Crimes of War

In the late 1960s, an elite squad of U.S. troops went on a horrifying rampage in Vietnam.

TIGER FORCE

A True Story of Men and War

By Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

Little, Brown. 403 pp. $25.95

The Vietnam War ended three decades ago, but it still haunts us. First, there's the cascade of books, movies, documentaries and even Broadway musicals such as "Miss Saigon." One of Washington's most popular attractions is the melancholy Vietnam Veterans Memorial, stark slabs of granite embedded below ground level. During his presidential bid in 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) was castigated as "unpatriotic" for glaringly jettisoning his decorations and participating in antiwar demonstrations after returning from his stint as a Navy lieutenant patrolling the rivers and swamps of the Mekong Delta. And the service academies and think tanks are currently abuzz with mavens discussing whether the Vietnam quagmire bears any relevance to the gritty insurgency in Iraq.

Tiger Force may prove to be the latest source of controversy. Residual loud-mouthed peaceniks will applaud it for confirming the conflict's barbarity, while hard-liners who stubbornly insist that the U.S. venture in Southeast Asia was a glorious enterprise in the protracted struggle to crush the global communist conspiracy will denounce it. Both sides will agree, though, that it is not a narrative for the squeamish.

Expanded from a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 series in the Toledo Blade, the book concentrates in meticulous detail on the experiences of an elite platoon of the 101st Airborne Division, deployed to the flooded rice fields and tangled jungles in the valleys of mountainous Quang Ngai province and instructed to survey the region and summon air strikes against the enemy's positions. The ambitious strategy, labeled "search and destroy," stemmed from Gen. William C. Westmoreland's optimistic notion that nothing could resist America's overwhelming firepower and defined "free-fire" zones that were subject to unrestricted bombing forays.

The operation degenerated into a nightmare as the U.S. grunts "ignored the rules of war. They went berserk." Spurning strenuous efforts by the sober to check their rampage, they stormed villages, randomly torched flimsy thatch-roofed hutches, and tortured and murdered helpless peasants, including women, children, the elderly and even the blind. Over a period of 33 days in 1967, they killed 120 people. They stupidly gunned down North Vietnamese and Vietcong captives who might have been interrogated for valuable information. Several Americans ghoulishly looted corpses for gold teeth and chopped off the ears of the dead, which they plaited into bracelets and necklaces. On my visits to honky-tonk Danang in the 1960s, I witnessed tipsy GIs cavorting around and garishly flaunting these gruesome souvenirs as proof of their machismo.

The Tiger unit was founded in November 1965 by the leathery Maj. David Hackworth, the model for the demented Col. Kilgore in "Apocalypse Now," to "outguerrilla the guerrillas." Astutely perceiving that conventional methods were futile against the swift, elusive Vietcong, he formed small, mobile, camouflaged squads to furtively track and ambush them. But the concept, while theoretically brilliant, was essentially preposterous. It was patently unrealistic to suppose that hairy, round-eyed Westerners could blend into the murky Asian landscape. The suffocating tropical heat and humidity debilitated them. They were soaked by torrential rains from typhoons, plagued by fever and migraines, tormented by blood-sucking leeches and malarial mosquitoes, afflicted with bruised shinbones and lacerated feet; they gasped for breath as they trekked through the dense foliage, soggy terrain and web of creeks, marshes and ponds. Confused by their inability to tell friend from foe, they were chronically apprehensive and nervous. In their frustration, they ventilated their wrath against the "gooks," "slopes" and "wogs" whom they despised and distrusted; they ridiculed the pious slogans enunciated by sanctimonious propagandists claiming that they were effectively fulfilling their noble mission to "win hearts and minds." Some of the fiercest bigots, ironically, seem to have been Latinos harassed by Anglo supremacists back home.

The wanton slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai triggered the trial in 1969 of Lt. William Calley and Sgt. David Mitchell. The Pentagon also felt pressure to investigate the horrendous Tiger Force rampage, but the bureaucrats, typically, vacillated, which finally induced a few of the force's veterans -- despondent over the ugly affair -- to reveal the true story to the authors. To date, no one has been prosecuted.

I reported the war at length and have no doubt that the authors' account is credible. Indeed, I frequently observed Vietcong suspects being pummeled or having their genitals wired to field telephones as they were grilled for intelligence. But I am inclined to conclude that most GIs, constrained by a measure of rectitude, were not as ruthless as the Tiger soldiers or Calley. To a large extent, the Tiger Force's misconduct mirrored the incapacity of the platoon's officers to control their men's excesses. As the war dragged on without visible signs of progress, morale deteriorated and the atrocities were increasingly symptomatic of their dehumanization. As though to repeat history at its worst, U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad have been convicted of abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi inmates. Against this backdrop, Tiger Force adds a graphic, frightening dimension to our knowledge of the Vietnam tragedy, as well as our knowledge of ourselves. It is bound to be read far into the future. ·

Stanley Karnow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1991. He is the author of "Vietnam: A History."