As Rafe recounted it, Meserve saw her and said, There she goes. Clark said, Why, that bitch, I stabbed her more than twice. Meserve told us all to shoot her before she could get away. Thus, early in his tour of duty, Eriksson recalled, G.I.s in his unit were empowered to shoot any Vietnamese violating a 7 P.M. curfew, but in practice it was largely a matter of individual discretion whether a soldier chose to fire at a stray Vietnamese hurrying home a few minutes late to his hootchthe American term for the mud-and-bamboo huts in which most natives lived. Only Manuel would remain anywhere near Eriksson; he was being reassigned to a different squad in the same platoon. 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. Yes or no? Nor could the concern that the C.O. Lets kill her and get it over with, he said, according to the court record. It was to take them, ultimately, to Hill 192a height, in the Bong Son valley, that overlooked a ravine laced with a cave complex, which was suspected of serving as a Vietcong hideout. When Eriksson reaffirmed that he was, Kirk picked up his phone and called the Criminal Investigation Division office at Camp Radcliff. I was afraid of being ridiculed, sir, he told the prosecutor. The farther back you got, the closer you approached the way people lived in civilian life., On November 16, 1966, the commanding officer of Erikssons platoon, a Negro lieutenant, Harold Reilly (whose name, like every soldiers name in this account, has been changed), assigned him as one of five enlisted men who were to make up a reconnaissance patrol, its mission to comb a sector of the Central Highlands for signs of Vietcong activity. She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare, Eriksson said. Casualties of War (1989) - User Reviews - IMDb Arriving on the run, the two explained their errand to Clark, who heard the news eagerly, then pulled rank on Eriksson and ordered him to take his place in guarding the hootch. Eriksson saw Vorst shortly after the three soldiers left the company command post. As a disciplined soldier, I knew I wouldnt abandon the weapons in the hootch to the enemy, but, just the same, I was dizzy with thinking how to save Mao. What if he refused to arrange an introduction for me? Erikssons patrol leader delivered a tongue-lashing to his counterpart, who apologized. But he was very tolerant about it. Q: I didnt ask you for a long elaboration. But the assertion was a hard one to prove, for Rafe was on hand to testify that Eriksson was so situated in that feverish moment that Mao wasnt even in his line of vision. When he stopped asking me questions, he started talking about Meserve and the others, sort of thinking aloud what it was that came over fellows in wartime. They may be out in a few months, he said. Still in the process of waking, and not yet thinking clearly, he said, he had transformed her into a peasant woman on her way to do a days farming, such as he had seen many times in Vietnam; he had envisioned the passenger in a broad, peaked straw hat and black pajamas, carrying the traditional stick across her shoulders, with baskets at either end for holding crops. It had to be him, and no other chaplain, he recalled, smiling. Ad Choices, He wanted never to be away from her. In our part of Minnesota, just about everyone is., It was ten at night when Eriksson sat down to talk with Kirk, and he found he was able to speak more freely than he had even to Curly Rowan. A: No, sir, Ive got nothing against the government. Arrested by military policemen at scattered points, the four soldiers passed through Vorsts area in the late afternoon and saw the Captain briefly. The men were familiar with the knife; it had recently been given to Clark by a close friend in the platoon who had been wounded. . in his stead. His last order before they left was to send Eriksson, Rafe, and Manuel to fetch the days supply of water from the stream. For Rafe, the fighting had ended an hour earlierwell before the patrol reached the cave complex. I simply asked, do you think a murderer should be retained in the United States Army? She was dead, Im sure., Immediately after the murder, Eriksson told me, the men appeared to assume a self-protective air of disbelief at what had taken place. He wouldnt mind being a door gunner aboard a helicopter, he told Vorst, citing as his qualifications for such a post that he had been trained as a machine gunner and that he was fond of flying. . His interest in religion still strong, Eriksson took part in church activities, he told me; he had recently supervised a group of high-school-age boys and girls making a two-week retreat on an island in a lake between Minnesota and Canada. Special care had been taken with the operation, he stated, since it had been conceived by the battalion command, a higher echelon than the company command, to which Reilly was ordinarily responsible. In the hootch, Eriksson recalled, Mao, now relieved of Manuels pack, watched him and Rafe heave out junk for a while, and then, unasked, the girl lent the G.I.s a hand. Additional pictures were taken a week later, when Eriksson led a second pilgrimage to Hill 192. All of us in the patrol had long ago stopped pretending nothing horrible had happened. If he had known this, he thinks, he might have realized then, as he did later, that the Captain was in a bind; that is, he was torn between the dictates of his conscience, which condemned the crime, and concern for his Army career, which, Eriksson later discovered, the battalion commanderwho outranked Vorst, and who was also a liferwas in the habit of admonishing the Captain to bear in mind. A: Well, no, sir, until theyvenot until they serve their sentence. His parents stayed home plenty of Sundays.. Some Vietnamese people were bringing children out of. You could never tell how a man was going to behave under pressure, Eriksson said. They suffered from smoke inhalation. Youre hurt, I can see, but how are you? Similarly, it was permissible to shoot at any Vietnamese seen running, but, as Eriksson put it, the line between walking and running could be very thin. The day after the one on which his squad was ambushed and half its members were wounded, several enemy prisoners were taken, and, in retaliation, two were summarily killed, to serve as an example. A corporal who was still enraged over the ambush tried to strangle another of the prisoners; he had knotted a poncho, nooselike, around the captives neck and was tightening it when a merciful lieutenant commanded him to desist. She herself had thus far been the only person with whom her husband had discussed it since returning from Vietnam, and even with her he had not gone into much detail. Incident on Hill 192 - Wikipedia The five men and Mao kept up a steady pace. For as long as she lived, Eriksson did not know her name. Incensed, the Sergeant uttered the first of a series of threats. . As he was leaving, he told me, the Captain called out reassuringly, Ill handle everything!, When Eriksson heard nothing from Vorst for four days, he sought an interview, which was granted. It was the same sentence he had been serving, but now, having been transformed into a new verdict, it was subject to another review, the effects of which soon worked to Rafes advantage, for in August, 1969, the commanding general at Fort Leavenworth shortened his term to twenty-two months. Incident on Hill 192 | Historica Wiki | Fandom sonoma academy calendar; why are my bluetooth headphones connected but not working; incident on hill 192 where are they now; By . I needed more of an impression of Boyd than I had, Eriksson said. 2. gcdc. The Sergeant had made his announcement with a straight face, leaving his men to interpret it as they would. They had gone scarcely twenty metres when a cry of distress halted them. And wasnt it just possible that the victim might not necessarily be Eriksson himself but, rather, his new bride? June 17, 2022 . They constantly reported rapes and kidnappings by the Vietcong; in fact, the Vietcong committed these crimes so indiscriminately that the victims were sometimes their own sympathizers. Technically, I myself was a suspect, Eriksson told me. carefully explained that to me, informing me of my legal rights, one of which was to shut up. When the interrogation was over, he was asked to lead a search party to the spot on Hill 192 where he had claimed that Maos body could be found. They had known each other since childhood, their fathers having been neighboring farmers, who both had difficulty making ends meet. Enacting the role of chief government witness was not an edifying experience, Eriksson went on. The enemy did the same thing, and much of the evidence for this came from the Vietnamese themselves. He displayed a hunting knife. As if his family had any money! He made one particular friend at Fort Carson, a Marine captain who had seen eighteen months of combat in Vietnam and was also about to become a civilian. That was a bum rap. Smiling, Eriksson remarked to me, We were thirty thousand feet up by then, or he might have asked for his money back., In Minnesota, Eriksson returned to the small apartment in Minneapolis where we were sitting, his wife having maintained it while he was gone. To listen to them, and to the testimony that the guys in the patrol gave, Mao was probably living happily in her hamlet. As early as the opening day of Rafes trial, which was the first one held, he realized that it was idle to consider whether the G.I.s punishment would, or could, fit the crime. As it turned out, they required no invitation to talk about herparticularly in the summer months, when the torrential monsoon rains drowned any possibility of outdoor routine. A veteran of thirty-five thousand autopsies, Professor Furue told the court, Compared with other female Mongoloids, Maos remains were well developed, a well-balanced body build., Meserve, Clark, and the two Diazes were taken into custody the day after the first search party made its visit to Hill 192. The two other G.I.s in the combat team were a year younger than Eriksson, who was then twenty-two. Whatever I could do about her depended on finding someone with both the rank and the conscience to help me, he told me. The search party was a smaller one this time, Eriksson said, its assignment to make certain that nothing of any conceivable courtroom value still lay hidden in the area around Maos body; eventually, a C.I.D. For a number of months, though, he found it less than exhilarating to pick up where he had left off. The five-man squad, led by a 20-year-old sergeant, Tony Meserve, had been sent on patrol. Then he proceeded to tell us that if anything happened to Eriksson, our souls would belong to him. Possibly to help them retain their souls, Vorst announced that he was breaking up the patrol. It didnt take many further interrogations to convince the law-enforcement officers that they had a case, for Rafe and Manuel readily signed affidavits whose substance supported Erikssons account of the incident on Hill 192the name by which Maos murder became known among the military. Though Eriksson testified at greater length than anyone else, most of the witnesses who appeared in the close, noisy courtroom spoke in support of the defendants, extolling their gallantry, their sense of duty, and their other soldierly virtues. Among them, Eriksson said, these sizable elements, advancing toward the cave complex, succeeded in killing one V.C. Again according to Eriksson, Clark was given to quick movements and to seemingly abrupt decisions that reflected Meserves thinking in an exaggerated form. The experts findings established conclusively that Mao had been stabbed three times, in the rib cage and the neck, and that her skull presented a crushed appearance, showing the shattering effects of two high-velocity-missile wounds. Classifying her racial stock as Mongoloid, Professor Furue placed Maos age at between eighteen and twenty and her height at five feet four and a half inchessomewhat greater than Eriksson had estimated it to be in talking with me. Although news of the incident reached the U.S. shortly after the soldiers' trials, the story gained widespread notoriety through Daniel Lang's 1969 article for The New Yorker and his subsequent book. The image is that of a Vietnamese peasant girl, two or three years younger than he was, whom he met, so to speak, on November 18, 1966, in a remote hamlet in the Central Highlands, a few miles west of the South China Sea. He first asked Sergeant Meserve, Do you know anything about this? To which Meserve said, We dont know what youre talking about. He then directed the same question to all of us, Do you people know what youve done up there? Captain Vorst then asked me did I know what would or could happen to me. I couldnt tell whether it was Charlie or the girl, Rafe testified. Moreover, Eriksson told me, the enemy soldier inflicted casualties on the infantrymen deployed around the cave complex, which was some two hundred metres long and had numerous mouths. In turn, the sergeant passed the news on to Lieutenant Reilly, who sent for Eriksson. But. As far as he could make out, the company C.O. man attending the sessions assured him that this was highly improper. There, corpsmen deposited him on a bed alongside that of a battalion officer he knew and liked. But, as Eriksson pointed out, he could not give me many such first-hand accounts of V.C. It was also noted that, like Meserve, Clark was the product of an impoverished and broken home. The Vietcong, Loc said, had abducted her, accusing her of having led South Vietnamese forces to a V.C. The atrocity that Eriksson had reported was too big for that. On one occasion that he knew of, Eriksson said, American troops, attracted by the familiar odor of decomposing bodies, had found a pit piled high with Vietnamese men and women who had been machine-gunned by the V.C. When he first got back from Hill 192, he said, he had imagined that it might have been his peculiar misfortune to draw a patrol made up of psychopaths, but now each time a new G.I. They said that door-gunner duty was too dangerousthat if I was going to be any use as a witness I had to stay alive., Eriksson recognized the abrupt transformation of his military life the morning after his meeting with Kirk. Incident on Hill 192 (1970 edition) | Open Library The Sergeant was the first man to enter the hootch, and soon, Eriksson told me, a high, piercing moan of pain and despair came from the girl. Eriksson was now with them, and he saw that Mao had retreated to a corner of the hut, frightened, watchful, her eyes glistening with tears, her presence made known chiefly by a cough that had grown more pronounced since morning. 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. 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. It was a six-hour trek, over difficult terrain, and when the men finally stood just below the summit, several of them, who were unaccustomed to tramping so long, were near exhaustion. Thus, Vorst concluded, coming to the last of his questions, if the men in the patrol were actually convicted, Eriksson could anticipate their being freed in short order, and when that happened Eriksson himself might not feel so freefor was it really inconceivable that one or more of the ex-convicts would seek revenge? Former Private First Class Sven Erikssonas I shall call him, since to use his actual name might add to the danger he may be inhas also come back with his memories, but he has no idea what the future will do to them. I had had enough of watching beatings and stranglings with ponchos, he told me. Eriksson was fond of his uncle, Mrs. Eriksson said, but, reluctantly, he answered, Im afraid I dont want to talk about her., When Erikssons leave was over, he finished out his two-year hitch at Fort Carson, Colorado, where many of the men were either completing their service, like him, or departing for war. In the meantime, Erikssons orders placed him on temporary duty with a carpentry detail that was constructing additional housing for the base, whose population came to twenty thousand. Incident Books. It seemed like a deal, but why was it, Eriksson asked himself, that a captain should feel constrained to bargain with a lowly enlisted man? incident on hill 192 where are they now - sniscaffolding.com Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. As Mao stood listening, mute and uncomprehending, Meserve said that she had to be got out of the way; if they ran into action, he pointed out, she would be a hindrance, and even if they didnt, helicopter crews scouting the area might want to know who she was. Transitory though their show of character may have been, he said, it encouraged him in reaching a private resolve, for as he kept watch above the cave complex, Eriksson told me, he was suddenly seized with the overwhelming realization that unless he took it upon himself to speak out, the fact of Maos death would remain a secret. Day after day, out on patrol, wed come to a narrow dirt path leading through some shabby village, and the elders would welcome us and the children come running with smiles on their faces, waiting for the candy wed give them. As Manuel was going into the hootch, Maos sounds could he heard, weak and conquered. Another board might have found differently, a colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals office told me.) Id never known the Army had any such unit, Eriksson told me. The gunships were now unmistakably in the area, their motors sending up a storm of noise as the machines hovered low and their crews searched out the enemy. Incident on Hill 192 by Vanessa Pantoja - Prezi