Revealing a 40-year-old horror

The Pulitzer-winning reporters who exposed the U.S. Tiger Force's atrocities in Vietnam discuss why the case was whitewashed -- and its scary parallels to Iraq.

By Bill Frogameni

Read more: Books, Interviews, Vietnam War, My Lai, Authors, Books Interviews, Dick Cheney, Iraq War

May 24, 2006 | For seven months in 1967, an elite platoon known as Tiger Force went on a rampage, killing hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children. The soldiers mutilated bodies, wore necklaces made of human ears and executed unarmed civilians at close range. It was the longest known series of continuous war crimes in the history of the Vietnam War. Tiger Force fought in the theater of operations where the My Lai massacre later happened, a fact that suggests atrocities in Vietnam occurred due to the failure -- or even the design -- of leadership as opposed to the isolated actions of a few rogue soldiers.

The Army began an investigation of Tiger Force in 1971. Despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes, no charges were ever filed against any Tiger Force soldiers or made public. The investigation was apparently killed at the highest levels of government in November 1975 -- the same month Donald Rumsfeld began his first term as defense secretary under President Gerald Ford and Dick Cheney began as White House chief of staff.

In October 2003, 36 years after the fact, the Blade newspaper of Toledo, Ohio, published the first exposé of the Tiger Force atrocities. The nine-month investigation was driven by reporters Mike Sallah and Mitch Weiss (who were joined in the last month by another Blade staffer, Joe Mahr). The Blade's series began with the receipt of several classified documents that came from the recently deceased Henry Tufts, former head of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. Tufts had overseen the Tiger Force investigation and was never satisfied with the way it ended. When Tufts was forced into retirement at the conclusion of the investigation, he took the classified files with him. Upon his death in 2002, Tufts left these and other papers to his neighbor and friend, Michael Woods, who worked for the Blade's Washington bureau.

Published when the Iraq war was at the height of its popularity, the Blade's series drew a predictably intense polar reaction. While it did get exposure (Salon was one of the first to pick up the story), several major media outlets ignored or underplayed the story. Major metro dailies ran only short wire recaps of the series. Others, including the New York Times and the network news channels, ignored Tiger Force altogether -- until the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh chastised the national media for neglecting the story. The neglect, however, didn't prevent the exposé from winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Now, Sallah and Weiss have written a book -- "Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War" -- that tells the long story of Tiger Force through the eyes of those who lived it. There's the horrifying story of Sam Ybarra, one of the most notorious Tigers, who killed a baby by cutting off its head. And then there are the heroes like Gerald Bruner and Dennis Stout who risked their own lives trying to keep other soldiers from committing atrocities. In the end, Sallah and Weiss give voice to dozens of Tigers, Vietnamese and their loved ones. The result is a compelling narrative that spans almost four decades and helps redefine the Vietnam War. Salon spoke to the authors by phone.

How do you explain the lingering grip Vietnam has on our national consciousness?

Mitch Weiss: There was a real divide in the country between those who went and those who didn't. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood and those were the guys who went. On the other hand, the people who protested the war or fled to Canada went to college and were well-to-do. I think a lot of it is because of the class warfare.

Mike Sallah: As president, Gerald Ford said it was time to mend the nation's wounds, but I'm not sure those wounds have ever healed.

Through the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry took a lot of flak for serving in Vietnam then coming home and talking about the same kinds of atrocities you exposed in late 2003. It seems as if there's a knee-jerk response that still polarizes people when the subject of Vietnam and war crimes is mentioned.

Weiss: It's just amazing that we have a double standard for judging war crimes in this country. We go out of our way to condemn genocide around the world, but yet it's OK for President Bush to basically say we can torture prisoners.

Sallah: Somehow we're exempt from recognizing our own human rights abuses. We supposedly uphold the standards of what's right in the world; we should be the first to recognize when we're wrong.

After years of investigation and evidence, why were the Tiger Force atrocities buried back in 1975?

Sallah: The Tiger Force investigation was finished after the war had ended. It was the last thing our government -- particularly the Nixon and then the Ford administration -- wanted to become public. This was one last horrific reminder that would have kept us lingering on the war had they not buried it.

Weiss: You have to look at the political climate. Even as Saigon was falling, Gerald Ford made a speech about how we had to heal our national divisions and move beyond Vietnam. Ford was getting ready for an extremely tough campaign, the economy was heading south, and he had the baggage of pardoning Nixon. If you had court-martialed one of these guys against whom there was overwhelming evidence, it would have let the whole cat out of the bag and overshadowed what Ford wanted to do.

What was it like talking to Tiger Force vets all these years later?

Weiss: The first time we contacted them, we always said, "Help us understand what it was like out there in the field." Some vets were surprised we knew about it, but they opened up. For a lot of them, this was the first time they had talked to anyone about what they saw or did. Most of them had kept this bottled inside, so talking to us was like a therapy session. I think a lot of the vets were just glad to get it out in the open since for years they thought they were the only ones carrying around this burden. The reality is that everyone in Tiger Force was carrying around the same burden.

Didn't one of the vets tell you after the series that he wanted to play Russian roulette with you?

Weiss: That was William Doyle. I talked to him about five or six times before the series ran and he was very candid. He was the guy who said, "If I would have known the war was going to end, I would have killed more." He basically said you did what you had to do to survive and killing was the way -- the only way -- to stay alive since you don't have to worry about people who are dead. Something in the series set Doyle off, so he wrote me a letter saying, "If you want to talk more, bring a bottle of whiskey and we'll play Russian roulette." I knew he was suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], so I got on the phone right away and said, "Bill, what are you drinking? I'll bring the bottle." That was my way of saying, "I know you didn't mean it and I understand why you feel the way you do." As it happened, we kept talking. I interviewed Doyle three or four more times for the book. He actually went into greater detail about his life because we'd developed that trust.

When we were reporting for the series, I tried not to think about how it affected me personally because there wasn't time. But afterward, every once in a while in the middle of the night I've wondered how I would have acted had I been 19 years old in that same horrible situation with bad leadership. I can't answer that question. Sometimes, even now, I get depressed just thinking about it.

Next page: "The command element clearly wanted the Tiger Force unit to be a kill squad"