She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare, Eriksson said. Ending the first of his brooding silences, Eriksson said, From one day to the next, you could see for yourself changes coming over guys on our sidedecent fellows, who wouldnt dream of calling an Oriental a gook or a slopehead back home. My height, Eriksson said. It took him a while to realize this, he said, and, curiously, he became persuaded of its prevalence as a result of thinking about Vorst s negative handling. As he went over it in his mind for the hundredth time, he began to suspect the existence of cracks in the Captains seemingly certain, untroubled faade. With Greenacre there, it meant that Sven was waiving his right to my silence, he said. You never knew whose turn it was to die, and that isnt how it was in rear areas. Now the V.C., flushed from their temporary hideout, continued to beat a desperate retreat, relying on sniper fire to fend off their attackers, who were converging on them from both sides of the stream. Reporting another of Locs answers at the trial, the court interpreter stated, She said her sister have gold tooth, right side in lower jaw.. The only thing these women had to do on their way to the stream was breathe pure mountain air.. Eriksson himself helped Manuels case by testifying briefly as a defense witness, corroborating the fact that Manuel had refused to obey Meserves order to kill Mao. To Erikssons astonishment and deep relief, the Sergeant abruptly shifted his attention to the Diazes, asking first Rafe and then Manuel to carry out the murder. Everything around him, he said, impressed him as pointless and aridhis fellow-workers, the monotony of clock punching, and even, at times, his beloved carpentry. It excited me. Impatiently, Clark volunteered his services, but Meserve wouldnt have that, insisting that they collaborate. When she tried to flee, three of the soldiers chased after her. already had more prison time than that to his credit, so the force of the generals ruling was to bring about Rafes immediate release from confinement. His last order before they left was to send Eriksson, Rafe, and Manuel to fetch the days supply of water from the stream. He had no one to talk to over there. depredations. Sometimes you have your disagreements, and sometimes you dont voice them, you keep them to yourself.. He was paroled on June 18, 1970. None of the four hit anything, and the Sergeant radioed the platoon command for artillery support, which was quickly granted; the coperation, Eriksson recalled, pleased Meserve no end, since it implicitly conferred an importance on the skirmish. All the others in the patrol had raped or killed her. Another man might have called it something else, but the idea was simply that we had to answer for what we did. Like most rural women, she was dressed in loose-fitting black pajamas. 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. Additional pictures were taken a week later, when Eriksson led a second pilgrimage to Hill 192. It was still dark in the area, and no civilians attempted to stop us. Leaving the mother behind, the patrol resumed its march, prodding Mao to match its stride. The Captaina lifer, or career Army manhad left instructions that he was to be sent urgent messages only, but shortly after Eriksson took leave of Reilly, the Lieutenant, confident that the murder merited his superiors attention, radioed word of it to Vorst. The holed-up V.C. You want her gold tooth? Clark called over his shoulder to Rafe, who was then, he testified, a foot away and was staring, aghast, at Mao. I didnt know Eriksson brought it up. In Vietnam, the jurors petition urging clemency for Clark had been acted upon, with the result that the G.I.s life sentence had been commuted to a sentence of twenty years. [6], Storeby initially reported the crime. 2023 Cond Nast. Indeed, there are some that would say it did not even occur in civilization, when you are out on combat operations., Two weeks after the trials ended, one of the court interpreters, a Vietnamese schoolteacher, with whom Eriksson had made friends, brought word to him that Maos sister was missing. It was as though he had shot himself with two rounds of his own ammo. The wounded man lay helpless, directly in front of the small opening from which the V.C. The Sergeant had made his announcement with a straight face, leaving his men to interpret it as they would. The film stars Michael J. 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. Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. She was in an advanced state of labor, the Lieutenant related, but she had been refused admittance to the hospital, on racial grounds, and she had eventually had her baby on the floor of its reception room. Continually, Eriksson recalls, he heard the familiar argument that the V.C. When I got up to the girl, I saw that her head was partially blown away, he testified. As he listened to her, he said, it had even crossed his mind to shoot her assailants, but then, he observed to me, Id have had the bodies of four men to justify. Asked in court for his thoughts during the period he had sat on the grassy turf, he testified, Well, sir, I was wishing I wasnt in the situation I was in. and wounding another. Gazing into the valley below, Rafe thought he spied a Vietnamese in a native type of straw hat standing in the stream. I made sure I wrote to him every day, and in each letter I put a packet of Kool-Aid, so that at least his water would be tasty. The only thing that could stop me was if I became a friendly casualty.. There was little pattern to the verdicts, each of the juries indulging in its own vagaries. It had built up sharply. Manuel received a sentence of fifteen years, his punishment for rape. Cipriano Garcia's 4-year sentence was shortened to 22 months. Boyd had been a big help, he told me. This arose when a defense witness, a sergeant in the platoon, said that Eriksson had none. 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? Q: I didnt ask you for a long elaboration. Thats where the woman was going in the early morning, but it was peacetime and it wasnt necessary either for her or for the peasant women she was with to smell the bodies that were always rotting for miles around, no one knew where, when I was in the Central Highlands. Subjects The weather had turned hot and dry, Eriksson remembers, and the interior of the courtroom throbbed with the whirr of electric fans. Wed had to support each other in a new way after she was killed. 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. . Since the patrol would be going out again, Eriksson said, he knew he had to act fast, but that seemed no big deal. munitions cache on Hill 192. agents, lawyers, and ballistics and firearms specialists. It was going to be a big outlay, considering the few men we were up against, Eriksson said. As for Manuel, who was fair-skinned and stockier than his cousin, his manner was on the jumpier side. The prosecutor, it appeared, counted it a safe bet that the defense attorneys would attempt to portray Eriksson as some kind of repressed nut for having failed to join in the festivities on Hill 192. Your prompt reporting of this serious incident to your superiors and subsequent testimony in court were essential elements in the apprehension and trials of the men responsible for this brutal crime. It was six in morning and dark. The father was away in Phu My market, the interpreter went on. She looked weary and ill, and she seemed to be getting more so by the minute. In any event, Eriksson went on, he lost little time in seeking out his friend Curly Rowan to tell him the story of Mao. But Rafe stayed, and again the moan and the sobbing, slightly diminished, rose from the hootch. In due course, they came upon Mao, her remains a rigid crescent settled grotesquely in a half nest of soil and rocks and matted foliage. The incident on Hill 192 refers to the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao, a young Vietnamese woman [1] on 19 November 1966 [2] by an American squad during the Vietnam War. It did not occur in the United States. He sounded as though the war would have to come to an end before his work could make much sense.. 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. incident on hill 192 where are they now. These varying decisions, it seemed, were attributable to a variety of factors, among them considerations of the defendants character and background. (Eriksson had done the same for Rafe at his trial in Vietnam.) 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. He was just more serious-minded. As it happened, the Captain heard about it from a second source as wellfrom Eriksson himself. Eriksson was determined to meet the Arizonans friend, he told me, for he had a feeling that the long-nosed chaplain was the man who would help him bring Maos case to light. Eriksson did not have sexual intercourse or harm her in any way.) Meserve and Clark denied any wrongdoing, and the leader of the misbegotten patrol insisted that his motives had been misconstrued. . He had scarcely landed in Vietnam, in October, 1966, when he was made aware of these occurrences, each of them apparently impulsive and unrelated to military strategy. The Vietcong, Loc said, had abducted her, accusing her of having led South Vietnamese forces to a V.C. Six months ago, he said, he had taken a Minneapolis bus home from work and, being very tired, had dozed off. Listening to the fellows, I had the feeling there might be any number of Meserves and Clarks around me, he said. Eriksson shook his head again. However, Maos sister, Phan Thi Loc, who was present, has done this at one of the trials. 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. Loc and her father had moved from their native hamlet; they now lived in a village several miles from there. went on, it was mild sentences that were the order of the day, and, what was more, they became even milder when they were up for review; safe and professionally idealistic back home, he said, the legal experts of military appellate bodies invariably looked with suspicion upon the administration of justice in war zones. It was rustling. I couldnt even guess at the answersnot without knowing what kind of jam Manuel thought he was in.. Yes or no? It turned out to be a letter of commendation. . I decided I was hearing an individual who wished he could have saved that girl but hadnt been able to, Kirk told me. He felt that way, he explained, because out in the field, in territory that could turn hostile at any moment, the men in the patrol would be very much on their own, and this would be so even if a high-ranking officer were in charge. Late one afternoon, when he and about twenty other G.I.s putting up a barracks were about to knock off for the day, he saw a fellow-carpenter, Boyd Greenacre, detach himself from the crew to have a talk with a passing chaplain, a blond, long-nosed six-footer wearing a captains bars; the two men, Eriksson could see, were on cordial terms. Manuel admitted to C.I.D. 7 years ago. The G.I. Thinking along these lines, Eriksson said, he arrived at a kind of strategy in regard to Mao. Later, after setting up camp in an abandoned hooch, four of the soldiers (excluding Storeby) took turns raping Mao. I couldnt tell who was supposed to have the hard feelingsManuel or myself, Eriksson told me. 971 Words4 Pages. 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. His break came after just a weekby accident, which was the only way it could come. That was the thing about the chain of commandyou couldnt tell who was to blame for what. investigators before the trial started that he had committed rape, but when the subject came up in the courtroom, it appeared to be Manuels judgment that he had taken part in a reasonable enterprise, and the justification that he gave for doing so was military discipline. However, in the last month or so, Rowan told Eriksson, the Sergeant, apparently undergoing changes, had exhibited a mean streak toward the Vietnamese; a couple of weeks before, Rowan said, Meserve had shot at and wounded one of them, giving as his reason afterward that he had felt like it. The way Curly talked about him, Meserve sounded as though he had become a kind of war casualty, Eriksson told me. They found the company commander, who had himself only just returned, waiting impatiently to confront them with Erikssons report. In 1989 Brian De Palma directed the film Casualties of War, which was based on Lang's book. For this action, Meserve was nominated for a Bronze Star. Three Vietnamese were spotted walking along the edge of the water, and though they wore no uniforms, Meserve assumed they were V.C., and he and his men, including Eriksson, opened fire on them. As for himself, Eriksson told me, Meserve had ordered him to a ledge from which he could overlook the complex as he trained his grenade launcher on two cave mouths in particular, either one of which, the Sergeant thought, could afford the entombed V.C. He was ten when his father suddenly died. It had nothing to do with a mans being responsible for his own behavior. . We made up something to get him to go away, Eriksson told me. A: I was in the rear of the column, and didnt have a chance. A: Well, in general, sir, [but] in this specific case. 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. 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.