But, as Eriksson pointed out, he could not give me many such first-hand accounts of V.C. Another defense attorney repeatedly taxed Eriksson with having fabricated his charges against Meserve and the others in order to escape further assignments to hazardous infantry missions. Time and again, at chow or during a break out in the field, someone would tell him (as Vorst had told him) that it was pointless to throw good lives after bad by having Meserve and the others up on charges, since (as Reilly had said) violence was the language of war, and, naturally, it could not always be controlled. The enemy did the same thing, and much of the evidence for this came from the Vietnamese themselves. It was as much a part of us as our legs and arms.. 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 girls nameher actual namewas Phan Thi Mao. By then, moving unhurriedly in the gray dusk, Meserves squad had dutifully followed him two thousand metres to the east, which, as Eriksson and the others realized, was a flagrant deviation from the westward route the Sergeant had described so precisely at the briefing. But they werent as sure about it as the guys in the platoon had been, he said. Moving in on the bush, Clark blazed away with his M-16, and at once the rustling foliage grew still. It was the final talk between the two men. Asked whether Meserve might not have been searching the hootches of Maos hamlet for the strictly military purpose of finding strange faces, he answered, I wouldnt say this, sir. interrogators had apprised him of various rights he had, among them the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer, the interrogators had neglected to mention that he was entitled to have an appointed lawyer, meaning one whose services would be free of charge. But. in the area.. In an affidavit that Manuel later signed, he stated, Clark gagged the girl to keep her from yelling out. Technically, I myself was a suspect, Eriksson told me. Reporting another of Locs answers at the trial, the court interpreter stated, She said her sister have gold tooth, right side in lower jaw.. Wild with rage, Reilly had tried to wreck the place, whereupon hospital orderlies summoned the police, and the new father was arrested and jailed. When Eriksson was able to state that he had put in for door gunner aboard helicopters, which could hardly be considered safe duty, the lawyer persisted in reminding him that you testified you wanted to get out of the platoon., Eriksson agreed. Better relax about that Vietnamese girl, Eriksson. At Rafes court-martial, it was disclosed that for several days the two patients in the hospital ward seemingly talked about whatever came into their heads but that Rafe never mentioned Mao. 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. 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. As if Sven had it so easy! Mrs. Eriksson said to me when she heard of these findings. Inevitably, though, the defense witnesses were unable to confine their remarks to Meserves service record, foralmost tactlessly, it seemedthe prosecutor would inject the topic of Maos murder, the implications of which had less to do with the conquest of an enemy than with the requirements of an ordered civilian life. . I had no idea where my unit was. 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. [12] He was paroled on August 9, 1969. I am not afraid of him if he has no weapons. Eriksson answered, That is negative, sir, when a defense counsel, taking up the pre-Hill 192 patrol in which half of Erikssons squad had been wounded, inquired, Isnt it true, Eriksson, that you allowed the squad to walk into the ambush area without warning, because you were hiding in the bushes?. 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. This time, he said, it would be Clark who would stay behind to guard Mao and the weapons in the hootch. He stated at the trial, From where I was, I observed Clark grab the girl by the arm and take her into the bushes nearby. The novel was published in 1969. 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. June 17, 2022 . I thought again of letting her go, but what would I tell Meserve when he got back? The "farm" houses and outbuildings have the polished look of some wealthy Parisian's country retreat rather than the more rugged appearance of a working farm. Film rights were bought by David Susskind who was to produce the film for Warner Bros. Pete Hamill wrote a script and Jack Clayton was to direct. And, in practice, neither Manuel nor any of the other defendants (nor Eriksson, for that matter) paid a cent for legal services. now had to do with law enforcement, for he was reassigned to the 545th Military Police Company at Camp Radcliff, in which outfit he guarded high-ranking officers, pulled gate duty, made periodic sweeps of the base area for signs of infiltrating V.C., and, every day at 4 P.M., climbed into the drunk wagon, which was an M.P. We had to answer to something, to someonemaybe just to ourselves., Before Eriksson saw the last of Fort Carson, he again acted as a witness for the government. Its time for some fun, he said. It had to be him, and no other chaplain, he recalled, smiling. . Greenacre was present throughout the talk, at Erikssons insistence. Naturally, Erikssons experiences in Vietnam were varied, and many of them impressed themselves vividly on his mind. Greenacre might react disapprovingly, as the fellows in the platoon hador, for all Eriksson knew, Greenacre might turn out to be Meserves best friend. 2023 Cond Nast. 192.com Alexa Rank 47,733 Domain WHOIS Registered with 123-Reg Limited on June 13, 1997 WHOIS updated on June 5, 2019 Domain expires on June 12, 2024 IPv4 Address Seeing him made me think at once of two questions I would have liked to ask him or his sergeant. Rowan listened with astonishment as Eriksson apprised him of the Sergeants plan, but when Eriksson asked his friend whether he thought Meserves statements should be reported to an officer before the patrol left camp, Rowan immediately shook his head, replying, as the court record shows, Meserve wouldnt dare do such a fool thing. This incredulity notwithstanding, the news of Meserves briefing left Rowan unhappy. 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. She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare, Eriksson said. Clark could knife the girl from the front, the Sergeant said, while he bayoneted her from behind; the body would then be tossed over a cliff from the summit of Hill 192, where the patrol had reconnoitred the previous day. All of us in the patrol had long ago stopped pretending nothing horrible had happened. 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. 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. Lets kill her and get it over with, he said, according to the court record. Enacting the role of chief government witness was not an edifying experience, Eriksson went on. Eriksson shook his head again. Helicopter crews might spot her. Before the patrol left the hamlet, a swarm of local children materialized, chattering agitatedly in a circle around Mao, and then out of the white hootch came Loc. Esri, HERE, Garmin, NGA, USGS, NPS. At ten-thirty, a short distance below the summit of Hill 192, Meserve found what he was looking fora command post for the day. Between us, weve taken care of that whole family., Eriksson never did become a door gunner. Some Vietnamese people were bringing children out of. Then the C.O. The structure was in a state of extreme disrepair, and had a number of large holes in its mud walls. The girl was very much with us when Sven came home that day, and maybe she always will be, Mrs. Eriksson said. . It did not occur in the United States. agents, photographers, a firearms expert, and a ballistics man. This was about 1400 hours, Manuel stated. [5] In 1970 Michael Verhoeven made the film o.k., based on the incident. Their testimony indicates that they were so inured to the epidemic, occupational violence of war that they found it hard to recognize their judicial plight as a type of retribution. Coming to me, the way he did, he might have been trying to save his neck by turning states evidence, so to speak. Kirk therefore interrupted Eriksson frequently, challenging him to tie together details that at first seemed contradictory. 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. Leave it to me. The ideas that came to him, he said, had less to do with jobs than they had to do with life, and he attributed this to the incident on Hill 192. Had he stopped to think of the consequences to himself of accusing four fellow-G.I.sthereby adding to that suffering? Yes or no? They were just doing their job. Once the pair had assessed the gravity of the crimes being charged, they moved swiftly. I held a knife to her throat, he told the others. 2. gcdc. As the others clustered around it, Eriksson withdrew to the fringes of the circle, made uncomfortable by everyones purposeful curiosity. Rafe had flouted the order against unnecessary shooting, confirming Erikssons observation that plans could mean little in the field and that out there any patrol was a unit only in theory. She began to weep, and backed away, cringing. 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. . 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. incident on hill 192 where are they now. Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. 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. Testifying in his own defense, Rafe stated, I was afraid to tell [the officer], because I might be the only one who brought it up. I called him back and commended him on the job that he did and reported it, in turn, to the company headquarters.. Among them, Eriksson said, these sizable elements, advancing toward the cave complex, succeeded in killing one V.C. We couldnt have gone very far, I realized, but it was going to be dark soon and we might find a hideout somewhere in the brush. The following day, in the midst of a firefight with the Viet Cong, Thomas and Gervase became worried that the woman would be seen with the squad. Mrs. Eriksson fetched it for me from a bureau drawer, and I read: 1: You are to be commended for the important role you played in seeing that justice was done in the recent court-martial cases involving four soldiers charged with the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman. Sitting by himself on a sofa, Eriksson smiled somewhat ruefully, a deep dimple forming in one cheek. . He said for me to think that over again very carefully, Eriksson recalled. He had barely begun it, however, when Clark, seeing the two in conversation, descended on them, demanding to know what they were talking about. As in all armies, he believed, it pervaded every facet of military life, embracing officers and enlisted men, volunteers and draftees, and, for that matter, men with college degrees, like Vorst and Reilly, and men with meagre educations, like Meserve and him. His manner became momentarily subdued when Meserve waved him in as the third man, but Clark was his jaunty self again when he returned. Theyd say there had never been a girl with the patrol, and Id be left looking crazy., Shifting uneasily on the sofa, Eriksson went on, When I stepped back into the hootch, I saw that Mao had made up her mind that I wasnt going to harm her. The patrol and Mao shared the hootch that night, the girl spending it in a corner by herself. Fortunately, he ran into a fellow-Minnesotan at the airport, an artilleryman with whom he had gone off to Asia thirteen months earlier; the artilleryman, also homeward bound, unhesitatingly lent Eriksson the ten dollars. Eriksson conceded, however, that the prospect of Meserves and Clarks freedom did disturb him. It would be open for a while, and then thered be sections so thick with thorny vines tearing at our clothes that we couldnt see each other, even though we were spaced no farther apart than you and I are, right here in this room. Around eight oclock, Meserve permitted his squad a half hours break for chow. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. His farewell to them was succinct. Given this confusion of values, the legalistic consideration of Maos death sometimes bordered on the incongruous. That this weak, coughing girl had overpowered me? Additional pictures were taken a week later, when Eriksson led a second pilgrimage to Hill 192. When Meserve and Clark rejoined their comrades, Eriksson told me, they had the bound Mao well in tow. down a trail between two hedgerows when the patrol was suddenly fired upon from one side. Two escaped, and the fifth man made it to the caves, where he holed up for a last-ditch stand. In daylight it was search-and-destroy missions, and at night it was setting ambushes for the enemy. It describes in detail the 1968 events that made up what the U.S. Army called the Incident on Hill 192, in which a forward patrol was found to have kidnapped a Vietnamese girl, raped her repeatedly, then murdered her to avoid being found out. When they returned, Eriksson told me, they discovered that Clark was no longer alone in advocating Maos early demise. 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. Loc and her father had moved from their native hamlet; they now lived in a village several miles from there. With Greenacre there, it meant that Sven was waiving his right to my silence, he said. She might have helped me know what to do, instead of my having to figure it out aloneit was her life that was at stake. In any event, Eriksson went on, he lost little time in seeking out his friend Curly Rowan to tell him the story of Mao. They send you reeling from the theatre. The incident on Hill 192 refers to 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. Of those who were asked the question, only Captain Vorst, lifer though he was, stated that if Meserve was guilty of rape and murder, then he did not care to have the Sergeant in his command. The weather had turned hot and dry, Eriksson remembers, and the interior of the courtroom throbbed with the whirr of electric fans. 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. Looking back, Eriksson thinks that the small band of V.C. Storeby also recalled that Gervase claimed it would be "good for the morale of the squad. 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. The corpse itself was placed in an Army casualty baga rubberized olive-drab shroud, originally designed for fallen soldiers. The evidence gained as a result of the two field trips played an important part in the judicial proceedings, Eriksson told me. He has yet to come to terms with the incident on Hill 192, Eriksson told me. 1970. Eriksson told me that he felt weary at the mere prospect of reappearing as a witness a year after the Radcliff trials. The mother wept and pleaded, and her daughters, clinging to one another, cowered against the wall. munitions cache on Hill 192. I knew I wouldnt rest until something was done about Maos murder. 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. 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. It was rustling. The four soldiers visitation lasted nearly an hour and a half, and two minutes after it was terminated the men, to conceal themselves from any Vietcong who might be in the vicinity, rentered the hootch together. I needed more of an impression of Boyd than I had, Eriksson said. Acting fast, he sent Manuel backtracking to the summit to tell Eriksson and Rafe to report to him with Mao. His reaction interested me, Eriksson said. 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. He said, We all figured we might be dead in the next minute, so what difference did it make what we did? It was like living in an overorganized junglefull of names, ranks, and serial numbers but not much else., Dispiriting though he found the atmosphere in the platoon area, Eriksson went on, there were traces of conscience there. (Asked by a C.I.D. Those baskets could get awfully heavy, Eriksson recalled. Before Eriksson was through, even his possession of a sense of humor became an issue. On November 22nd, Meserve, Clark, and Manuel, weary from their five-day stint (Rafe was still hospitalized), had scarcely dropped into their foxholes back in the platoon area when they were ordered to appear at Captain Vorsts command posta hootch somewhat larger than Reillys but equally bare. Nor could the concern that the C.O. The mother, Eriksson told me, was waving a scarf and laboriously propelling herself forward. I had to give one small child mouth-to-mouth respiration and bring her back to life. In the case of Manuel (the father of a three-month-old girl), this attitude of mystification became so palpable that the prosecutor finally inquired, Do you feel you are involved in any way in this rape and murder? To which Manuel replied No..
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