Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War by Michael Sallah & Mitch Weiss

Author:Michael Sallah & Mitch Weiss [Sallah, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027070
ISBN: 9780759515734
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2006-05-15T07:00:00+00:00

Even before sunrise, the Tigers were up and walking. McGaha wanted his first mission to be successful, and that meant creating the element of surprise. Unlike Hawkins, this platoon leader wanted to lead the column, walking just inches behind Ybarra. The soldiers stopped at the edge of the clearing before reaching the huts. McGaha was ready. So were the other Tigers. Barnett aimed his M60 machine gun at the first hut. Ybarra, Kerrigan, and others carefully raised their M16s, waiting for the order. McGaha raised his right hand and motioned to fire.

The Tigers opened up and, for the next minute, blasted away at the thatch, and suddenly, the soldiers could hear the screams of people. Some tried to run out of the openings of the huts but dropped in the fusillade. A mother carrying a baby tried to crawl from a hatch in the rear of a hut but was immediately gunned down, the infant falling from her arms. It was a slaughter.

McGaha quickly ordered the men to stop, but they didn’t. Instead, they continued moving closer to the huts, firing. Unable to watch anymore, some of the medics turned away. Short of stepping in front of their bullets, there was nothing McGaha could do. It wasn’t until every hut had been blown apart that the firing finally stopped.

The platoon leader peered through the smoke and could see more than a dozen bodies lying in the dirt: babies, women, and children. Some of the adults were on top of the children in what looked like desperate attempts to shield them from the assault. While team leaders bent over the bodies looking for any signs of weapons or enemy maps—anything to show this was a VC village—McGaha watched. After several minutes, Barnett reached for the radio and called headquarters. “We got sixteen dead VC,” he said. After hanging up the receiver, Barnett approached the platoon leader. “No weapons,” he confessed.

At the other end of the hamlet, Kerrigan, Ybarra, and others were leaning over bodies, knives in their hands. McGaha watched as Ybarra reached down, grabbed the lower portion of an ear, and, holding a knife, began cutting the flesh, bit by bit, until he was able to yank the rest of the ear from the head.

McGaha wasn’t going to say anything. His job was to keep moving, to sweep through the next hamlet. “Let’s go,” he said. As the Tigers began forming a line, Ybarra had moved on to a new body and started kicking the face of a villager on the ground. At first, McGaha thought the Vietnamese was alive and the soldier was trying to finish the job. But as the platoon leader approached the point man, he noticed the man on the ground wasn’t moving. “Ybarra,” said McGaha, “what are you doing?”

Ybarra didn’t answer.

Later, the platoon commander learned his point man wasn’t trying to kill the Vietnamese. Ybarra was trying to kick out the teeth of the dead villager for gold fillings.

Carpenter perked up at the command over the radio: “You’re the 327th Infantry,” said the voice.

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