UNCOVERED.(The Talk of the Town)(activities of the Tiger Force during the Vietnam War)

Last month, the Blade, a mid-sized family-owned newspaper published in Toledo, Ohio, devoted fifteen pages over four days to an exhaustive expose of an elite Army unit, known as the Tiger Force, that spun out of control during the Vietnam War. The platoon, a forty-five-member, all-volunteer reconnaissance unit attached to the 101st Airborne Division, was ordered in early 1967 to take the fight to the enemy by setting up ambushes deep inside areas controlled by North Vietnamese and Vietnamese nationalist forces. Instead, it took the fight to the unarmed civilian population.

From May through November of 1967, the Blade reported, the Tiger Force, while operating in and around Quang Ngai province, in South Vietnam's fiercely contested Central Highlands, murdered hundreds of noncombatant men, women, and children. Some victims were tortured and mutilated. Some were shot while begging for their lives. Some, hiding in bunkers, were killed by hand grenades flung inside. Soldiers collected ears as souvenirs, along with a few scalps and gold teeth.

In early 1971, the Blade wrote, these events became known to Army investigators, who, over a four-and-a-half-year period, conducted an inquiry that eventually concluded that eighteen Tiger Force members had participated in as many as twenty war crimes. It was the longest war-crimes investigation of the Vietnam War. But no one was charged, and in 1975 the investigation was quietly shut down. By then, six suspects had been allowed to resign from the Army, which removed them from military jurisdiction. The only soldier to be officially punished was a sergeant who had triggered the investigation by reporting that a member of the Tiger Force had decapitated an infant. (He was reprimanded for stating that he had witnessed the incident when in fact he had learned of it from others.) Two former Tiger Force members told the Blade that they had been encouraged by Army investigators not to say anything about what had occurred; in addition, investigators failed to pursue leads and made no effort to interview eyewitnesses in South Vietnam.

The Blade's Tiger Force story began, as many newspaper revelations do, with a tip and some documents that were made available to its Washington bureau. Two reporters, Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, spent eight months researching records and interviewing platoon members and Vietnamese survivors. The most telling evidence came from the participants. William Doyle, a former Tiger Force sergeant, said, "Nobody out there with any brains expected to live. So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing--especially to stay alive." The officers assigned to lead the Tiger Force were fully involved in the atrocities, which began with the execution of prisoners. Former Private Ken Kerney was quoted as saying, "The commanders told me, 'What goes on here, stays here. You never tell anyone about what goes on here. If we find out you did, you won't like it.' "

At the height of the rampage, the Tiger Force platoon was operating a few dozen miles from a Quang Ngai hamlet that the Army called My Lai 4, and where, in March, 1968, more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians were massacred by a task force whose platoon leaders included William L. Calley, Jr. The Blade quoted a law professor as stating that My Lai might have been avoided if the senior officer corps had acted on complaints of military brutality in Quang Ngai that had been filed by at least two soldiers. The Blade further reported that in the early nineteen-seventies, ...