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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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