on his ability to outsmart his adversaries. Sapp wouldn’t say how she had found him, but it didn’t take long before Doyle figured it out. Just weeks earlier, he had checked himself in to a mental ward at the Bay Pines Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Saint Petersburg. He admittedly had been close to a breakdown, partly from years in Vietnam, partly from the unresolved issues of a troubled childhood. Because his name was in the system, his admittance in the facility had tipped off the military to his whereabouts.
Doyle asked Sapp why she wanted to question him. She would say only that allegations were made against him from his time in Tiger Force.
“Tiger Force?” he asked incredulously. “What do you want to know?”
Again, the agent said it was better to meet in person. He agreed but gave her a warning. “I’ll tell you now,” Doyle said, “I don’t discuss things that happened during the war. The only thing I’ll say is that while I was in Vietnam, I did everything I could, and killed anybody it was necessary to kill to keep Americans alive.”
The following day, Sapp and another agent showed up at Doyle’s apartment. Before asking any questions, they read Doyle his rights under military law, which meant he was under investigation but not under arrest. The suspected crimes: murder and aggravated assault. He had the right to remain silent and to call a lawyer.
Doyle sneered at the agents, saying he had nothing to offer. Each time they asked him a question, he answered with a “no comment.”
At one point the CID agents brought up the name of the man who fingered Doyle during the investigation: Bruner. Doyle immediately jumped to his feet, his face red, and began spewing obscenities. “Bruner was a wiseass!” he shouted. “He couldn’t be depended on! He was always trying to make peace, instead of making war.”
Most of the people accusing the Tigers didn’t even know what it was to fight a war, he sneered, including the CID. “Tiger Force was my kind of unit, I can tell you that,” he said. “We fought the war the way we thought it should have been fought.”
After three hours of additional “no comments” and obscenities, the agents finally gave up. They turned off their recorder and rose to leave. Doyle was quick to stand. “I can tell you this,” he said. “Don’t ever bother me again. I’m finished.”
Several hours later, he received another call from a man who identified himself as a CID agent who knew about the case. The agent told him investigators would probably be returning but that Doyle should keep his mouth shut. The agent didn’t want to tell Doyle much, other than to say there was “a faction of CID agents who were against the investigation. They’re trying to protect you guys.” Doyle was surprised and told the agent he appreciated the heads-up.
“Are you guys going after Hawkins?” he asked.
The agent then spelled out the whole case, based mostly on the fact sheet and summaries prepared by Apsey. Doyle listened. When the agent finished, Doyle asked for Hawkins’s phone number. The agent didn’t hesitate and, against Army regulations, passed on the number and even Hawkins’s address at Fort Rucker.
No sooner did Doyle hang up the phone than he called Hawkins. The two had not talked since Vietnam. Doyle was one of the few soldiers who had stuck up for Hawkins in the field, and Hawkins knew it.
Doyle told him everything. Hawkins said he was well aware of the investigation, because his own career was on the rocks. He had been informed it could be years before he was promoted—if at all. He could even go to jail.
By the end of the conversation, Doyle was seething. In his mind, he and Hawkins never did anything wrong in Tiger Force. Doyle announced he “wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone.”
He had taken shit from people his entire life. Beneath the tough exterior, Doyle was a wounded man. Pounded by a drunken, enraged father, he was protected by his mother, who would step in between the young boy and his abuser while she was alive. She was his protector, his savior. She died in a car accident when he was in grade school, and he lost anything decent in his life. The hurt and, later, the rage was uncontrollable, so much so that he turned it inward. For years, he blamed himself and, later, blamed the world. Dropped into South Vietnam, he found the perfect place and the perfect people to take out his wrath.
The day after CID agents visited his home, he began making a barrage of calls to the Pentagon. He demanded to talk to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and didn’t give a damn how long it took to reach him. After the calls bounced around the labyrinth bureaucracy, he managed to reach a secretary who worked in Schlesinger’s office. Doyle began ranting about the Tiger Force investigation, saying the Army was trying to railroad “good soldiers who answered the call” and that he was one of them. He said the Tigers did nothing different than what the soldiers did during the Phoenix Program. Doyle knew that Schlesinger had at one time been director of the CIA in 1973, taking the place of Richard Helms, who oversaw the program. “I want to know why all of a sudden these are war crimes,” he said to the secretary. “I was in the Phoenix Program, and I know damn well you all knew what the hell we were doing the whole time.”
He demanded to speak to Schlesinger, but the secretary said she would make no promises. She would take Doyle’s name and number.
Doyle was still angry after he hung up the phone. He wasn’t sure whether he would ever get a response, but at this point, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to stay in the country. He needed to get the hell out again, this time to the Philippines. He had spent time there during R & R sessions and liked it. Americans were left alone. He could disappear.
In a military career that spanned twenty-four years, Gerald Morse had done everything right. He had successfully attended the command general’s college, served in Korea, where he earned two Purple Hearts, and led a battalion in one of the most contested regions of Vietnam. Two years after the war, he had been sent to Heidelberg as part of a contingent to the Army’s 7th Army. From all indications, he was on a track to become a general.
On the afternoon of March 17, 1975, Morse was returning from a training exercise when two CID agents approached him. They said they needed to talk to him about Tiger Force.
Morse agreed to chat but wasn’t pleased. He reminded the agents that he had already been interviewed by the CID about this case in 1972 and didn’t know anything then. What made them think he knew anything now?
But the agents, Gary Lawrence and Ellis Collins, reminded him that the interview he was referring to was three years ago and that a lot had changed. One of the agents pulled out a card and began reading Morse his rights. Morse hadn’t expected this. He had always been a gung ho officer who excelled under fire without a hint of scandal. “You are under investigation for dereliction of duty,” said the agent. “You have the right to a lawyer.” Morse didn’t flinch. He said he would waive his rights to a lawyer and told the agents to fire away.
The first question: “What was your radio call sign?”
“Ghost Rider,” he said, “everywhere I went. Whether in a helicopter, vehicle, or stationary.”
“Did you ever say you wanted a body count of 327?”
“I don’t recall anything about that,” he responded. “That was so long ago.”
“Did you offer a promise and award or any other type of recognition to the person or the unit which made or surpassed the 327th kill during Operation Wheeler?”
He fired back, “Absolutely not.”
Asked why Morse changed the names of the companies from A, B, and C to Assassins, Barbarians, and Cutthroats, Morse responded, “This was done as a means of bringing togetherness and esprit within the units.” He explained that he needed to breathe life into the battalion to fight the enemy. He defended the use of free-fire zones but said the idea was not to kill unarmed civilians. There were times when villagers would be discovered in such areas, but he insisted the troops weren’t ordered to kill them.
“Was it justified to shoot and kill any Vietnamese who was unarmed and running from your troops in free-fire zones?” an agent asked.
“That’s a hard question,” Morse replied. If there was a triple-canopy jungle and visibility was limited, he said, he could understand a soldier would be “justified in shooting.” But again, he insisted that it would “not be justified to shoot and kill an unarmed fleeing person.”
There was one last question: “There have been reports of many atrocities, body mutilations, murders, mistreatment of prisoners and civilians committed by members of your battalion and particularly by the Tiger Force. Can you explain why none of these reports came to your attention while you were the commander?”
Morse turned directly to the agent. “I believe that if such things had happened, the personnel involved would have been less than stupid to inform me, knowing that I would have took action to court-martial them. . . . I find it hard to believe that any such war crimes occurred in my battalion.”
On a warm, late April afternoon, Apsey hiked along a trail in San Pedro Valley Park until he came to a grassy hill overlooking a meadow blanketed by wildflowers. He removed a Canon from his bag and crouched to capture an image of the rolling landscape.
It was one of his favorite places for nature photography and one of the few spots where he could escape an investigation that had dominated his life. Usually he was able to focus on his hobby, looking for the best angles and lighting. But even amid the flowers and sunshine, he was unable to relax.
For months, he had been trying to find time to visit here to shoot some photos but had been too busy. He was already feeling alone. Fellow agents weren’t asking him about the investigation anymore, and agents in CID offices elsewhere didn’t want to get involved. He wasn’t exactly an outcast, but he knew he wasn’t popular among some agents just by their reactions when he called for routine assistance.
At times, the stress was overwhelming, and he was slowly showing symptoms of diabetes: shortness of breath, light-headedness, fatigue. He wasn’t helping his condition by smoking more and spending the balance of his time at work and not at home. It was impossible to separate himself from the case. He had returned last month from Arizona and couldn’t shake the image of an emaciated Ybarra, sunken eyes, staring up from a couch in the darkness of a filthy shack. The faces of the others—Barnett, Bowman, Carpenter, Kerrigan, Fischer—as they spoke of what had happened those years ago were images too pitiful to forget.
Unlike the rest of the country, they didn’t have the luxury of putting the war behind them. Just a week earlier, on April 23, President Ford announced America would not help the South Vietnamese in their efforts to fight back the North Vietnamese who were on the outskirts of Saigon. He was not about to send troops to refight “a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” It was time, he said, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Of course for Apsey, it was one thing to forget the war but another to dismiss the crimes—no matter how he felt personally about the soldiers. After spending three years on the case, he was convinced that despite a brutal conflict in which things went awry and innocent people were killed, this was a nightmare unit that had again and again and again lashed out at defenseless people, many of whom were caught in a war they never wanted. In the end, there was no excuse for what Tiger Force did. And there was no excuse for the commanders who knew things were spinning out of control but did nothing to stop the killing. These were not fog-of-war killings, Apsey told his superiors. These were premeditated murders by members of a unit who were on a brutal rampage. If you can look the other way on these actions, then anything goes. You won’t even need rules of engagement. You won’t need a military code. You won’t even need CID agents spending years on war crimes.
God knows, he knew the consequences of his work—and the explosive information that was about to be written in his final report. He knew people could be charged and careers could be ruined. Worse, if this ever reached the American public, it would be a national disgrace. American soldiers killing women and children, scalping villagers, kicking out the teeth of the dead, and wearing necklaces of human ears? It was understandable for a unit to lose control once, maybe even twice. These were eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds in a confusing war. But this was different. “This is my job,” he would tell his wife when he brought his work home. “I’m getting tired of it, too, but I can’t just take the easy way out.”
Apsey knew the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were far worse than Americans in the treatment of their own people. More than six thousand civilians were executed at Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968 in one of the worst spates of war atrocities.
But Americans should have a higher standard, the highest. We were supposed to be humane, to be tough, brave soldiers—not killers. Ultimately, it wasn’t up to Apsey to enforce standards. That would be carried out by the Army’s justice system. But he at least had to do his job by pointing out the breaches. Otherwise, he was no better than the officers who chose to look the other way.
Apsey never forgot the Jesuits who taught him about the power of a higher good—the grace of God interceding in the lives of people. He tried to stay away from applying his own morality to cases. But with Tiger Force, that was difficult. Beyond the mechanics of the investigation, he saw evidence of a deep, underlying struggle between good and evil. It wasn’t so much a fight for power. That was too easy. It was a battle over whether platoon commanders and soldiers would succumb to their own dark instincts. They needed to be held accountable. Otherwise, the crimes would happen again and again.
Through their own words, the former Tigers had told Apsey everything he needed to write his final report. But what they never gave up was the reason for their fall from grace. At times, they gave clues through the tension and tears, but nothing more. They never confessed that somewhere between the ambushes and booby traps and humping in the glaring sun, they lost hope. Somewhere in the blackness of the night, they lost faith. And in the end, there was nothing to separate them from the devil.
Apsey peeked over the stacks of records, photos, and military maps covering his desk as Woodrow Eno entered his office. They had been collaborating by phone and now were finally meeting to talk over the progress of the final report. Apsey turned off his tape recorder and stood up to greet the twenty-eight-year-old Army lawyer who was assigned by the Presidio to review the investigation. Eno appeared fresh in his crisp uniform, in contrast to Apsey, who looked tired and haggard, the ashtray on his desk filled with cigarette butts and the floor covered with crumpled paper.
He rarely left his office these days, instead spending endless hours examining records—allegation by allegation—searching for the strongest testimony in each case. For each allegation, there was a separate stack of records, including sworn statements, maps, and suspect photos. The stacks carpeted his desk, his floor, and the tops of his cabinets. He now struggled to find a way to charge soldiers for the shooting of the farmers.
Based on interviews with Carpenter, Miller, and Allums, he was convinced that the assaults took place and that Hawkins had overseen them. But he wasn’t sure which members of Tiger Force fired their weapons.
Eno sat down and picked up the spreadsheet. He made it very clear that unless people were proved dead, there would be no murder charges. That seemed so obvious it was unclear why Eno had said it. But he explained that he was hesitant to press assault charges in the case of the farmers because no one had bothered to check on them after the shootings. Sure, Apsey had assumed they were dead; so had some of the soldiers. But were they?
“We need strong, unequivocal evidence, as much testimony as possible,” Eno announced. That meant many of the allegations Apsey had spent time investigating were “probably not going to be actionable.” He would review everything after Apsey finished writing the report. But, he reminded Apsey, the case was eight years old. The South Vietnamese government had collapsed on April 30 with the fall of Saigon, and the last thing the American public wanted was more Vietnam.
“How can we just walk away?” he asked. But he had a terrible feeling as he looked at Eno, a sense that things were suddenly not as he had believed, not as he assumed, that someone had hold of a rug and was about to yank it.
The killing of the prisoner on May 8 near Duc Pho had always bothered Apsey, mostly because the man, nicknamed the Big Gook, was tortured for days before he was shot to death after being ordered to run. It was one horrible thing to shoot a civilian without warning, but it was another to spend days beating and taunting him first. Since each witness—Barnett, Carpenter, and Heaney—agreed to the details, it could be reported as a war crime. The problem was that no one could recall who shot the prisoner. So the murder could really only be used to show a pattern.
Continuing his dictation, Apsey turned to the torture and stabbing death of a prisoner in July near Duc Pho. Speaking as clearly as he could, Apsey recounted the details: several Tigers placed bets that Robin Varney couldn’t knock out the prisoner with one punch. When he failed, Varney pushed the prisoner into a bayonet held by another soldier, the blade plunging into the prisoner’s neck. Apsey couldn’t recommend charges, since Varney was dead, but again, it was part of a larger pattern.
Apsey turned to the summary executions of two brothers in the Song Ve Valley in July. As he dictated details of the shootings without a hint of emotion, he remembered how Manuel Sanchez—a decorated career soldier—expressed sorrow over his failure to protect the prisoners. Apsey noted that Sanchez couldn’t identify the Tigers who killed the brothers, but said “this execution was ordered by the officer in charge: Hawkins.”
After reporting on the treatment of prisoners, Apsey moved on to the Tigers’ practice of bombing bunkers. But even after reviewing several written statements, Apsey was hard-pressed to recommend charges. The basic problem was there were so many attacks on bunkers, it was difficult to pinpoint just one. Some occurred during the day, others at night. The one case in which every witness seemed to agree—bunkers in a hamlet near Chu Lai in August—involved two former soldiers who were out of the Army and couldn’t be charged.
By including some of these statements, Apsey was hoping to establish the unit’s culture—at least among the leaders—and, in so doing, make a stronger case against those who may be charged. Body mutilations were another way of showing the platoon’s brutality. Though these were not the most serious offenses, Apsey was determined to use the evidence to support his overall case. He noted that numerous Tiger Force members “were observed in possession of human-ear, scalp, and gold-teeth collections,” basing his findings on twenty-seven separate witness statements.
Of all the soldiers, Ybarra was the prolific offender, Apsey wrote in his report. “Ybarra on numerous occasions cut ears from dead Vietnamese bodies, possessed a set of human ears and a jar containing two ears, possessed a string of human ears, which he wore on several occasions around his neck, and a bag with about fifteen to twenty gold teeth, suspected to have been removed from dead bodies.” Apsey couldn’t charge Ybarra, since he was no longer in the Army, but that wasn’t the reason the information was written into the report. Apsey wanted to show that someone such as Ybarra could garishly display his souvenirs without even drawing a blink, that these were dark crimes committed in the brightest sunshine.
Apsey then moved into Operation Wheeler, the mission launched by the military on September 11, 1967, to take over the Central Highlands. Drawing on the platoon’s radio logs, he went into detail, showing that the Tigers reported forty-eight Vietcong killed between November 11 and 21, without a single knife or rifle seized. He noted that battalion commanders, who were actively monitoring the radio logs, should have questioned the discrepancies, but they had not said a word.
Though Apsey was careful about drawing conclusions, he hinted that one of the reasons the Tigers were killing so many people was to reach a goal of 327 deaths. Apsey stated the platoon was acting under the orders of Morse to reach the magic number—an accusation, he noted, that was denied by the former commander. Apsey also accused Carl James of knowing about, but not reporting, the killing of an unarmed farmer near Chu Lai.
Apsey noted that “several of the 1/ 327 officers that were interviewed related they heard rumors that mutilations had occurred,” and included the testimony of battalion surgeon Bradford Mutchler: “The subject of mutilations was swept under the rug and not openly talked about because no one wanted to find out if the rumors were true.” Lastly, Apsey wrote that neither Morse nor Austin “put into effect an affirmative plan for the discovery or prevention of war crimes.”
Apsey had always said the investigation was like a cold case, except he didn’t have bodies or weapons. All he had was the words and memories of former Tigers. Despite the passing of time, he would try to prove that twenty, or two-thirds of the allegations, took place. There was no doubt in his mind they occurred. But time had passed. Four of the suspects were killed in combat, seven had left the military, and two could not be found. It was now June 1975, some eight years after the killings.
As a child in Austria, the son of a Nazi, Apsey had heard about the Nuremberg trials—and the importance the world placed on prosecuting war criminals. Such prosecutions were the only way to hold people accountable for their actions and prevent future atrocities. How, he wondered, was the American military going to prevent future Tiger Forces from happening if it didn’t address the problems now? Lives had been lost, but lives could be saved, too.
Apsey’s final report was fifty-five pages long, signaling the end of his “three years of hell,” he later recalled.
No one in Apsey’s office really understood the pressure he endured. But then, no one had ever investigated a war-crimes case for such a long period of time. When he inherited the Coy Allegation file, there were 133,000 American ground troops in South Vietnam, and the war was still on the front pages. When he completed it, the war was over and Saigon had fallen, as had an American president.
Under the Army’s justice system, it was up to the suspects’ commanders to decide whether to convene an Article 32 hearing. In most cases, commanders would read the final reports and supporting evidence and consult with military lawyers assigned to their base before making a decision. Apsey and other agents in his office thought he would be stationed at Fort MacArthur at least until the case reached a hearing, at which point he might be required to testify or provide additional reports. He was certainly ready. There was a sense of relief after he finished the paperwork. In the ensuing days, he began to take down the maps and statements on his wall, and to go out for lunch. Even Perdue noticed his agent was moving a bit quicker around the office. “It was like a weight had lifted off him,” he recalled.
In the back of his mind, Apsey expected a promotion, perhaps even a crack at running his own CID office in the years to come. No one could doubt his work ethic and expertise. For the next two weeks, Apsey waited.
When he received the call from the Presidio in late July, he was stunned. It had nothing to do with the Tiger Force case. He was told to pack his bags and be ready in two weeks to ship out. He was heading to South Korea to work in a CID office north of Seoul.
The two Army officers walked side by side down a long corridor of the Pentagon, their footsteps growing louder as they reached a marble conference room at the end of the hall.
The taller officer with a shock of silver hair, General William Maddox, turned to the other, James Hawkins, and motioned for him to wait outside the room where a team of Army lawyers was meeting.
Hawkins had known this day was coming for a long time. It was November 1975—three years since Hawkins was first confronted about the case—a case he had been trying to forget. He was now married and stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, with only three years to go before retirement.
Hawkins had been nervous ever since boarding the plane with Maddox, his commander, for the flight to Washington—his career and even the specter of a jail sentence riding on this trip. He feared becoming another Calley. The last thing he wanted to do was stand trial with the world watching.
In his mind, every killing was justified, and he would say so if he had to testify. But he knew the American public wouldn’t understand. They would treat him just the way he was being treated now—like a common criminal. If not for this damn investigation, he could have been a major by now. He had served when others had run. This was the thanks he was getting.
Hawkins shifted uneasily in his chair until he finally saw his general emerge from the room, followed by an Army lawyer.
He rose to his feet as the two men approached him. The lawyer handed Hawkins an eight-page brief.
Hands slightly trembling, he began reading the pages with descriptions of murders and assaults by Tiger Force members. By the last page, he came to his own name and the murder of the old man by the Song Ve River.
There it was—the word “murder.” This could be his career, or even his life.
But when he reached the final paragraph, he took a breath. Despite ample testimony against him, Hawkins would not be charged. No one would. The Pentagon had decided that it was better to cover up what had happened. Let the country move on.
Hell, it was only some Vietnamese.
The Army brief concluded that despite the evidence, “nothing beneficial or constructive could result for prosecution at this time.” Four commanders were asked to read the final report of the Tiger Force case, but no action was to be taken in those cases. The investigation would now be closed, the documents shipped to a storage room at CID headquarters. The longest war-crimes case of the Vietnam War was over. There would be no charges. There would be no press conferences. There would be nothing at all. It would be as if nothing had ever happened.
And so it was.