At ten-thirty, a short distance below the summit of Hill 192, Meserve found what he was looking fora command post for the day. 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. see review David rated it liked it Nov 11, 2021 Glen rated it liked it Jan 29, 2014 Honorably discharged in April, 1968, this new war veteran, who is twenty-four and comes from a small farming community in northwestern Minnesota, isnt even sure that he would care to hold on to his recollections, if it were possible for him to control his memory. In the end, the four juries sitting at Camp Radcliff found the defendants guilty of one crime or another. Incident on Hill 192 explained On the way, Greenacre told Eriksson that the chaplain, Captain Gerald Kirk, came from Ogden, Utah; he was a Mormon, Eriksson learned, and so was Greenacre. He had barely begun it, however, when Clark, seeing the two in conversation, descended on them, demanding to know what they were talking about. Vorsts executive officer, by contrast, could not countenance the thought of Meserves being cashiered. The country we were moving through was mostly all shades of green, but we also passed arid stretches and, here and there, places that had been browned by napalm. I saw him raise his rifle, Rafe stated, adding that he then started toward Clark. Professor Furue and Colonel Finck also appeared as witnesses, to offer information based on clinical studies they had made of Maos skeletal parts in Saigon. Thomas remained free on bond during the trial, and court records showed that in exchange for his testimony he would only serve one year's probation. 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. 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. [1] The idea that came most easily to his mind was to continue in police work, in which he had been engaged since his days at Camp Radcliff, but on applying to the State Highway Patrol for a post as motorcycle cop he discovered that this was impracticable. Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. had shown for Erikssons safety be explained unless those cracks existed. However, Maos sister, Phan Thi Loc, who was present, has done this at one of the trials. The guys would back him up, of course. . He sounded genuinely concerned. Something else the prosecutor did was to advise him to see a psychiatrist before the trials started. Before Eriksson was through, even his possession of a sense of humor became an issue. The paintings made her unhappy, or, rather, they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed always to have been inside her.. Clark came back to where we were. That had to have some purpose. She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare, Eriksson said. Reporting another of Locs answers at the trial, the court interpreter stated, She said her sister have gold tooth, right side in lower jaw.. Later, after setting up camp in an abandoned hooch, four of the soldiers (excluding Storeby) took turns raping Mao. LANG, DANIEL (Author) Secker and Warburg (Publisher) Production date. 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. At times, Eriksson displayed a certain poise on the stand. To be sure, there were a few individuals, like Rowan, who shared his outlook, but the great majority saw things the way their officers did. The patrol and Mao shared the hootch that night, the girl spending it in a corner by herself. Other soldiers, he said, might just as easily have betrayed the weakness that the four men had betrayed on Hill 192, but it had fallen to Meserve and Clark and Rafe and Manuel in particular to act as they had. No such dismay was expressed. 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. It excited me. Impatiently, Clark volunteered his services, but Meserve wouldnt have that, insisting that they collaborate. Casualties of War - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia 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. Casualties of War - Wikipedia 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? Wed had to support each other in a new way after she was killed. At four-thirty the following morning, Meserve diligently checked his mens gear at the edge of camp, seeing to it that their chow, star clusters, rounds of ammunition, smoke and hand grenades, and other supplies were in order. A: Well, in general, sir, [but] in this specific case. 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. [15], "David E Gervase (1946-1981) - Find a Grave", "Report:Sailor-trial witness was in Vietnam rape-murder", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Incident_on_Hill_192&oldid=1147907196, This page was last edited on 2 April 2023, at 23:16. I figured somebody would have to be out there for security, because there were V.C. 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. I didnt know Eriksson brought it up. By the time he concluded his last appearance on the stand, he had been accused of lying, of cowardice, and even of Maos murder. 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. Casualties Of War Analysis - 971 Words | Internet Public Library 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. Uninitiated though he was in the ways of jurisprudence, Eriksson said, he found it odd that defense lawyers could freely engage him in conversation during court recesses, questioning him on subjects that he was later asked about under oath when the court session was resumed. 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. She ate, standing, and it was whimper, then eat, whimper, then eat. Besides, what if the four were court-martialled and found guilty? I was an inch too short. Somewhat gratefully, he went back to his prewar, and well-paid, job of cabinetmaking at the small department store. be ambushed. Who else would tell but myself? He saw now how wrong he had been in thinking that a report of rape and murder would evoke instant action, as in civilian life. 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. 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. Things will get sorted out, he said. The five-man squad, led by a 20-year-old sergeant, Tony Meserve, had been sent on patrol. She was pleased, she told me, that I had asked to hear about the episode involving Mao. I then heard the girl cry out, but not too loud, Rafe continued. [8] After finding Phan Thi Mao (21), they bound her wrists with rope, gagged her, and took her on the mission. Leave it to me. By the time I got out of jail, he told Eriksson, I was saying to myself, Whats happened is the way things are, so why try to buck the system? And take it from me, Eriksson, its even more hopeless to try to buck it in the middle of a wartheres more of a system then than ever. When they returned, Eriksson told me, they discovered that Clark was no longer alone in advocating Maos early demise. And who was the man who fired the last shot? He was at his wits end for a way to circumvent the system, Eriksson told me, because he was convinced that it was this system that lay at the heart of his difficulties. It could keep them from believing that life was so valuableanyones life, I mean, even their own. Rafe received a punishment of four years imprisonment, plus a monthly forfeiture of fifty dollars in pay. This was true of many farmers in the area, Mrs. Eriksson told me, adding that most of its inhabitants were of Scandinavian background. The mother, Eriksson told me, was waving a scarf and laboriously propelling herself forward. A small, pretty blonde with an alert, intelligent manner, she offered me coffee and cake the instant I set foot in the apartment. The land was very changeable. It was an abandoned hootch, eight feet square and eight feet high, with a window on the east side, a door on the west, and two slits facing north and south; there was a stream a few metres away, giving the patrol a ready source of water. Serving as radioman, he was in the vanguard with Meserve and Clark; Mao walked ten metres behind, wearily ascending the rugged terrain, with Rafe as her forward guard and Eriksson bringing up the rear. Thus, defense lawyers raised no objections when the prosecutor asked the defendants and the defense witnesses whether a soldier who was condemned for having committed civilian homicide, such as the killing of Mao, should be kept on as a member of the armed forcesthat is, should be permitted to go on committing military homicide. My height, Eriksson said. 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. The lawyers were playing a game, he said. Eriksson talked with me at his home in (I shall say) Minneapolis, where, since leaving the Army, he has been earning his living as a cabinetmaker at a local department store. . Loc and her father had moved from their native hamlet; they now lived in a village several miles from there. 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. They send you reeling from the theatre. Rafe subsequently testified that the Sergeant was in an expansive mood, cheerfully observing to his men that it wasnt every day he could rate artillery support and have himself a woman as well. INCIDENT ON HILL 192 (from my war diary) Incident on Hill 192 - Wikipedia. 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. After several minutes, the moan turned to a steady sobbing, and this did not cease until, after a half hour, Meserve reappeared in the open. 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. 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. He had wanted to tell of the way the episode with Mao had affected him, and why it was that he had felt impelled to report the othersfour young Americans like him, each dependent on the others for survival deep in enemy territory. The day continued eventful. I held a knife to her throat, he told the others. Among them, Eriksson said, these sizable elements, advancing toward the cave complex, succeeded in killing one V.C. Gazing into the valley below, Rafe thought he spied a Vietnamese in a native type of straw hat standing in the stream. When he opened his eyes, a new passenger was sitting directly opposite hima young Oriental woman. 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. in the area.. The pro-forma proceedings at Leavenworth took two days, at the conclusion of which the jury came in with a verdict of acquittal. In all four trials, the court records show, defense lawyers made a studied effort to depict Eriksson as less than lion-hearted, presumably on the theory that proving him to be craven would automatically exonerate their clients. 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. The incident on Hill 192 refers to the kidnap, gang rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao, a young Vietnamese woman on November 19, 1966 by an American squad during the Vietnam War. entered the caves, he said, the patrol had long ago left the vicinity of the curiously shaped rock formation, and had descended so deep into the valley that the men were practically able to touch the thick, rough outer walls of the caves. A smile spreading on his face, he took the scarf and stuffed it into Maos mouth. . He remembers that he talked with one of them while they were both shaving, and that in shooting the breeze with another he led the conversation around to Greenacre when the man mentioned that Arizona was where he dreamed of spending his first post-war vacation. 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. I thought again of letting her go, but what would I tell Meserve when he got back? wouldnt let me become a door gunner, Eriksson told me. We just looked at each other, without saying hello. incident on hill 192 where are they now. They found the company commander, who had himself only just returned, waiting impatiently to confront them with Erikssons report. . Maos sister, Phan Thi Loc, appeared as a prosecution witness, her very presence irrefutable evidence that Mao was not in fact living happily in her hamlet. She had lain moldering there for three weeks and her body was badly decayed. 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. 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. When she finished eating, she mumbled something in Vietnamese; maybe it was Thank youI wouldnt know. Between us, weve taken care of that whole family., Eriksson never did become a door gunner. He was just more serious-minded. Rafes sentence of eight years had been cut to four, and Meserves ten years had been trimmed to eight. I wanted to be very sure that he himself hadnt taken part in the rape. She was the big thing that had happened in the war for me, he told me. Incident On Hill 192 - amazon.com Incident on Hill 192 | Military Wiki | Fandom Twenty minutes later, they knew what it was. 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. In addition, Rafe flatly said, Eriksson could not see the girl, despite which, Rafe also testified, Eriksson stated, Oh, no, like he regretted that he had fired. Rafe himself let go with a burst from his M-16, which, inexplicably, caused his rifle to jam. Her fever and coughing had increased overnight, he said, and that didnt do her cause any good. 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. Much as he loved it, he told me, it was what he had been working at before he was drafted, and, as is often true of new war veterans, he felt restless and in need of a change. Lets kill her and get it over with, he said, according to the court record. 2023 Cond Nast. The soldiers set up a night watch, each man pulling guard duty outside in the moonlight, alert for any lurking enemy. In warat least, the war we were init was nothing unusual to hear shots that were unexplained, to find a body that might or might not have been shot in combat. She was real goodpretty clean, he said. 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. 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. Meserve saw to that, for a brilliant sun had come up, its glare exposing the bizarre party as clearly as it did the landscape. 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. 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. He was confident, he told me, that he stood a better chance of finding help there than in the confines of the platoon area. Enacting the role of chief government witness was not an edifying experience, Eriksson went on. This morning, Manuel carried his own. When Eriksson reaffirmed that he was, Kirk picked up his phone and called the Criminal Investigation Division office at Camp Radcliff. Then I thought of taking off together with her. or did he just refuse at all times? In April, Eriksson received his honorable discharge from the Army, and in April, too, he heard of further judicial developments. If he said no, he would appear to be disowning the defendants, his comrades-in-arms; if he said yes, he would in effect be telling the jury that he regarded the war as a public-works project for criminals. Naturally, Meserve said, if the men could spot any Vietcong in the open, that would be all to the good, but the patrols ordersand these had been spelled out in no uncertain terms by the battalion commandwere to avoid any shooting matches with the enemy except in self-defense; as a so-called pony patrol, he said, they were out to collect early-warning information concerning enemy intentions. She kept looking at me, as though she was trying to guess what my game could be. It was her first food since shed been taken away from her hamletit had been still dark then, and here it was the middle of the afternoon. They were her last. Impressed though he may have been, he heard Eriksson out with some skepticism, for before Kirk entered the Mormon priesthood he had spent ten years as a policeman on the Salt Lake City force. That leaves three to go.. Perhaps because Meserve had been the leader of the four accused, he came in for particularly heavy praise. 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. Daylight was coming on fast, and he wanted the girl in the light as little as possible, Eriksson told me. fellows knew about law, Eriksson said. I can assure you I wasnt being paranoid in thinking he might be shot in the back for seeing me. 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. Needless to say, the question was not examined philosophically in the Camp Radcliff courthouse; instead, it was employed narrowly as a government gambit for stumping a witness. 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. down a trail between two hedgerows when the patrol was suddenly fired upon from one side. It had to be on one of the two rocks that the girl lay, Eriksson knew, and to spare the others in the party unnecessary exertion he screened out the nearer rock by himself, doggedly plunging through formidable brush to reach it. When Mao saw me come into the hootch, she thought I was there to rape her, Eriksson said. 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. Meserve fought well that day. I listened to Svens story with a cops ear, the chaplain said. With Greenacre there, it meant that Sven was waiving his right to my silence, he said. I knew I had cut myself off from the rest of my patrol, refusing to go into that hootch, and I had this idea that the fellows were watching the place from the brush, waiting for me to make just one false move with Mao. The Heroes of Hill 192 - Warfare History Network Evacuated by a medical helicopter, he was flown to a hospital at Qui Nhon. 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. Even though the two were alone, Eriksson remained cautious, revealing nothing about Maos murder. Clark was holding her elbow, and he pushed her forward when Meserve ordered the patrol to get moving. . The Sergeant seemed more attracted by the possibility of military action, to judge by the speed with which he had his charges break camp. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.
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