In the morning, Wood kept his distance from everyone. Usually, he pored over maps with team leaders, but he was in no mood to talk, and he wanted nothing to do with Hawkins.
When the Tigers gathered up their gear and began walking in the direction of Hanh Tin, Wood stayed in the rear. He was still seething over the killing of the old man near the river. It was an unjustified shooting, but more than that, it was stupid. It gave the platoon’s position away, leading to a firefight. If Hawkins was trying to keep the prisoner quiet, there were other ways.
“He’s not fit to lead anything,” Wood told Carpenter that morning.
Even the commander’s drinking buddies from the night before had some concerns. Already, the Tigers were making snide remarks behind his back, several calling Hawkins “Jingles” because when he walked his pants would make noise from the many objects stuffed in his pockets.
As the platoon reached the outskirts of the hamlet, the soldiers could see a cluster of huts. Hawkins ordered the men to halt. He went down the line, picking several men to set up a perimeter around the area, with each one responsible for guarding a three-hundred-meter area. Anyone walking in or out of the area would be stopped, detained, and questioned by translators. The Tigers were determined to keep people from building more huts. “This is a free-fire zone,” Hawkins said. “No one is supposed to be here.”
Wood walked to the front of the perimeter where Hawkins was standing, but Wood didn’t acknowledge him. The morning fog had already burned away, and the translators were in the hamlet talking to a few remaining villagers, getting them ready to be evacuated, when a Tiger spotted two women walking toward their position. “Two approaching!” the guard shouted. Hawkins looked over and told the men to open fire. As soon as he uttered the words, Wood blurted out with a hand raised, “No, hold your fire. Hold your fire.”
Hawkins wheeled around, his face flushed, and angrily snapped, “You don’t countermand my orders. This is my platoon.”
Wood turned to Hawkins. “They’re openly approaching our position. It looks like they want to communicate with us.”
With the men waiting, their weapons drawn, Hawkins lifted his rifle, aimed at the women, and began firing, followed by another Tiger Force soldier. The two women fell to the ground, one screaming.
Wood couldn’t believe what he had just seen. He pivoted around and faced Hawkins, who had just lowered his rifle. “What the hell are you doing?” he screamed. “These were just two old women!”
Without waiting for a response, Wood and two medics rushed to where the women fell. One was shot in the leg and arm; the other did not appear to be hurt but was shaking and crying on the ground.
As the medics leaned over the women, Wood rose and ordered a radio operator to call for a medevac. No one protested the command.
Wood was beside himself. He stormed to the opposite side of the hamlet. He was done with Hawkins. He was going to report everything when he got back to Carentan. There was no way Hawkins should be leading a platoon, and if the commanders didn’t relieve him of duty, Wood would ask to be transferred.
“This isn’t good,” he told Carpenter later. “This isn’t good. This isn’t good for the Tigers. You tell me how a guy like this ends up becoming a commander.”
As the sun set over the mountains, the Tigers slipped off their gear and settled down in the brush. There was not much left to do. Other than the two elderly women who were targeted, no one else had approached the perimeter. It was getting too late to move, and it was better to set up camp along the river just outside the entrance to Hanh Tin.
Just before dark, Wood and six others walked away from the camp, each stopping to dig a foxhole in the dry red soil around Hanh Tin—spaced seventy-five meters apart—with two Tigers posted along a large bend of the river. If the Tigers were going to get ambushed, it was going to be at night and they wanted to be ready.
For several hours, it was quiet, and many of the Tigers dozed off. One thing Carpenter noticed before falling asleep was the brightness of the moon, casting shadows on the valley floor as if it were a sun instead of a satellite. “It was like nothing I had seen in a long time,” he recalled.
Sleeping in between Trout and Bowman, Carpenter was startled awake by shots. He jumped up and grabbed his M16 when he heard someone shout, “We need a medic!” He and Bowman ran fifty meters to the perimeter, where they saw a Vietnamese male in his early twenties rolling on the ground, holding his leg. Covered in blood, he was crying.
Bowman could see the man was seriously wounded. He opened his medic kit to look for bandages as Trout arrived. The team sergeant asked what happened, and one of the soldiers on guard said he shot the man because he had approached the perimeter. Trout stared at the man on the ground and could tell he needed a medevac. But there was no way he was going to call in a chopper and give the Tigers’ position away. As Bowman began wrapping bandages around the man’s leg, Trout slipped next to the medic and removed a .45-caliber handgun from his side. He then thrust the gun in the medic’s face. “C’mon, Doc, break your cherry,” he said.
Bowman knew what the sergeant meant. But that would mean crossing a line—one he didn’t want to cross. He and Trout had been on maneuvers several times, and he knew the veteran sergeant wanted his soldiers to be tough. But this was different. This was murder. The man rolling around in the dirt in pain wasn’t carrying a weapon. The men didn’t even know if he was an enemy soldier. He could have been a villager returning home like so many others. “I couldn’t do it,” he recalled. “It was against everything I believed.” He’d become a medic to save lives, not take them.
Trout shrugged his shoulders and pointed the .45 at the man, calmly firing three shots into his chest and head. Bowman stood speechless, too afraid to protest, too afraid to say anything.
For a minute, the men stood and stared at the man’s body, twitching in the dirt. “No one bothered to check the body for an ID card,” Carpenter recalled.
Wood, who arrived as the sergeant was pulling the trigger, didn’t know what to say to Trout. Though he didn’t always agree with the veteran, he respected him. Now he had watched the sergeant execute a wounded man. And Trout had done it in front of so many of the soldiers who looked up to him.
The medics were huddled in their own group along the riverbank, uncharacteristically quiet. Normally they would borrow supplies from one another and chat about what transpired with their teams. But no one wanted to say anything. They had heard about the killing of the old man by the river and the shooting of the wounded Vietnamese by Trout.
Teeters just wanted out of the Song Ve. Nothing good was happening here. Since joining the Tigers in February, he had never seen anything like this. Something was happening in Tiger Force that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was no secret that everyone was pissed off. No one wanted to be in this hellhole. The heat was wearing on everyone, and so was the jungle rot.
The tension was keeping the men awake at night, and to carry out the day’s mission, Teeters and other medics were passing out Black Beauties, amphetamines that would jack up the soldiers but also increase their stress—a dangerous combination. Now Teeters was dipping into the bag himself—it seemed the only way to get through the days.
He wondered whether he would ever get back to Oregon, particularly the pines and streams where he fished with his father, Don. He kept thinking more and more about his home—his mother, Gayle, and two brothers—something he knew he shouldn’t do. Don’t lose your head. Don’t think too much. “Man, this is fucking nuts,” he said to the others.
A soldier on edge isn’t necessarily bad. The brain and body adapt to war: the senses become sharpened to every noise, every flicker of light, every smell. But when soldiers are artificially stimulated and are lacking sleep, they become agitated at the slightest thing. They are too tired to process every sound, sight, and smell. They become overwhelmed by their surroundings, and without rest, they are no longer capable of making sound decisions. The Tigers were teetering on the edge.
Lying under a cover of leaves, Nyugen Dam peeked out to make sure there were no soldiers. He had been hiding under the thick green underbrush, but with no one in sight, he rose slowly and walked a few feet to the water’s edge to wait for another villager. Across the river, he saw his friend wading toward him, his head barely visible above the moonlit water.
Nyugen was irritated after waiting for hours and whispered to the man to hurry. Even after sunset, it was dangerous to be in the open. The American soldiers could be anywhere. As the two reached the riverbank, Nyugen grabbed a shovel hidden in the brush.
They crept along a dike and then to the edge of the hamlet where the soldiers had been earlier in the day, ever watchful of lights flickering in the darkness—a sure sign the soldiers were near. For the villagers, the only safe places were the old bunkers in the foothills. The Vietcong knew the locations of the underground shelters, but they weren’t bothering the villagers, at least not now. Not with the Americans in the valley.
With each step, Nyugen and his companion could smell a familiar odor lingering in the night air. The man cupped his hand over his nose as he neared the tree line. Next to the remains of a hut was the body of the Vietnamese shot by Trout several hours earlier. Nyugen and his companion had known the smell of death before. They had buried fellow villagers and family members in the past.
Nyugen stood for a moment and stared at the corpse, the face unrecognizable and the shirt soaked in dark blotches of blood. Hours earlier, he had seen the body from a distance but was unable to move closer in fear of being spotted by the soldiers. He did not see the execution but heard the shots from the foothills.
It was hard to recognize the dead villager, especially in the darkness. It would be impossible to bury him in the nearby rice paddy, because the water would push the corpse back to the surface. Nyugen walked fifty meters to a clearing, bent over, and rubbed the soil between his fingers. It was dry, red clay—good enough to support a shallow grave. He handed the shovel to the other man and told him to dig a large, round hole, but not too deep. The man began digging while Nyugen walked back to the body.
Nyugen tried not to think about the victim, but it was difficult. As he lifted the arms of the man to carry him to the burial site, he noticed large gaping wounds on both sides of the man’s head. Because it was dark, he peered closer to get a better look and noticed the ears were missing.