Warriors and murderers

In 1969, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre, when US army troops killed, maimed, tortured and raped unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, in a pre-dawn attack on an alleged VietCong stronghold in 1968.

Accounts of the atrocities in that distant Vietnamese hamlet horrified a nation struggling with the psychological consequences of America's ill-judged intervention in Indo-China. President Nixon described My Lai as an "isolated event".

Almost two decades later, Tiger Force, an investigation of other US army war crimes deep in the paddy fields and jungles of central Vietnam in 1967, suggests that the President had, to put it charitably, seriously understated the case.

Tiger Force was a "recondo" platoon (that is, one that combined reconnaissance and commando operations) of the famous 101st Airborne Division, the crack parachute infantry regiment that was raised during World War II.

The 101st had an honourable history. Its soldiers were among the first to parachute into occupied Europe ahead of the D-Day landings and they fought many of the key battles that finally defeated Germany. In Vietnam, the 101st's reputation was tarnished by Tiger Force operations that amounted to little more than officially condoned war crimes against Vietnamese civilians between May and November, 1967. In six months, the Tigers were estimated to have killed more than 200 unarmed civilians "" and this according to Tiger Force veterans whom the authors interviewed and corroborated with army records.

Tiger Force soldiers were different from the line company "grunts" in that they were volunteers who needed capabilities in guerrilla warfare. The trouble was that this expertise had to be acquired not in training, but on the job in one of the most dangerous theatres of operations in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, several Tiger Force "stars" were, to put it mildly, dysfunctional or misfits in civilian life.

One of its most notorious members, for instance, was Sam Ybarra , an Apache Indian with a chip on his shoulder about his looks and a history of disorderly conduct and underage drinking convictions. Ybarra was known to hack off the ears of his victims and wear them as garland, dig out the teeth of dead civilians for gold fillings and even behead a baby.

Ybarra represented an extreme; many others who took part in the killings were decent blokes in civilian life. Caught between the impossible demands from commanders, a hostile local populace, poor intelligence, exhaustion and fear, many Tigers found themselves crossing the fine line between warrior and murderer.

The Tigers were under orders from General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, and MACV (pronounced "Macvee" or the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam), to clear the central highlands of the local Vietnamese population that, it was believed, provided critical resupply and shelter for the VietCong (VC).

To this end, villagers were herded into settlements where living conditions were appalling and disease rife. Many died and many escaped and infiltrated back to their homelands. Others simply hid during the rounding-up operations. Once this was discovered, the Tigers were tasked with rounding up and re-evacuating these villagers and capturing and killing as many VC as possible in the assigned areas.

As everywhere else in Vietnam, the VC remained notoriously elusive and the local population proved both resilient and recalcitrant. Forced to stay in the jungles for weeks and under pressure from army commanders to show results, the Tigers soon began reporting a high number of "kills" "" almost all of them, veterans recalled, civilians.

Worse, no army commander questioned a basic fact "" the conspicuous mismatch between the number of kills reported and the number of weapons captured. Tigers who reported the atrocities were ignored or transferred out. The generals were desperate for "results" in a war that was rapidly becoming unwinnable for the Americans. As one Tiger later put it, Tiger Force had become an "assassination squad" for the commanders. Hersh's investigation of My Lai led to the indictment of just one officer. Tiger Force criminals went free "" investigations were either dropped or not pursued. Many Tigers, fearing retribution after the My Lai revelations, left the army, putting them outside the pale of military justice.

Meticulously researched and compellingly written, the book, the outcome of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, is disturbing because it raises a question of current relevance: how much of this is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan today?

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TIGER FORCE
The true story of men and war

Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
Little Brown & Company
396 pages