A red sun rose over the South China Sea as helicopters departed the base camp carrying the newest “class” of Tiger Force. Three Hueys, each carrying men, circled Carentan and veered west, soaring over endless foothills that seemed to rise higher as the aircraft flew farther away from the coast. From the air, everything seemed blanketed by trees, a great green expanse that faded gradually only where it scaled the slopes of the oncoming mountains. After they passed over the first row of peaks, the land suddenly opened—and in the distance was a wide valley with lush green rice paddies cut by waterways glistening in the sun.
From his seat near the open doorway, Donald Wood scanned the scene below: farmers toiling in a field, their conical hats protecting them from the rays. Water buffalo herded along a dike leading to the riverbank, where children splashed in the water.
Wood knew all about the Song Ve Valley. As a forward artillery observer who had just joined the Tigers, he had been studying maps of the four-mile-wide-by-six-mile-long river basin for days. His job was to become familiar with every crevice of the valley so he could confidently call in air strikes when the platoon located Vietcong positions. If he made one mistake—one miscalculation—fellow soldiers could be hit by friendly fire.
A remote, timeless basin some ten kilometers from the coast, the Song Ve had always been low on the Army’s priority list of trouble spots, but intelligence reports were starting to show that the Vietcong were extorting rice from Song Ve farmers. As his chopper began to descend, Wood could see that the wide stretch of rice paddies and hamlets was unscathed by the war. It was late June, and most of the rice was ready to be harvested. One of the goals of Task Force Oregon was to cut off the enemy’s food supply, and if that meant destroying the rice paddies, so be it. “This is as important as anything else we can do,” Westmoreland had said several months earlier during a planning session at the MACV.
That point had been driven home during yesterday’s briefing. Even before the choppers departed the base camp that morning, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Austin had stressed to his men the goal of the Song Ve campaign. “The farming needs to stop. The VC are moving the rice on sampans along the river to enemy camps,” he said. But the Tigers had no clue just how much farming they needed to stop until they saw the expanse of green rice paddies on the valley floor. It was like trying to count the stars in the night sky.
Thus, in order to curtail the harvest, they would have to take drastic measures. That meant clearing the entire valley and moving everyone out—all seven thousand inhabitants in seven known villages. In South Vietnam, there were several definitions for populated areas. But in general, a village was larger than a hamlet and, in many cases, plotted on government maps. Scattered throughout the Song Ve were hamlets, some with just four or five huts.
Colonel Austin declared that the battalion’s three line companies, known as A, B, and C, would move the people and their livestock to the Nghia Hanh relocation center just west of the valley, while the Tigers would break into small teams and look for Vietcong and rice caches.
As Wood’s chopper landed in a rice paddy, he watched as several farmers leaned over their plows in a nearby field, barely looking up. This had been their land for generations, and Wood wasn’t expecting an easy campaign, no matter how many pep talks the men got. The twenty-two-year-old officer was one of the few Tigers who had studied the Vietnamese culture—both in Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and later on his own. During his first two weeks at the base camp, he had talked to South Vietnamese translators about the people of the Song Ve. Most of the inhabitants were Buddhist farmers whose families had grown rice in the valley for hundreds of years. Wood and other battalion officers had been told in briefings that the province had always been difficult to control for the South Vietnamese government, partly because the people were fiercely independent. Some of the village elders were active in what was known as the Struggle Movement—an active campaign to bring peace to North and South Vietnam. Wood was told the people of the valley were pacifists and had tried to remain independent in the war, but it was getting more difficult. The VC had been trying to recruit, touting a fairer distribution of land ownership, while the government of South Vietnam had done very little to win any sort of support. That lack of effort was all the more telling since the people of the Song Ve had a grim recent history with the South Vietnamese. During a program launched by the government in 1958 to move rural people into “strategic hamlets,” the occupants of the Song Ve refused to move, and eventually the program was scuttled, though not before the South Vietnamese government killed some of the villagers.
When the United States began sending fighting units to South Vietnam in 1965, parts of the strategic hamlet program were resurrected. Under the new plan, the peasants would no longer have a choice: To keep them from joining the Vietcong, they would be forced to live in relocation camps. Instead of growing their own rice, the government would feed them. In order to notify the people about the new program, the U.S. military came up with a system of dropping leaflets from aircraft, ordering locals to leave and promising food and shelter at the camps. This was very similar to a leaflet program, known as “Chieu Hoi,” that was offered to enemy combatants, but this one specifically targeted civilians, with millions dropped in various provinces.
As his team of four soldiers gathered around Wood in the paddy, they looked up and watched as a chopper broke through the morning fog, the first wave of leaflets fluttering downward. Other choppers began circling the valley, releasing trails of paper. Over the next few minutes, the leaflets began covering the hamlets like freshly fallen snow.
Wood’s team headed for the south side of the valley to set up a command post, while three other teams began moving in different directions for their first patrol.
As Wood’s men reached a row of huts, shots were fired in their direction. The soldiers quickly scrambled for cover, but no one knew where the snipers were hiding. Wood radioed the platoon commander, Lieutenant Stephen Naughton, to let him know his position. The firing ceased, but it was clear the Vietcong had been watching the Tigers since they arrived in the valley. For more than a dozen rookie Tigers, it was the first time they had ever been shot at.
Suddenly Ybarra began talking about opening fire if they found any civilians in the huts. Wood jumped in. “No one is going to fire on anybody who’s not armed,” he said. Wood knew what it was like to go into combat, the sickening feeling in the stomach and the inability to stop shaking even when your hands were wrapped around an M16. But he had also learned from his Special Forces training that you had to stay in control. You had to know when to fire and when to hold back. It could make the difference between killing an enemy soldier or an unarmed villager.
When Wood had arrived in Vietnam, he had spent several months in the 1st Battalion/320th Field Artillery learning that firefights almost always begin without warning and that many times, there’s no time to call in the supportive air strikes. “You got to keep moving” were the words he remembered most from Special Forces. That is, don’t panic, don’t be stupid, and finish the job on your own. Air strikes were icing.
For newcomers such as Barry Bowman, just talking about killing unarmed villagers made him nervous. Like most of the soldiers who served in Vietnam, he had received less than two hours of instruction on the Army’s rules of engagement and the 1949 Geneva conventions, which prohibited the inhumane treatment of civilians and prisoners—a crash course on the rules of war. The Tigers were handed cards when they arrived in Vietnam defining eighteen war crimes, but no one ever talked about them and it wasn’t clear if the cards had ever been read.
Bowman knew that if you saw a war crime, you were supposed to immediately report it to commanders. “I just hoped I wouldn’t have to,” he recalled. But if you weren’t sure what constituted a war crime, how would you know what to report?
To stay safe, the team took cover and waited to ensure the snipers left. As they hid in the brush, Wood and others watched as several Vietnamese villagers, mostly old men and women, emerged from their huts. One by one, the people reached down and began examining the papers on the ground. More generic leaflets had been dropped all over the province for weeks, but the instructions on these papers were specific. By June 21, the people would have to evacuate the valley for a relocation camp. That meant they had to leave in two days. The leaflets’ message was clear: “At Nghia Hanh you will be safe. There will be shelter for you and your family. Those of you who choose to remain in the area will be considered hostile and in danger.”
Satisfied that the Vietcong snipers had given up, the men prepared to move on. Terrence Kerrigan looked toward the village but wasn’t really paying attention. His hands were still shaking, and he was barely able to hold his rifle. In the first two weeks of June, the Tigers had spent most of their time guarding combat engineers repairing sections of Highway One, the national roadway that ran along the coast of South Vietnam. Occasionally they would hear a few stray shots but saw no major combat. The whole thing felt a bit like a game. The free-spirited Californian tried to calm himself, but he was overcome with a sense of foreboding. He looked around to see if anyone was looking at him, but they were walking toward the village. They were going in, and Kerrigan had no choice but to follow.
By late afternoon, more Hueys began arriving and dropping soldiers from the battalion line companies on opposite sides of the Song Ve River, the main waterway that cuts through the heart of the valley. Their job was to fan out across the basin and visit the seven villages in the company of translators who were to tell the locals they had to leave.
When some of the soldiers from C Company entered the Hanh Tin hamlet, they met two elders who immediately told them the people didn’t want to move to a relocation camp. “This is our land,” said one of the villagers. A translator with the soldiers angrily told the elders they didn’t have a choice: They had to evacuate or they would be considered the enemy. They would be safe if they went to the camp. Their wives and children would be cared for. If the men were of military age, sixteen through fifty-five, they would probably be drafted into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to fight the Vietcong.
Lu Thuan was saddened as he watched the soldiers. For the first time, the war was coming to the Song Ve, something he had dreaded for two years. He had seen the men from the 101st Airborne—known as “chicken soldiers” because of the eagle patches on their sleeves—in other areas of Quang Ngai, but somehow he had hoped they would bypass his valley.
The thirty-one-year-old farmer knew that with the arrival of the American soldiers, it was just a matter of time before he and the others would get caught in the middle. A devout Buddhist who traveled every month to the pagodas—a house of worship—he had heard stories from the people along the coast who were forced to flee and the chaos and death that came with it. The VC would fire on the Americans, and the Americans would eventually retaliate by flying in planes with bombs. The valley—his valley, his home, his land, his wife, his children—none of it was safe any longer.
After one night in the field, planning, the Tiger teams had mapped out their patrol areas. The valley was divided into four quadrants—north, south, east, and west—with each team responsible for hunting Vietcong positions and rice caches in their own sections and, unless ordered, staying clear of the line companies.
Sergeant Sanchez insisted on teaching his team members a few tips about patrols—the same rules he learned when he joined the Tigers. As his soldiers passed through brush on the way to the west quadrant, he watched as Kerrigan moved toward two mangroves.
“Quick, stop,” Sanchez said. Kerrigan looked at his team leader and froze.
Sanchez, motioning with his hand for the other five soldiers to follow, walked toward Kerrigan. As they circled the soldier, Sanchez pointed toward the two trees, located parallel to each other, two meters apart. “What do you see there?” he asked the men.
Sergeant Ervin Lee waited for someone else to answer, but everyone was silent, so he piped in. “It’s a good place to put a trip wire,” he answered.
Sanchez asked Lee to repeat what he just said to make sure everyone heard.
“Trip wire,” Lee said.
Sanchez nodded. “There’s nothing there now, but when you see two trees within a short distance of one another, don’t walk between them. It’s a perfect place to string a wire at foot level that can set off an explosive.”
Over the next hour, Sanchez passed on more rules, knowing the soldiers had already been briefed about these safety measures but also knowing that even good soldiers sometimes forget the most basic instructions, even those that could make a difference between life and death. He told them not to smoke on patrol; the flash of a lighter or wisp of smoke was enough to give away a soldier’s position. And then there was the rule about going to the bathroom: make sure you dig a hole to cover your excrement. “Your shit leaves a trail,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez also told them about water. In the heat, a soldier could easily go through four canteens in twenty-four hours. If they happened to run out of water while on patrol, they should look for clusters of bamboo; there was a good chance a spring was nearby. As far as sleeping, he told them to use their poncho liners for sleeping bags. It would keep them dry and help protect them from spiders and other bugs.
Though he spoke of insects and arachnids in a cavalier manner, the same was not true for all creatures of the Vietnamese terrain. Sanchez was a stickler about one thing: leeches. “Check your bodies every few hours,” he told the men. “They can latch onto you without you even knowing.”
Five kilometers away, in the far west quadrant, Wood and his team came upon a thicket of bamboo. He stopped the men—mostly newcomers—and reached down to separate a single stalk from the others. “You see this?” he asked. “This is bamboo. It’s more dangerous than a rifle.”
The newcomers seemed puzzled. Wood explained that the VC cut a piece about a foot long and then sharpen one end, mash feces in the hollow opening, and insert the other end in the ground.
“The VC want you to step on this,” Wood said. “It’s a booby trap. And when it penetrates your boot, you will get an infection—count on it.”
His team moved beyond the thicket and reached a rice paddy, when the soldiers spotted a thatched hut in the distance. Such huts were usually used to store rice, plows, and other tools, but as the Tigers moved closer, a man jumped out and, to the surprise of the soldiers, fired an AK-47.
The Tigers dropped to the ground as the man dashed back into the hut. Without hesitation, they opened fire with their M16s, blowing the hut to pieces. It was the first time outside of training that some of the soldiers had ever fired their M16s, and they weren’t sure when to stop. After several minutes, they rose in unison and inched their way to what remained of the hooch. When they looked inside, they saw not only the dead man, his rifle laying across his torso, but a woman and baby whose bodies had been ripped apart by the barrage.
The deaths were unavoidable—no one had known the mother and child were inside—but Wood was clearly upset. He turned from the rest of his men and walked away. Bill Carpenter quickly approached his lieutenant and tried to console him, but Wood brushed him aside. He was the team leader and was ultimately responsible. And, of course, he had fired his M16 just like everyone else. Indeed, it may have even been his own bullet that ended the baby’s life.
Though he had been in skirmishes with the enemy, this was the first time Wood had seen a child killed in a firefight. But as an officer, he had to remain in control of his emotions. There were too many newcomers, and he knew they would be looking to him for guidance. If he showed any signs of weakness, he could lose their confidence. And this was no place to let that happen. No doubt, they were going to run into more ambushes.
“Just forget it,” he told Carpenter. “It’s over. I just want to forget it.” But for the next several hours, he was quiet. He couldn’t shake the images. And there was no way he would ever tell his family what happened. They wouldn’t understand. How could they? Their lives revolved around church, Friday night football games, and fish fries in the small town of Fridley, Minnesota. It suddenly seemed so long ago when he packed his bags on a bone-chilling January morning in 1965 and drove to the bus station to report for duty. He had been on the move ever since: Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
For most of his life, Donald Wood had been on the move.
His father, a Whirlpool engineer, was always being transferred. By the time Donald was eleven, he had lived in three cities, and each time it became harder to adjust. He and his twin sister, Helen, and younger brother, Jim, had to make new friends and attend new schools. Finally, in Fridley, he found a home. In high school, he had developed a close group of friends and even stayed in contact with them through letters after joining the Army. But he couldn’t even tell them what happened. War was a series of brutal honesties that fostered a clot of terrible secrets. So it had long been, and so it would be.
That night, the Tigers regrouped near a bend in the river and set up camp. While one of the Tiger Force teams patrolled the perimeter of the area, the rest of the soldiers stretched out along the bank, some finally getting a chance to empty their bowels. Wood kept to himself, while some of the others began to open the mail that had been delivered earlier in the day by supply choppers. For several minutes, the men were quiet as they began reading their correspondence, and then suddenly one Tiger began reading a portion of his letter aloud. When he stopped, another followed, and then another. The men took turns reading letters aloud—some from girlfriends, others from parents and siblings.
Barry Bowman thought it remarkable that the Tigers—many of whom had only known one another for days—were sharing intimate details of their lives. “We read them and shared everything in them with our comrades as a way of coping with the danger we were in,” he recalled. In these pauses, moments disorienting with a sense of frontier and temporary relief, the men could let down their guard. They were still tethered to their old lives via each letter read. But soon that tether would break.