THE ORGY OF BLOOD AND VIOLENCE IN THE 'TIGER FORCE'. The fierce soldiers 'Tiger Force' cut the ears of their victims in Vietnam and made necklaces with them. Violated all written and unwritten laws of war. The Pentagon investigated for more than four years his atrocities, but decided to protect the suspects. Thirty-six years later, four journalists 'Toledo Blade' have managed to unearth one of the chapters U.S. Army's rugged and offer us the gritty side of the war. CARLOS
FRESNEDA.
Correspondent NEW YORK .- The soldier Sam Ybarra shot at close range against a 15-year old Vietnamese boy in the village of Duc Pho. He killed because he wanted his tennis shoes, he did. They are tested, but not worth it. To retaliate, he drew his knife and cut off his ear to his innocent victim. Saved it as "war trophy."
The Tiger Force soldiers were made necklaces with human ears, connected by a cord shoe, and so entered the Vietnamese people, proclaiming their reign of terror and shooting everything that moved.
killed and maimed dozens of unarmed civilians. Girls raped and killed 13. Decapitated babies. Riddled with mothers before their children.
They shot dozens of residents while their rice fields mowed. Tortured and executed dozens of prisoners. Many soldiers were left with skulls of their victims as souvenirs.
May to November 1967, the bloodiest squad Aerotrasportada Division 101-tanning to fight and kill like a tiger in the jungle-converted regions of Quang Ngai and Quang Nam in a field extermination where everything was permitted.
Months before the slaughter at My Lai, to awaken Americans to the horrors of Vietnam, the soldiers of Tiger Force had carried out and particular blood orgy of violence and medals were hung on the merits of war.
Rosary terrible atrocities of Tiger Force remained secret until 1971, when the Pentagon opened an investigation proved the existence of at least 18 war crimes and raised its findings to the White House decided to shelve the issue in 1974, for what not to reopen still bleeding wounds of Vietnam.
After 36 years, three reporters and a photographer from Toledo Blade, took to the impossible task of rebuilding the outrages of the Tiger Force. Eight months late Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr Andy Morrison to complete their investigations.
talked with over a hundred soldiers and survivors, visited the scene of apocalypse in Vietnam, dived by more than 2,000 pages of classified documents.
The result is an eerie and overwhelming number of reports-buried secrets, truths brutal, which has been publishing all this week the Toledo Blade and has climbed the small Ohio newspaper to the top of investigative journalism.
In a time marked by the patrioperiodismo and censorship of war and postwar Iraq, with all the major newspapers afraid to break ranks because we accuse them of treason, it is surprising that awful flash of light that comes precisely from the American heartland .
"People may ask why we have decided to write about war crimes committed 36 years ago by American soldiers during an unpopular war," writes the director of the Toledo Blade, Ron Royhab. "Well, we think that people need know what has been done in his name ... People have a right to know that American soldiers committed atrocities and that our Government has sought not made public. "
The Pentagon, by the mouth of the Army spokesman Joe Burlas, responded saying that the investigation of Tiger Force was closed for "lack of evidence" and made it clear that there is no intention of reopening the case.
The echo of the horrors of the Tiger Force has come to Vietnam these days: several human rights organizations have called on the government in Hanoi to demand explanations the case to Washington. But the Foreign Ministry has given the controversy scarred with exculpatory note: "Our policy is to promote mutual understanding through cooperation and bilateral relations with both the U.S. and other countries that had a hostile relationship with Vietnam in the past. "
politicians prefer to look the other way, but the American public, still drugged by the special effects of the nearest war-re-read these days and witness the old and bloody scenes that seem drawn from the famous movies like Platoon, Born July 4, or Apocalypse Now.
The Tiger Force, or Force Tigre, was created in 1965 as an elite squad of 101 Aerotrasportada Division, which specializes in fighting the guerrillas in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
The squad was composed of volunteers with combat experience and a strong instinct murderer, one of the tests was precisely in a questionnaire to detect "the desire to kill" of applicants.
Most of its members were recruited in villages in the American heartland as Rayland (Ohio), Globe (Arizona) and Loreto (Tennessee). Many of them, like Sam Ybarra, were under 20 years and had taken issue with the law. Ybarra, who many remember as "The most prolific murderer 'squad, was released from prison for illegal possession of weapons to enlist in the Army (he died of pneumonia at 82, victim of alcohol and drugs).
After a training period in the U.S., the Tiger Force soldiers first entered combat in South Vietnam, in places like My Cahn h Dak To, before being sent to the central regions to combat advance of the Vietcong.
The elite squad was made up of 45 soldiers, who acted in coordination with other units but that worked with high autonomy and with little supervision. They are distinguished
by striped camouflage, like a tiger, the squadron's name (the same uniform worn by Special Forces "Green Berets"). They were divided into groups of seven or eight, with supplies, ammunition and water to survive for 30 days in the jungle.
"We lived day to day", reports the Toledo Blade former Sgt William Doyley, 70, from his retreat in Missouri.
"We did not expect to survive. Nobody with a brain little expected to survive in that situation ... So you did what you felt like it, especially to stay alive. And the way of life was to kill, because if someone is dead did not have to worry about for him. "
The first members of the Tiger Force arrived in the region of Qyan Ngai on May 3, 1967. It took little action.
Five days later they made their first prisoner, a guy who seemed more Chinese than Vietnamese, with every appearance of belonging to the militia of the Vietcong. For two long days he was tortured and beaten.
"I tried to keep him alive, but he knew that his hours were numbered," recalled another survivor of the Tiger Force, William Carpenter. As stated in the investigation opened years later by the Pentagon, killing the soldiers raised "making it blow up with explosives." Finally I said I was free, let you run and shot from behind.
executions of enemy prisoners began to be "an unwritten law," according to former Sergeant Miller. San Ybarra soldier still remember him setting a dagger to the barrel of the rifle and nailed down in flames at the base of the skull, like a garrote, to another prisoner.
Over time, these bloody practices began to be applied to civilians. In June a prisoner was an old man with black clothes that looked like a Buddhist monk who dared to complain about how the soldiers treated the peasants. The soldiers tied his hands and joined a grenade into the body. Then said they had explosives to justify his death and make you spend as an "enemy combatant."
soon began to become popular on the battalion another ritual frightful mutilation of the victims. All point back to the soldier Ybarra as the initiator of the tradition, with that 15 year old boy who killed to remove the sneakers and then cut off his ear who kept carefully in a bag of food.
reporter Ward Just, in his book To What End, he said. however, that in 1966, months before start the strake macabre, a Tiger Force soldier sent by mail to his wife in the U.S. cut the ears of several of his enemies. U.S. Army known as this practice abhorrent, but we know that somehow consented.
During the investigation of the Pentagon, at least 27 soldiers recognized that "collecting" ears of the victims was "something popularly accepted" and that soon after became fashionable the "collars" ear-bound with shoelaces-that proudly showed soldiers to intimidate the population.
"There was a period in which most of us wore necklaces of ears," admitted the former Larry Cottingham medical researchers from the Pentagon, they also discovered another passion shameful of the soldiers in that bloody war: the search and extraction of gold teeth in the bodies still warm.
The men of the Tiger Force were soon in the flesh to suffer the rigors of jungle warfare: two soldiers dead and 25 wounded in the first ambush. Half the company had to be evacuated, but reinforcements soon arrived with Lieutenant James Hawkins in charge. With a reputation for ruthless, came with a mission to penetrate the Song Ve Valley and forcing the evacuation of more than 5,000 farmers, with the excuse that they cultivated rice served to feed the enemy.
The move to refugee camps should be done at gunpoint, who did not obey the orders of the soldiers were women, old or young, they risked being killed.
"We were taking no sides in the war," he told the Toledo Blade Vietnamese Nguyen Dam, 66. "All we wanted was to let us cultivate our land." Dam survived because he was allowed to move to a refugee camp in Nghia Hanh, where he spent two years built a wall of cemento.Cuando returned, the valley was strewn with mass graves.
Lieutenant Hawkins earned the respect and fear of the troops volándole the head of an innocent 66 year old carpenter, Dao Hue, who committed the crime to cry out to let him live. "This right is deleted here," Hawkins said at the time of pulling the trigger.
Hawkins himself, now 63, admitted the incident told the Toledo Blade and justified his action "because the cries of the peasants could alert the enemy." Hawkins received the Pentagon's assurances that it would be investigated. Months later, he was promoted the higher the Ejército.Al Hawkins came over from Colonel Gerald Morse, ghost rider, ready to orchestrate from his helicopter murderous actions of the Tiger Force unit with the First Battalion of the 327th Infantry. The first thing he did was to "rebrand" their companies: A "murderers", the B 'barbarians' and C' cortagargantas. " The thin red line separating civilians from the enemy finally jumped into the air in the region of Quang Nam, Fall 67. The soldier Rion Causey, who was a practicing physician of the squad, could not believe his eyes: "We lost five men and a further 12 had injured. The soldiers wanted revenge at all costs. Everybody was bloodthirsty. " Causey admitted that in one month accounted for 120 victims, and acknowledged that civilian deaths were recorded in the military.
The atrocities of the past few months dealing with the most dense and uneven paving the Pentagon investigation. To a 13 year old girl raped and beheaded on marcha.A a baby was decapitated to remove a gold pendant. The aim was to reach the 327 victims (in honor of the battalion number), but far surpassed the bar: the soldier Sam Ybarra, a veteran of the squad, received a distinction been awarded the victim number one thousand. November 67.
"If I know that war ends soon, have killed more," admitted the former sergeant unceremoniously William Doyle, another distinguished for his merits in Vietnam: "Even if I killed so many I lost count."
Doyle was the first to be contacted by the one hundred agents in the service of the Pentagon, which in 1971 investigated the atrocities of the Tiger Force. Doyle, 70, has now recognized the Toledo Blade that investigators asked him kept secret war crimes.
lasted four and a half years of research, driven by the impact of the slaughter at My Lai. The Pentagon had promised tough on war crimes, but the matter passed from hand to hand, from Nixon to Ford. The U.S. giant again withdraw into himself, then came the wars.
The penitent, the proud, the witness
Rion Causey, 55, a nuclear engineer, lives in Livermore, joined California.Se as a soldier and medic with 19 years at the 'Tiger Force' and witnessed dozens of killings of unarmed civilians. In a single month between May and November 1967, accounted for 120 victims. "I do not know how people can go back to sleep as if nothing had happened at night, 36 years later", says the "Toledo Blade.
"I am not a religious person, nor do I have all the answers about life. Then he was only 19 years, but knew what they were doing was wrong, terribly wrong. " 67 injured in November, left the squad in a helicopter and still remembers what were his last words as he was leaving hell the jungle: "May God protect you for your atrocities."
William Doyle 70, lives in Missouri. He joined the 'Tiger Force' as a sergeant in June 1967 and has admitted to 'Toledo Blade' that killed several civilians, several prisoners, and even some Vietnamese interpreters were assigned to unidad.Lejos to feel remorse, ensures that only regret is not having been even more deadly.
William Carpenter, 55, lives in Rayland, Ohio. He joined as a soldier at the 'Tiger Force' in January 1967 when he was 18. Was among the first who dared to mention the war crimes of the 'Tiger Force' research team assigned by the Pentagon: "On the one hand trying to figure out what ocurrido.Por the other hand, did everything they could to hide and keep quiet because it was not appropriate to reopen the wounds of war. "
DO NOT REPRESENT THAT THE SOLDIERS OF THE TIGER FORCE OF THESE PHOTOS, speaking at the War Crimes
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