As he neared the doorway, Rion Causey hesitated for a moment—not quite sure whether he wanted to walk inside even after traveling across the country for his first Tiger Force reunion. Inside the brightly lit banquet room near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, people were laughing and talking.
Causey spotted a few faces—barely recognizable from another time, another place. He remembered some of them but not their names. Too much time had lapsed since his last day with the Tigers, when he was being airlifted to a hospital after being sprayed by shrapnel in March 1968.
He could feel his own heart racing as he walked into the room and approached an open bar where several men from the Tigers and the 1st Battalion/327th Infantry were holding drinks, smiling. It was the kind of nervous anticipation that comes with any reunion.
Across the room, he spotted a man in the corner, someone vaguely familiar. He noticed that one by one, the other men began forming a circle around him. Causey inched closer and peered through the bald and graying heads to get a better look. All at once, he remembered: Harold Trout, his sergeant. Trout was no longer the stocky, athletic, tough-talking team leader who could strike fear in the hearts of young soldiers with a glance. He was now round and pudgy with an affable grin—nearly all of his hair thinned by time.
Causey waited for the others to clear out before he walked across and introduced himself. They shook hands, but Causey could tell Trout barely recognized the former medic.
That wasn’t a big surprise. To Trout, Causey was just another skinny, sandy-haired kid who was coming into the war with no real combat under his belt. Now he was older, graying, with a doctorate in nuclear engineering and nothing in common with the former sergeant who spent his career in the military.
After making small talk, Causey waited for a moment, then turned to Trout with a serious look. “I need to ask you something,” he said, staring into Trout’s eyes.
For a moment, Causey wasn’t sure this was the right time. It was a reunion and people were supposed to be enjoying themselves. But after all these years, he didn’t have a choice. It was now or never. For years, he had been keeping the pain inside, something he didn’t even share with his family, secrets so deep he would wake up at night, sweating, scared to close his eyes. Middle-aged and divorced with a son, Causey was tired of carrying the guilt, the anxiety.
Trout politely stood and waited.
Causey took a breath. “I need to know: What happened at Chu Lai? Why did we kill so many people?” Causey wasn’t asking about killing enemy soldiers. That was expected. This was about the civilians—unarmed boys and men—systematically gunned down, in many cases without any resistance.
Trout knew what Causey was talking about. So did the others in the room that day. But for so long, they had avoided talking about it. For so long, they had avoided one another. This was a reunion, and no one wanted to discuss a topic so disturbing. The slaughters, or the CID investigation? How could they forget? It forced them to scatter all over the country, forced some to hide. Reunions? Forget it. They didn’t want to see one another. Not until the Vietnam veterans began to feel welcome by the rest of the country in the 1990s with the Welcome Home Parade in New York and other events did the former Tigers even begin to reach out to one another. With the Internet, it became easier to find people from their platoon. And finally, it seemed the time had come to reunite.
Some of the men turned around and walked away. They knew what Causey was talking about. Everyone did. It was their secret—hidden from everyone.
On a cold, windswept morning in December 2002, several boxes arrived in the mail at the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library.
The packages were the latest additions to a repository famous for housing papers from radical groups in American history. So it came as some surprise to librarians that this latest delivery consisted of the records of Army commander Henry Tufts. Most of the researchers had never heard the name.
For years, the boxes collected dust in the Tuftses’ basement—remnants of the years he spent as the Army’s top cop. The former head of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command once talked about writing a book but never found the time. He knew his records were valuable—a snapshot of the inner workings of the Army—but he wasn’t sure what to do with the boxes filled with twenty-five thousand papers.
Though Tufts detested reporters, he developed a fondness for Michael Woods, who happened to be a veteran science and technology writer for the Toledo Blade’s Washington bureau. Woods never bugged Tufts for story information, respecting his friend’s privacy.
When Tufts died on July 24, 2002, he left his papers to his friend with one condition: that Woods make an effort to get the documents into the public domain.
Woods intended to honor his friend’s request but also wanted his hometown paper to have the first crack at doing so. So Woods worked out a plan: he would find a university close to Toledo and allow reporters from the paper to dig through the documents. After six months, the records would be open to public inspection.
He contacted a colleague, the newspaper’s national affairs writer, to take a look at the shipment that was already on the way to Ann Arbor, just fifty-five miles away. That correspondent—Michael Sallah—is one of the two authors of the book you now hold in your hands. In time, the documents would spark one of the most comprehensive war-crimes investigations ever undertaken by an American newspaper.
Sallah and fellow reporter Mitch Weiss (the other author of this book) would uncover one of the darkest secrets of the Vietnam War—the longest series of atrocities carried out by a U.S. fighting unit in the conflict and, later, a massive Army investigation that was eventually covered up.
Sallah had researched the background of Tufts but had no idea that a small file tucked away in one of the commander’s boxes would be the key to unlocking the story. In fact, for the first month of research, the reporter was unable to find anything new in the collection. All the investigative cases saved by Tufts—including the My Lai Massacre of 1968—had been splashed in the media over the years.
By early February, there was one last box to inspect. Sallah began sifting through the papers when he found the thin manila file with the words “Coy Allegation” on the label and the twenty-two documents labeled “Confidential” or “For Official Use Only” inside. Just to make sure this information had never been published, the reporters spent several days combing the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other papers on microfiche, searching for any references to Tiger Force. Nothing. The reporters began reading every book they could find at local libraries about the war. Again, nothing about Tiger Force. Weiss began faxing requests to the Army under the Freedom of Information Act, asking for records about a war-crimes case known as the Coy Allegation. Sallah turned to another source: the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the largest government repository of military records open to the public.
The archivist promised he would look and, two weeks later, called back with good news. “I found the case,” said the researcher. “But it’s probably seven hundred pages. You’re going to have to wait.” The archivist promised it would be ready in two weeks. It was the first time a reporter had ever asked for it.
By the time Sallah and Weiss arrived at the large glass-and-steel center in suburban Washington in March, the papers were ready. For three days, the journalists copied the reports, stopping occasionally to read the typed pages. Most of the statements were from former Tigers, describing the disturbing events. Sallah and Weiss were struck by one fact: there was no record of a military hearing. They took the time to look at other cases on file at the center and found that many had led to hearings—but not this one. It was clear from the reports there were atrocities—lots of them. Even more startling, the war crimes were corroborated by the soldiers who were interviewed in the Army’s investigation. The details they recounted were so specific that it was hard to believe the soldiers were making them up—especially since they were admitting to them. What happened to the case? The Army wasn’t going to tell them. The Pentagon had processed the earlier request by the newspaper but sent only one hundred pages of the investigation before stopping. No more reports would be sent, and the records were sealed from the public.
Sallah and Weiss quickly discovered the lead investigator in the case was living in Washington state, his name appearing on the bottom of nearly every important document. Gustav Apsey was surprised by the call. Reluctantly, he agreed to talk about the investigation, a case he said was troubling and “the hardest investigation of my career.” Sallah asked whether there was ever a court-martial. Apsey said he couldn’t talk about it. “I’m retired, but technically, I can still be recalled to active duty. I can’t say anything else about this case.” He did admit he didn’t recall any hearing.
Over the next few months, the reporters began tracking down scores of former Tigers who served between May and November 1967—the period in question. Some of the names came from the Tiger Force Web site. Others were found in the records. The interview that opened the first door to understanding the soldiers’ actions took place in late February 2003, when Sallah and Weiss tracked down a former medic. Rion Causey would offer the first real hint that what was reported in the records was painfully true. Slightly balding and thin, Causey had a pleasant face and a gentle demeanor. On the surface, it looked like he was unaffected by the war. He said the Tigers were a brave unit with a high casualty rate. “They were great soldiers.” But when he agreed to an interview in the backyard of his home in Livermore, California, the afternoon sun streaming through the trees, Causey revealed another side. “We did things,” he said, “that still bother me to this day.” Several Tigers had just been killed when he joined the unit in late September, “and everybody was bloodthirsty at the same time, saying, ‘We’re going to get them back. We’re going to go back there. We’re going to even the score.’” For just the short time he was with the Tigers, he described a trail of atrocities in the Central Highlands. One hundred twenty people—Vietnamese—killed, unarmed, with no one knowing if they were the enemy, shot over a period of thirty-three days. “I counted them,” he said. “It was all about body count. Our commanders just wanted body count.” He described men who were out of control—and leaders who looked the other way. And then he said the words that resonated throughout the reporting process: “I still wonder how some people can sleep thirty years later.”
While Sallah was interviewing Causey, Weiss was uncovering more secrets—this time, from the dead. The reporter reached family members of Sam Ybarra and Ken “Boots” Green—two Tigers whose names appeared prominently in the records for war crimes but who were long deceased.
Ybarra’s mother, Therlene Ramos, confirmed everything the reporters needed to know about her son and the allegations against him. After returning from the war, Ybarra openly talked to her about killing women and children.
“He was alive,” she said, “but he was dead.”
He held one wish before he died, she said: to return to Vietnam and help the people whose lives he had torn apart. “Something happened to Sam, and he was trying, trying to make good on what he had done,” said Ramos. “He wanted to help the people. To say he was sorry. But he never made it. He died before he could do anything.” In his last years, Ybarra was a drug addict and alcoholic who was always ranting about Vietnam. The cops were constantly warning him about public drinking and disorderly conduct. He tried to spend time with his two daughters, but in the end was too weak to leave the house. When he died in 1982 of complications from cirrhosis of the liver, he weighed ninety-five pounds. He was thirty-six.
In all, Sallah and Weiss reached more than sixty-five Tigers, some by phone, others by finding where they lived and knocking at their doors. At times, it was frustrating, with many hanging up. Others were taken by surprise but reluctantly talked. Many had never told these stories to even their closest family members. Some, such as Douglas Teeters, then fifty-five, had battled drug and alcohol addiction. A few, such as Floyd Sawyer, fifty-six, had spent time in prison. Married four times, former sergeant Ernest Moreland in 1999 had placed the barrel of a .45 handgun in his mouth and threatened to kill himself. Knowing he needed help, he walked into a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Jacksonville. “My nervous system is overwhelmed by everything,” said the fifty-six-year-old veteran. He suffered flashbacks and insomnia, but he would not talk about any specific war crimes. “I could still be charged,” he said. In the course of these interviews, Sallah and Weiss began confirming what was in the records, and how the atrocities—three decades later—affected the men. Over the course of five telephone interviews, Barry Bowman said he was still haunted by one of the central war crimes in the Tiger Force case: the killing of an elderly man by unit leader James Hawkins. “I was sprayed by pieces of his skull,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Warwick, Rhode Island. Bowman wasn’t innocent, either, he confessed. He shot a wounded villager.
When Sallah and Weiss reached Harold Fischer, fifty-four, he was collecting disability after selling used cars for twenty years. Divorced and living in San Antonio, Texas, he still regretted not doing enough to stop the atrocities. “I knew the slaughter of civilians was morally wrong,” he said, but he feared retribution from platoon leaders for speaking out. He spent years battling drug and alcohol abuse. “It was my only escape.”
All of the Tigers interviewed said they recalled the CID investigation—many worrying they would be dragged into a court-martial. Now living in Salem, Oregon, Teeters said the investigation ruined his life. He said he lost his job after Army agents showed up and flashed their badges at an alarm company where he was a supervisor in Seattle in 1972. “My supervisor was really security minded,” he said; his boss was scared about any publicity that would come out. “My life kind of spiraled down after that. I went the other way,” he said. “It was the last time I really held a steady, good job.”
He still struggles with the memories of soldiers slaughtering unarmed civilians. “I wake up with those sweats, soaking wet, man,” he said. “It’s not as bad nowadays because I got these pills. I take Zoloft and Triazoline. It knocks me out. That’s the only way I’m able to get through this.” Sawyer, who performed odd jobs most of his life, spent seven years in prison for beating a man in a barroom fight. “I beat him half to death,” said the former combat engineer who currently lives in Washington state. “I got drunk, got into an argument, and went back to Vietnam.” Married three times, he said he “drinks a case of beer a night just to sleep. I’ve tried very hard not to think about Vietnam.”
Sallah and Weiss found Bill Carpenter, a former sheriff’s deputy, living in Jefferson County, Ohio. Alone and divorced, he has become the self-appointed historian for Tiger Force. He didn’t always pay this close attention to his former unit. In fact, during the CID investigation, he and other former platoon members stopped talking to one another. “People were scared,” he explained. “Everyone just kind of lost touch for years.” During reunions the men began to reconnect, swapping stories about their families, jobs, and war-related disabilities, but there were still two subjects they tried to avoid: the CID probe and their former platoon commander James Hawkins. Even today, that’s something not lost on Hawkins. When he was reached by phone at his home near Orlando before the newspaper series was published, he admitted to not being invited to the gatherings. “I know there are some of them who got differences with me,” he said.
He even went on to confirm some of the atrocities documented in the records. “Look,” he said, “I killed people I had to kill. If they were in a free-fire zone, they were fair game.”
Hawkins had volunteered for one more tour in Vietnam after leaving the Tigers, serving as a helicopter pilot and eventually retiring as a major in 1978. He then spent the next two decades as a civilian flight instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Twice, he ran into trouble with the law after retiring to Central Florida: once for shoplifting twenty dollars in goods from a Wal-Mart, another for soliciting an undercover female officer for sex. Neither offense resulted in any jail time.
Bald with a slight paunch, William Doyle still bears a tattoo on his trigger finger—the ace of spades—and lives in a dilapidated farmhouse in Missouri. He criticized the CID investigation, saying no one understood what it was like to fight in Vietnam. “No one had any business looking into Tiger Force,” he snarled. Married with five daughters, Doyle said he only did what he had to do to survive while ordering the executions of dozens of unarmed civilians. “If I walked into a village and everyone wasn’t lying prostrate on the ground, I shot those standing up,” he told Weiss in a series of long, rambling telephone interviews. “If they didn’t understand fear, I taught it to them. We were living day to day. We didn’t expect to live. No one out there with any brains expected to live. We were surprised to be alive next week. So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing—especially to stay alive. I’m not saying you give up and die. You struggle to live. But the way to live is to kill, because you don’t have to worry about anybody who is dead.”
For all those Tigers who bothered to talk to the CID and who now feel guilty about not doing enough to stop the atrocities, he offered his thoughts: “Those sorry sons of bitches. What’s the matter with them?”
Doyle admitted to everything, adding that he only had one regret: he didn’t kill more Vietnamese.
Sallah and Weiss were anxious to reach the two Tigers who tried to stop the killing, Donald Wood and Gerald Bruner, but were disappointed when they learned the men were deceased. Wood was thirty-six when he suffered a brain aneurysm during his son’s soccer game in Findlay, Ohio, and died in 1983. Bruner died of throat cancer in 1997. He was fifty-nine. From conversations with Wood’s relatives, including his wife, son, and brother, it became clear that the onetime lieutenant avoided talking about the war. “There were things he saw that clearly bothered him,” said his son, John, thirty-two, a bank officer in South Bend, Indiana. “The killing of civilians. But he didn’t like to talk about it.” Wood only discussed the war after drinking—something he did often—and usually only to fellow vets. One was Henry Benz, a onetime neighbor and now a Pittsburgh public schools administrator. He said Wood mentioned Tiger Force but didn’t elaborate. “From what I could tell, he looked at the Vietnamese as people—not stereotypes. He tried to understand them.” In the Hancock County Courthouse, Wood was known as a lawyer who took on tough criminal defense cases that many lawyers in the conservative Findlay area wouldn’t touch. “He didn’t give a damn about what those people thought,” said his brother, Jim Wood. “He always told his kids to stick up for the underdog. I always knew there was something driving that, and it may have been his time in Vietnam.”
Bruner didn’t try to hide his disdain for the way the Tiger leaders treated civilians, relatives recalled. After receiving an honorable discharge from the Army in 1975 as a sergeant, he lived most of his life in Colon, Michigan, spending many years assisting veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Before he died, he recorded a tape in 1988 about his tours in Vietnam, recalling the shooting of the farmer by Doyle. In the tape, he condemned the killing. “He wanted it known what happened,” said his wife, Karen Bruner. “He could never accept what they did. That’s just not the way he was.” She said her husband always felt he was forced from the Army for talking in the Tiger Force case. “They were writing him up all the time for being late and really small stuff. He finally gave up and got out.”
Of the 120 soldiers who rotated in and out of the forty-five-member platoon during the seven months in question, less than a dozen were killed in combat, records showed. Two were killed in action in 1968: Captain Harold McGaha was killed on January 21, 1968, and Sergeant James Haugh died on March 27, 1968. Sallah and Weiss tried to reach James Barnett, but they found out he died of cancer on August 27, 2001, at the age of fifty-seven. They also learned that Terrence Kerrigan succumbed to cancer and related complications on December 15, 2000, at age fifty-two. Former Tiger team leader Sergeant Manuel Sanchez suffered a heart attack and died on July 15, 1992. He was forty-six. Other Tigers had passed away: James Cogan on July 26, 1993, at forty-five; Ervin Lee in 1977 at thirty; Forrest Miller in 1979 at forty-five; and Benjamin Edge in 1990 at fifty-three.
The key interview would be getting to the top commander: Gerald Morse, the man known as Ghost Rider. His name was all over the records. The reporters tracked him down in Arizona, where he is a well-known senior racquetball player. Morse, seventy-four, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 1979, agreed to a brief interview by phone, insisting he did not know the Tigers committed war crimes. “Not under my watch,” he snapped. But when Sallah and Weiss called him several times later to answer more questions, he refused to return the calls. When a Blade photographer showed up at his door, his wife peered through the curtains, asking the photojournalist to go away. “He wants to be left alone,” she said.
Harold Austin, seventy-three, who retired from the military in 1971, preceded Morse as battalion commander and is now living in Duncanville, Texas. Like Morse, he said he was unaware of serious problems in the unit. “If I knew what was going on, I would have cracked down,” he said. “But I don’t know if that would have stopped it. When you’re not in the field, you have no control over what’s going on.”
Carl James, sixty-two, the former captain and designated liaison between the Tigers and battalion headquarters, blamed the Tigers for the end of his military career. During a battalion reunion several years ago, he began railing about the investigation into the Tigers. “I told them they held up my promotion for years because of that damn investigation,” said James, who lives in suburban Los Angeles. “I got so sick and tired of the Army, by the time I was finally promoted I was ready to get out.” He retired from the military in 1980.
In all, Sallah and Weiss successfully interviewed forty-three veterans during the newspaper’s investigation, but just talking to the ex-soldiers wasn’t going to tell the whole story. Part of the investigation required going to Vietnam. The radio logs of the platoon from the period in question, showing the platoon’s movements from day to day, were still on file at the National Archives. Using Army grid maps from 1967, Sallah and Weiss were able to trace the trail of the Tigers.
With the assistance of a translator, the reporters spent sixteen days in the Quang Ngai and Quang Nam (formerly known as Quang Tin) provinces, visiting Quang Ngai City, Duc Pho, and later Tam Ky and the Que Son. They heard plenty about atrocities, but none could be connected to Tiger Force. But when Sallah and Weiss went to the Song Ve Valley, everything changed. Within three days of interviewing elders, the reporters found people who had witnessed three war crimes by the Tigers. Tam Hau, a frail, gray-haired seventy-year-old who was barely able to walk alone, described finding the bloodied body of her uncle, Dao Hue, who was carrying a shoulder bar with buckets at both ends stuffed with geese. Everything she described matched the soldiers’ statements. Then there was Nyugen Dam, sixty-six, a rice farmer who watched as the two blind brothers were executed by the Tigers in a rice paddy. The last war crime was recounted by Kieu Trak, seventy-two, who described the assault on the ten elderly farmers—including his father.
With the soldiers on one side of the world and the victims on the other, Sallah and Weiss were now prepared to ask the Pentagon, What happened to this case? During a sweep of records at the National Archives, the reporters discovered that summaries of the Tiger Force investigation were sent in 1973 to the offices of Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Army Secretary Howard “Bo” Callaway.
Sallah and Weiss called Schlesinger, Callaway, and others who served during that period. Schlesinger refused to return phone messages. Callaway said he didn’t remember the case. Through his secretary, President Ford declined to comment on atrocities during the Vietnam War. Schlesinger’s successor, Donald Rumsfeld, who was now serving his second stint as defense secretary, this time under President George W. Bush, would not talk about the case, either.
Stumped, the reporters went back to Apsey, who led the investigation, and in a moment of reflection, he broke his silence. “There was no political will,” he said. “They didn’t want to prosecute.” No one had directly told him the case was dead, but when they had shipped him to the CID office north of Seoul a few weeks after filing the final report, he knew why. “They were really concerned about the press finding out. It was a bucket of worms. So it was better that they be done with it. To just end it.” Apsey added that after all these years, he felt vindicated. “I can tell you that I have been waiting for this for thirty years,” he said. “I always understood that someday this may come up. I am just relieved that it has.”
After six months of research, interviews, and a dozen trips to Washington DC and other cities, as well as sixteen days in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the reporters wrote a four-part series in October 2003 that would eventually prod the Pentagon to reexamine the case. The story would reemerge in the middle of the 2004 presidential campaign as a debate surfaced over whether atrocities occurred in the war—with both candidates forced to revisit their own actions during the conflict. That same year, Sallah, Weiss, and a third reporter who joined the team later, Joe Mahr, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in recognition of their series on Tiger Force, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths.”
On the first day of publication of the series, the Blade had been flooded with e-mails, letters, and phone calls. At first, most of the messages were negative—critical of the newspaper running such a dark story at a time when the United States was engaged in Iraq. “You are the reason we lost the Vietnam War,” read one message. “The Blade is the reason why there are 58,000 names on the wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” declared a caller. But by the end of the series, with the former Tigers and the people of the Song Ve Valley interviewed about the impact of the war crimes on their lives, the feedback began to change. “Thank you for telling the truth,” wrote one Marine veteran who served in the war. “This is a story that needed to be told.” Another said Tiger Force soldiers should be prosecuted. “We were in Vietnam,” said one veteran. “We wouldn’t have tolerated that.”
At first, the Army refused to comment on the series. But eight days later, on October 30, the Army announced that it was reviewing the case because of pressure from the media and calls to the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi. In February 2004, military lawyers began interviewing veterans, including Rion Causey and Dennis Stout, as part of an expanding investigation. Army officials also started poring over the records of the Tiger Force investigation from the 1970s, comparing the information to what was published in the newspaper series. On September 5, 2004, the Blade published a story that a military lawyer reviewing the case for the Army recommended that Hawkins be brought back to active service for an Article 32 hearing—the equivalent of a military grand jury—for his actions during the Tiger Force rampage. As of the publication of this book, the Army has still not acted on the recommendation.
Whether the military should press for a hearing nearly four decades later is open to debate, a question better answered by legal scholars and military historians. Perhaps the more critical question with far greater consequences is whether the Army has learned anything from the rampage so many years ago. Whether the Army acknowledges the longest series of atrocities by a U.S. fighting unit in the Vietnam War or continues to bury its past. To do the latter would come at an enormous price. Part of the culture of any military institution is what it has learned and failed to learn from prior mistakes, providing an institutional memory with clear-cut rules and guidance. Covering up war-crime cases such as those of Tiger Force may save the institution from being embarrassed but does little to prevent such cases in the future.
What institutions fail to recognize is that the real consequences are not in the publicity but in the human costs. The tragedy of Tiger Force extends beyond the Vietnamese whose lives were shattered. The soldiers themselves have paid an incredibly deep price—day after day, year after year. “It’s in the middle of the night, when the demons come, that you remember, that you can’t forget,” says Bill Carpenter.
Driven by zealous commanders, many of the Tiger Force soldiers ignored the rules of war. They went berserk. Instead of abiding by what was right, they opened up on unarmed men, women, and children, and almost forty years later, they are still suffering emotionally and spiritually. In the words of Tiger Force sergeant Ernest Moreland, “The things you did, you think back and say, ‘I can’t believe I did that.’ At the time, it seemed right. But now you know what you did was wrong. The killing gets to you. The nightmares get to you. You just can’t escape it. You can’t escape the past.” He said he tries to reconcile his past deeds with his morality today, but in that struggle, he rarely—if ever—finds peace.
So many of the Tiger Force soldiers have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms include flashbacks and nightmares. But for those who committed atrocities or failed to stop such actions, the condition can be worse. In addition to the trauma, they are often saddled with a strong sense of guilt that can complicate the deeper feelings of fear and isolation. “It’s another layer that needs to be addressed,” said Dr. Dewleen Baker, director of a PTSD research clinic in Cincinnati. “It’s not that easy. How do you reconcile killing civilians? It’s hard, especially when you have a core set of values.”
In the Tiger Force case, the burden of responsibility has fallen on the soldiers—for now. Their names have been linked to one of the biggest war-crimes cases of the Vietnam War. But so far, the Army has not accepted responsibility and continues to conceal the records.
After the Blade broke the story of Tiger Force, the reporters said they hoped the Army would assume responsibility for what happened in the Central Highlands in 1967 so that someday some other newspaper—five, ten, twenty years from now—didn’t turn up hidden records from some other series of atrocities committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, or another country. Until the military does so, the dangers of another Tiger Force will always be there.