Elite unit savaged civilians in Vietnam:
Since the war ended, the American public has been fed a dose of movies fictionalizing the excesses of U.S. units in Vietnam, such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon. But in reality, most war-crime cases focused on a single event, like the My Lai massacre.
The Tiger Force case is different. The atrocities took place over seven months, leaving an untold number dead – possibly several hundred civilians, former soldiers and villagers now say.
One medic said he counted 120 unarmed villagers killed in one month.
For decades, the case has remained buried in the archives of the government – not even known to America’s most recognized historians of the war.
Until now.
The Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, if that means anything. I don’t know if it does, since official military records seem to be worthless these days.
I’ve glanced at the stories in the Blade: really just verification and detail of what most people should know to be true. And it’s not there weren’t cases of this in earlier wars.
Early in the Korean War, villagers said, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside.
When the families spoke out, seeking redress, they met only rejection and denial, from the U.S. military and their own government in Seoul. Now a dozen ex-GIs have spoken, too, and support their story with haunting memories from a “forgotten” war.
American veterans of the Korean War say that in late July 1950, in the conflict’s first desperate weeks, U.S. troops killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, trapped beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri.
In interviews with The Associated Press, ex-GIs speak of 100 or 200 or “hundreds” dead. The Koreans, whose claim for compensation was rejected last year, say 300 were killed at the bridge and 100 in a preceding air attack.