The man was never captured, Eriksson said, despite the fact that he became the single target of the gunships rockets and the infantrys bullets and grenades. Thomas caught her and shot her in the head with his M16 rifle. He didnt see how he could just walk up to Greenacre and state his business. Each day, Eriksson said, he felt as though he were at war with war, a troublemaker out to undermine some careful, desperate code of survival. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Meserve, as though he were finally bored with the topic, abruptly reminded the unit of its mission; he wanted the men to do some more reconnoitring that afternoon. This sentence was first commuted to 20 years, then reduced to eight, which made him eligible for parole after half that time. . The atrocity that Eriksson had reported was too big for that. The incident on Hill 192 refers to the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao, a young Vietnamese woman,[1] on November 19, 1966[2] by an American squad during the Vietnam War. Anyway, thats what made me believe I was interested in religion. For as long as she lived, Eriksson did not know her name. He does remember, though, that she had a prominent gold tooth, and that her eyes, which were dark brown, could be particularly expressive. He knew Mao for slightly more than twenty-four hours. [8] After finding Phan Thi Mao (21), they bound her wrists with rope, gagged her, and took her on the mission. In the Army, he had discovered, that kind of action depended entirely on the discretion of ones superiorunless it was possible to figure out some way of bypassing him. Who else would tell but myself? The holed-up V.C. One M.P., I remember, told me he could have understood it if Id gone to bat for a G.I. Casualties of War (Film) - TV Tropes In the first place, he wanted to act fast, and, besides, he had no doubt that once he did act, there would be fast results. Besides, as the defense could not dispute, the jacket containing the explosive charge of a grenade launcher is made not of lead but of copper, and the search parties experts had found only the lead of numerous bullets from an M-16 rifle littering the immediate vicinity of Maos body. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach. Meserve testified at his court-martial, The mother came out, like they always do, started crying, talking. After half an hour, their watch on the stream paid off, producing a more interesting sight than Rafes water buffalo. By then, too, the men were approaching the hamlet of Cat Tuong, in the district of Phu My, and Eriksson was cursing himself for having listened to Rowan. In disbelief and confusion, his heart palpitating, Eriksson saw that Meserve was losing no time in carrying out his plan, for, with Clark at his heels, the Sergeant had embarked on a systematic search of the hamlets hootches. recognized that there were forces of conscience that might have to be contended with? A moment later, the two groups went off in different directions. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. A smile spreading on his face, he took the scarf and stuffed it into Maos mouth. In any event, Eriksson went on, he lost little time in seeking out his friend Curly Rowan to tell him the story of Mao. It was based on the actual incident on Hill 192. The two sisters looked at each other. Youre hurt, I can see, but how are you? Incident On Hill 192 - amazon.com ? an Oklahoma rifleman asked one night as he and Eriksson were settling down to sleep in their foxholes. I had a feeling she had been injured in some waynot that I could tell. Conscience was one thing that crossed over from civilian life to war, he said. Clark at once greeted it with enthusiasm. He was 34 years old. bus that collected G.I.s who had fallen on hard times in Sin City, a section of bars and bordellos in An Khe, two miles away. Rafe received a punishment of four years imprisonment, plus a monthly forfeiture of fifty dollars in pay. She began to weep, and backed away, cringing. I might say I was praying to God that if I ever got out of there alive Id do everything I could to see that these men would pay for what they did., Eriksson now lapsed into the longest of his silences with me, and when he spoke again, it was, for him, at great length. Its a part of the country where we pride ourselves on not being demonstrative, she said. (Eriksson had done the same for Rafe at his trial in Vietnam.) The groups second-in-command was Ralph Clark, a corporal who came from a town near Philadelphia. Invariably, Eriksson said, he found himself reproved for the deed. IJW: Casualties of War (1989) : r/Ijustwatched - Reddit Eriksson was to remain there until his reassignment as a door gunner came through, Vorst having sent his transfer papers on for official approval by the helicopter command. The two have no children. Reilly was aware that if it came to public knowledge it would tarnish the image of the officers commanding the platoon, the company, the battalion, perhaps even the regiment; the officers might be made to appear incapable of controlling the conduct of the men in their commands. Phan Thi Mao (1945-1966) - Find a Grave Memorial Eriksson continued as an M.P., his duties generally less onerous than they had been in Vietnam, and his existence certainly more relaxed, since, as he observed to me, he was waking up every morning not only in his own country but in the presence of the Rockies. Arriving at the austere hootch that Reilly used as a command post, Eriksson told me, he imagined that the Lieutenant, if only conversationally, would express dismay over the murder. Seeing him made me think at once of two questions I would have liked to ask him or his sergeant. No such thing happened. Cross-examined at Meserves trial as to why he had shifted his position, Eriksson testified, Well, sir, these gentlemen seemed to meoh, I should say kind of enthused about what was going on. As the men had raced to get there, clambering and sliding, Rafe had slipped and fallen from a ledge, dislocating an elbow and a shoulder. Meserve saw to that, for a brilliant sun had come up, its glare exposing the bizarre party as clearly as it did the landscape. Moving in on the bush, Clark blazed away with his M-16, and at once the rustling foliage grew still. Despite Vorsts generally negative tone, Eriksson said, he believed that the company commander would eventually take steps to bring Meserve and the others to justice. In the late spring, for instance, he learned that a change of sentence might be in the making for Clark, whose lawyer, it appeared, had asked the jurors who convicted him to approve a petition urging clemency; all but two of them had agreed, and Eriksson was given to understand that this augured an almost certain reduction in sentence. Im not going to say that, sir. The two Diazes laughed, either out of embarrassment, Eriksson conjectures, or because they thought Meserve was joking, in view of his remark about the morale of the squadan old gag in the platoon. Unlike their civilian counterparts, Vorst said, the law officers (the term by which military judges were known) and members of the court (as jurors were known) had a sympathetic understanding of the pressures a combat man faced in risking his life daily; military jurists didnt expect foot soldiers to be on their best behavior in a war zone. . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. He was ten when his father suddenly died. Casualties of War: Incident On Hill 192 Dolce Vanity When he opened his eyes, a new passenger was sitting directly opposite hima young Oriental woman. Incident on Hill 192 | Military Wiki | Fandom As if his family had any money! Even his routine duties as a G.I. It turned out to be a letter of commendation. But on the bus the peasant woman across from me was going to work in paddy fields that were near Maos hamlet, from which it was a nice walk downhill to a stream that flooded the rice fields. I had to give one small child mouth-to-mouth respiration and bring her back to life. also kidnapped, raped, murdered. Since returning to civilian life, a year and a half ago, Eriksson has been concerned primarily with what his wife calls sorting things out. Once he had been separated from the service at Fort Carson, he came back to Minneapolis determined to find employment at something other than carpentry. Thinking like thatwell, as I say, it could change some fellows. It was just like when you stick a deer with a knifesort of a thudor something like this, sir.. According to Eriksson, Meserve, who was assertive and confident, was both the patrols youngest soldier and its most experienced one, being a volunteer of three years standing who had fought in Vietnam for a year and had been decorated several times; he was due to go back to the United States in a month. Since the verdicts would automatically come under review and the government might again need him as a witness, he was kept on in the post of military policeman at the division base. View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Created by: TrentLane Added: 26 Aug 2021 Find a Grave Memorial ID: 231233841 Sponsored by Jennifer Brown Source citation With me, he said, he trusted he would be able to go into these matters freely, but he had early discovered that in a court of law they were of little interest. The hamlet was barely out of sight when Manuel, perhaps competing with Clark, untied Maos hands, then slipped his pack from his shoulders and loaded it onto the girls. Shitstink McLanahan. They obscured her figure, Eriksson says, but he has the impression that she was slender and slight, and was perhaps five feet two or three inches tall. Naturally, Erikssons experiences in Vietnam were varied, and many of them impressed themselves vividly on his mind. I knew I wouldnt rest until something was done about Maos murder. Q: For a murder. He had imagined that he would be able to ask how it was that he alone of the patrol had come to act as he had. From his point of view, as he had indicated at the beginning of our talk, the legal consideration of the crime was a field day of fencing and distortion, of quibbling and traps. They found the company commander, who had himself only just returned, waiting impatiently to confront them with Erikssons report. I discovered its not difficult to kill a human beingin combat its as instinctive as ducking bullets. Accompanied by a squad of armed enlisted men, as a precaution against an enemy ambush, the search party set out early the following morning, December 9th, flying from An Khe to an airstrip near Captain Vorsts company headquarters. A: Sir, Sergeant Meserve, he joined the unit in approximately February of last year, and he served under me when I was a rifle-platoon leader, and the reason he is a sergeant today is because we put the duties of squad leader upon him. "[7], At approximately 05:00 on the morning of 18 November, the squad entered the tiny village of Cat Tuong, in the Phu My District, looking for a woman. But I couldnt think any of my brainstorms through. But the Sergeant did nothing about the escaping V.C., for he was now powerfully distracted from the enemy; in the distance, still inaudible and looking miniaturized, were four approaching gunships. Necessarily, he said, he was in a position to speak only of the behavior of American soldiers, since they were the people he fought and lived with. All he need do, he believed, was report that they had committed rape and murder, and the military authorities would investigate with the same alacrity that civilian authorities are expected to show in such situations. Just before it did, Eriksson moved away from the entrance to the hootch, where he had been standing, and sat down alone on the grassy turf to one side of the structure; periodically, he raised his field glasses to gaze at distant points. This was about 1400 hours, Manuel stated. Having appeared as a witness before four tribunals in Vietnam, Eriksson told me, he had had his fill of the judicial processof the dogged grillings by lawyers and the repeated strictures of judges insisting on precise answers to questions that were often vague. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories, Like their predecessors in all wars, American veterans of the Vietnamese campaign who are coming home to civilian life have their heads filled with memories that may last the rest of their days, for, no matter how far from the front a man may have spent his time as a soldier, he will remember it as a special time, when, fleetingly, his daily existence appeared to approach the heroic. As far as he knew, he said, no legal developments were brewing in their behalfnot that it made much difference, he added, since he had learned just a few weeks earlier that Meserve and Clark stood to be declared eligible for parole before they had served even half their time at Fort Leavenworth. rallied to the patrols defense that idea seemed less tenable. It was the way I felt, he said. The men were to be gone five days, the Sergeant revealeda fairly long time for a reconnaissance missionand on hearing this Eriksson experienced a sense of exhilaration, just as he had at the prospect of far shorter patrols in which he had taken part. That was how my hunch went, and I didnt dare change it in any way. Eriksson moved cautiously. Fortunately, he said, his assignments involved no murder or rape cases. The next thing I knew, I was in jail, Eriksson told me. The enemy did the same thing, and much of the evidence for this came from the Vietnamese themselves. The weather had turned hot and dry, Eriksson remembers, and the interior of the courtroom throbbed with the whirr of electric fans. He was upset and frustratedit was in all his letters. Eriksson remembers having a deep feeling of ease and calm, as though he were at long last ceasing to be a fugitive from injustice. We would be fools to think those men couldnt do again what they did before., He would never cease to condemn the members of the patrol personally for their crime, Eriksson said, but that didnt mean they were beyond pity. munitions cache on Hill 192. Incident on Hill 192 - Wikipedia. [6], Storeby initially reported the crime. It was adduced that even before Meserve left for Vietnam he was regarded as an exemplary soldier, since he had been selected to march in President Johnsons inaugural paradean honor limited to two hundred men with unblemished records. At the start, he spoke laconically, but gradually his natural reticence thawed out, and there were timesgenerally after one of his silenceswhen he produced such a burst of talk that it seemed to cost him an effort to bring it to a halt. The soldiers set up a night watch, each man pulling guard duty outside in the moonlight, alert for any lurking enemy. They were her last. Mao coughed throughout the night, and at one point, Eriksson recalls, Clark again urged that the girl be finished off forthwith. The hootch contained a table, a low bench built against a wall, and tattered remnants of a straw mat strewn in a dark corner, and the dirt floor was littered with scrap metal, rocks, and cans. I didnt know then that they were four hundred metres away, at the top of Hill 192, or that it would be a whole hour before they returned. But, as Eriksson unhesitatingly acknowledges, the fact is that when he thinks of his tour of duty in Vietnam it is always a single image that comes to his mind. Acting fast, he sent Manuel backtracking to the summit to tell Eriksson and Rafe to report to him with Mao. . It was another case of people doing their job, he told me. Hey, Sven, how do you know that girl wasnt a V.C. Eriksson shook his head again. And I told her, in English, I cant understand you. I wanted to tell her other things. The Vietcong, Loc said, had abducted her, accusing her of having led South Vietnamese forces to a V.C. Id never known the Army had any such unit, Eriksson told me. But at the other end of the path, just as we were leaving the village behind, the enemy would open up on us, and there was bitterness among us that the villagers hadnt given us warning. Well, during this Operation Thayer II, which started [last October], we ran into a hootch that was burned down. Rafe, hospitalized at Qui Nhon, was already accounted for; Clark was to take a relatively rear-area post, at battalion headquarters; Meserve was to be shifted to another platoon. The incident on Hill 192 is the name the United States Army called the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao, a young Vietnamese woman on November 19, 1966 by an American squad during the Vietnam War. We all looked at the paper, and he asked us what this was all about. Three times I saw the C.O. Yours was not an easy task, but you did your duty as an American soldier. If hed kept quiet, he would have been impossible to live with., Regardless of when Meserve and Clark get out, Eriksson thinks, the atmosphere of civilian life may exert a moderating influence on their outlook. It happened when the Sergeant, having delivered his instructions, concluded the briefing by telling the assembled men that they were going to have a good time on the mission, because he was going to see to it that they found themselves a girl and took her along for the morale of the squad. For five days, the Sergeant said, they would avail themselves of her body, finally disposing of it, to keep the girl from ever accusing them of abduction and rapeboth listed as capital crimes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. No matter how close the questioning, and no matter how detailed the testimony he gave, or heard, it all seemed related to Maos murder in only a surface sense. Now, six months later, Clarks case, forwarded from Vietnam, had been gone over in the United States by a board of review, which had reduced his term to eight years. In that season, Eriksson told me, when the M.P.s yakked the hours away together in their quarters, one or another of his fellow-cops would periodically recall what Eriksson had chosen to do. Thinking along these lines, Eriksson said, he arrived at a kind of strategy in regard to Mao. It came from Maos mother, who was giving chase. It was rustling. There was to be an autopsy at the United States Army mortuary in Saigon, by a Japanese anthropologist, Professor Tadao Furue, of Tokyo University, and Colonel Pierre A. Finck, commanding officer of the 9th Medical Laboratory. Sprawled on the ground after the meal, Meserve, refreshed, glanced at his fellows and then, with a knowing smile, indicated the partly ruined structure. That this weak, coughing girl had overpowered me? Lang's article for The New Yorker described the so-called "Incident on Hill 192" that involved the kidnapping, . Not sitting next to each other anymore, are they now standing opposite each other, with the frightened girl in the middle, separating them visually, just as she is the matter dividing them ideologically. Incident on Hill 192 | Imperial War Museums The G.I. Eriksson himself stood scanning the landscape intently, looking for the curiously shaped rock formation where the stabbed girl had been shot. Speaking evenly, Eriksson said, They were among the onesamong the fewwho did what everyone around them wanted to do. Nor was he himself free of blame, he went on, without pausingonce again referring to the limitations within himself that he had glimpsed in Asia. fellows knew about law, Eriksson said. At the time the fifth V.C. Hit it! the patrol leader shouted, and his men hit the ground, the bullets from the still invisible attackers raising columns of dust all around the flattened G.I.s. Plot Besides, Eriksson said, none of the M.P.s at Fort Carson asked him about Maovery likely, he assumed, because they didnt connect him with her. He still has a tendency to fight off its memory, he said, and he thinks the reason for this is that although the experience he had may have revealed certain strengths in himself, he is far more concerned with the limitations it exposed. For that matter, he said, he knew almost nothing about Greenacreonly that he was a cowboy from Arizona, a wiry type, who put in a good days work as a carpenter and didnt have much to say. Eriksson was not called upon to testify this time, and this was a vast relief, he told me, not only because he was eager to get on with his civilian life but because it looked to him as though Rafes rehearing would be a duplication of Manuels second trial; that is, with Rafes tainted admissions thrown out, the governments arguments would be undermined and a verdict of acquittal brought in. They hadnt ever heard Maos voice or seen her carrying Manuels pack.. Are you afraid of Sergeant Meserve? Eriksson was asked at one point, and he replied, Thats affirmative, sir. It was the hardest decision Ive ever had to make, and it couldnt have been the best possible one, or Mao wouldnt be gone today., In the time that elapsed before the patrols return, Eriksson said, Maos condition worsened noticeably. . All rights reserved. That leaves three to go.. Incident on Hill 192 - Wikipedia
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