Buried secrets, brutal truths
By Ron Royhab Posted Jan 1 2004
Blade Graphic
In 1967, the 18 soldiers of a platoon called Tiger Force committed war crimes on hundreds of innocent Vietnamese victims. The U.S. government consciously concealed those secrets, planning to keep the history forever hidden. Then, 36 years later, The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, uncovered the mysteries surrounding those hateful events. Roy Royhab, executive editor on the paper, recounts the process used to uncover the story.
It's a story the U.S. Army tried to keep secret for more than three decades. An elite U.S. platoon called Tiger Force murdered, tortured and mutilated the bodies of civilian men, women and children in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
The Army spent 4½ years investigating the atrocities, concluding in 1975 that 18 platoon members committed war crimes between May and November 1967. But no charges were filed, and the final investigative reports were buried until October when they were uncovered by The Blade, a family-owned newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. The newspaper's four-part series, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths” uncovered conclusive proof of Tiger Force war crimes.
The investigation started eight months earlier when The Blade obtained 22 pages of classified Army records of atrocities by Tiger Force members.
The incomplete records were from the files of the Criminal Investigation Command, but did not provide enough information for a credible news report.
Readers' Response
The series obviously touched a nerve around the globe. The Blade received e-mails, phone calls and letters from active duty soldiers and veterans of all wars, dating back to World War II, as well as average citizens also responded, with a variety of opinions on the series. Here's a small sample:
Jonathan Horwitz, now living in Denmark, wrote: “As a Vietnam vet ('65-'66), I returned physically whole, but it took 20 years for my soul to find me again. I want to thank you for running this series. I read it on the Internet. And wept. The war made me a pacifist, and I joined Vietnam Vets Against the War shortly after my return. We must never forget what war does … There are thousands of American veterans, forced to do things which were against their nature, who today are alcoholic or drug addicted or suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and who cannot get help…”
From J.D. Cotton: “Five brothers and we were all in the military. I was on a flight crew that did electronic stuff over Vietnam. One brother was a medic, another brother lived in the French Quarter in Saigon and was a military contractor, the oldest of us was in Vietnam in the Navy at the time that the French were defeated. I know a few things about war. I am writing to thank you all for having the courage to tell the truth of what you've learned … I am beginning to wonder what is the point of Freedom of the Press if the media won't report the news. I guess it is for a paper like The Blade.”
From Mike Beagle: “You know what ticks me off about your story? Did you write what this platoon of young men had to deal with day to day? Does anyone ever give them credit? I am not condoning the killings that were not related to the war at that time … But just one damn time I'd like to hear about the men in that platoon that fought the war with dignity while we sat on our lazy behinds and never realized how lucky we are…”
From Alan Clapp of Massachusetts: “It's easy to pass judgment from an air conditioned office. In that war everyone was a potential enemy. Soldiers were killed by bombs in baby carriages. Why not report on the atrocities done by the enemy.”
Margaret Shuman: “You and the Toledo Blade should be ashamed of yourselves for digging up this dirt from nearly 40 years ago, which even Vietnam has dismissed. Why do you media vultures have to continually drag our military through the mud? They were only following orders and didn't want to be there any more than we wanted them there.”
And from Ed Delezen: “I was a Marine in Vietnam in 1967-68. This is a terrible story and I feel that those who took part in this mindless carnage should be placed on trial in Vietnam, not America, but in present day Vietnam.”
To prepare for the investigation, reporters Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss searched through volumes of historical material published about the Vietnam War, but found no mention of Tiger Force atrocities, or the Army's investigation, or the subsequent cover-up. Even Vietnam historians interviewed for this series said they were unaware of these events.
“We were slowly finding out that this was hidden from even the most recognized experts on the war,” Sallah said.
To this day, neither the Army nor CIC will open the official Tiger Force records for public review, citing privacy issues, but as the result of The Blade's series, the Army has decided to do its own review of the case.
Army spokesman Joe Burlas told The Blade that military officials are expected to spend weeks looking for new evidence from the Army's investigation of Tiger Force that began in 1971. Burlas said the Army's belated decision to look into the case came because the Pentagon and State Department received calls from reporters in the United States and from overseas after The Blade series was published.
After being shut out by the Army twice, the reporters went to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they reviewed thousands of declassified documents.
“The National Archives found the case, but officials there told us it would take a few weeks to open the records to us because the custodians had to redact the names and social security numbers,” Weiss said. They waited for the seven large files that contained more than 1,400 documents. Included in the documents were witness statements gathered during the Army's investigation. However, since the names of suspects were removed and the locations where the atrocities occurred were sketchy, the reporting team had to keep digging.
They decided to review the Army's radio logs and commanders' logs at the National Archives that showed all Tiger Force operations during 1967. They took the map grid coordinates of daily troop movements from the radio logs, and plotted them on an Army war map to locate where Tiger Force operated in the Central Highlands.
Pieces of the puzzle started to come together. The reporters had discovered the exact location where the atrocities were committed. They used declassified records from the National Archives, and classified records obtained by the newspaper, to match a specific atrocity to a specific Tiger Force soldier. They used the Army's own Vietnam-era mapping system to match the specific atrocity to a specific location.
But the Blade investigation was far from over. Sallah and Weiss and Blade photographer Andy Morrison were sent to the Song Ve Valley and Chu Lai area in Vietnam, where most of the atrocities took place.
The reporting team spent 16 days there, using the Army's grid coordinate maps and the help of village elders. Accounts from the Vietnamese farmers verified details the reporters found in military records, and later from interviews Blade reporters conducted with Tiger Force veterans and Army investigators. The Blade hired an interpreter and a driver in Vietnam, and reporters used a tape recorder for all interviews. “We later spot-checked the interviews by enlisting the help of a translator who lives in Toledo,” Sallah said.
As soon as they returned from Vietnam, a third reporter, Joe Mahr, was assigned to the team to help track down Tiger Force veterans and Army investigators. It was a slow process. Some of the unclassified National Archive documents and classified documents obtained by the newspaper contained enough information about Tiger Force members to help reporters locate them. Others were located through Internet searches and telephone listings. And in some cases, former soldiers told the reporters where other Tiger Force members were living.
Blade reporters interviewed 43 Tiger Force veterans who either acknowledged that they committed atrocities or witnessed them, and in some cases, tried to stop them. Some say they are still having problems dealing with what they had done to innocent civilians more than 30 years ago.
The Blade conducted more than 100 interviews for this series, including villagers in Vietnam, Tiger Force veterans, retired Army investigators, and military historians. Reporters traveled to two provinces in Vietnam, and to California, Arizona, Washington state, Indiana, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and across Ohio and Michigan for the story.
“Why do you have to do this?”
Even before the series was published, a Vietnam veteran called the newspaper to ask, “Why do you have to do this?”
He was reacting to an ad that promoted the four-part series that began on Oct. 19. That question was a topic of discussion among Blade editors and the newspaper's publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block.
I wrote a column on the first day of the series explaining why The Blade, which has as always had a passion and reputation for international journalism and investigative reporting and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, undertook the project.
“One reason is simply that the public has a right to know that American soldiers committed atrocities, and that our government knew about it and kept it from the public. We would have been a party to a cover-up if we had knowledge of these war crimes and did not publish the story. Wrongdoing on this grand a scale is always significant. It is important to know what happened and why it happened because that's how a democracy functions. The people need to know what is being done in their name and who is responsible.”
There's never a good time to write and read about war. The Blade's investigation of these atrocities has nothing to do with today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, although some readers questioned why this story was being reported while our country was at war. We published the series now because we recently discovered evidence of the atrocities, and the truth has never before been told.
The reaction to our Tiger Force series was worldwide. We received hundreds of e-mails while it was still being published. The series was summarized by the Associated Press, Scripps Howard News Service, Reuters and an untold number of Web sites, and is posted on toledoblade.com. It appeared in many major American newspapers, and in newspapers on television and radio broadcasts across Canada, Asia, Europe, South Africa and China. An AP pickup of the Tiger Force story appeared on the front page of the International Herald Tribune. Reporter Paul Harris wrote about the series in the Oct. 26 issue of the London Observer. He called the series a “huge scoop.”
“Yet the newspaper that uncovered the atrocity was not the venerable New York Times or the Washington Post . . . Nor was it the New Yorker, famed for its in-depth journalism. It was The Blade, a daily newspaper with a circulation of just 150,000 that serves the Ohio city of Toledo, by Lake Erie,” Harris wrote.
The complete series ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Blade's sister paper. It appeared in some form in the Washington Post, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Knoxville News Sentinel, Arizona Daily Star and in other newspapers. But while Blade reporters were interviewed on National Public Radio, on the radio/TV program “Democracy Now,” and on British and Canadian radio and television stations, the series was ignored by American television networks.
That was until Seymour Hersh, who broke the story on the My Lai massacre more than 30 years ago, wrote a column in the Nov. 10 New Yorker questioning why the major networks had not picked up any of the Tiger Force stories.
After reading the Hersh piece, Peter Jennings sent a film crew from “ABC World News Tonight” to The Blade to interview reporters Sallah and Weiss. ABC also sent a crew to Vietnam to interview witnesses and survivors of Tiger Force atrocities and sent additional film crews to talk with Tiger Force veterans. The story was aired in two parts on “World News Tonight,” and on “Nightline” and became a subject of public dialogue. On Nov. 9, Philip Gailey, the St. Petersburg Times editor of editorials, wrote about The Blade's Tiger Force series. He concluded that “most American soldiers served with honor and courage in Vietnam, and they did not commit war crimes. What Tiger Force soldiers did is an ugly story that many Americans don't want to hear. But when something goes this horribly wrong, we need to hear the truth, no matter how painful it is.”
That is the point of The Blade's investigation.