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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. The incident on Hill 192 is the name the United States Army called 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. Eriksson considers himself hazy about the girls looks. Out of the blue, without being asked, hed start defending what hed done maybe hours ago by saying that, after all, it was no worse than what Charlie was doing. The next thing I knew, I was in jail, Eriksson told me. Journalist Daniel Lang brought this to further public attention with a 1969 article in The New Yorker entitled Casualties of War . Released from jail in a few hours, he found himself no longer a lone, underground accuser but, instead, a cog in an elaborate law-enforcement machine, whose purpose was to gather evidence, question suspects, and generally determine whether a case existed. 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. His parents stayed home plenty of Sundays.. Here is the interchange between the executive officer and the prosecutor: Q: Do you feel there is a place in the United States Army for any murderers? We were each acting the way we had to, he told me. Commanding, Erikssons tour of duty in Vietnam came to an end on November 28, 1967, a year after the patrol paid its visit to Maos hamlet. 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. Asked why, he answered, O.K., lets say you are on a patrol. 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. Vorst was in the group, and Eriksson, detaching himself from his unit, went up to the Captain and told him about Mao. Apocalypse Now 1979. Q: Why did you want other members of the squad to think you were a rapist? Ordering Eriksson and Rafe to clean up the hootch, and leaving Mao in their charge, the Sergeant went off with Clark and Manuel to have a careful look around. 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. "Casualties of War" is Brian De Palma's entry into the Vietnam War movies competition. He hopes to open a small carpentry shop of his own in several years, but, ideally, he would like to be a farmera career that he doubts he will ever be able to afford. Q: I didnt ask you for a long elaboration. Eriksson was not called upon to testify this time, and this was a vast relief, he told me, not only because he was eager to get on with his civilian life but because it looked to him as though Rafes rehearing would be a duplication of Manuels second trial; that is, with Rafes tainted admissions thrown out, the governments arguments would be undermined and a verdict of acquittal brought in. Events happened fast that day, Eriksson said. He does remember, though, that she had a prominent gold tooth, and that her eyes, which were dark brown, could be particularly expressive. At the time the fifth V.C. All rights reserved. [12] He was paroled on August 9, 1969. Manuel admitted to C.I.D. 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. Using the upper one as a vantage point, they spied the small band of V.C. When the two men were aloft and sitting side by side, the artilleryman suddenly glanced at Eriksson with fresh interest and said, Say, werent you the guy who turned in that patrol? What conclusions may be drawn from "The Incident on Hill 192," as the war crime was known at the time of the courts-martial? No matter how close the questioning, and no matter how detailed the testimony he gave, or heard, it all seemed related to Maos murder in only a surface sense. The hootch contained a table, a low bench built against a wall, and tattered remnants of a straw mat strewn in a dark corner, and the dirt floor was littered with scrap metal, rocks, and cans. 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. He had stopped the shooting as soon as he heard an American voice yell Hit it! Still fuming as the two patrols stood facing each other awkwardly, Erikssons sergeant declared that in all the time he had spent in Vietnam he had never before experienced any such mistake. As Eriksson waited for his sergeant to cool off, he idly scanned the men in the other squad, his eyes stopping abruptly when they met the expressionless gaze of a familiar face. 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. see review David rated it liked it Nov 11, 2021 Glen rated it liked it Jan 29, 2014 Straggling uphill, he said, they gravitated toward their leader, who stood, unflustered, near the jutting rock formation, surveying the combat situation. In daylight it was search-and-destroy missions, and at night it was setting ambushes for the enemy. 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. Nor could the concern that the C.O. Casualties of War: Incident On Hill 192 Dolce Vanity 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. The atrocity that Eriksson had reported was too big for that. 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. All that awaited decision, Meserve went on, was the moment and method of the girls murder, but, whatever was settled on, the Sergeants thought was to have Eriksson do the job; if Eriksson refused, Meserve said, he would be reported as K.I.A.killed in action. He was brand-new. This meant going to platoon headquartersthe home of four squads, and only a few minutes walk from company headquarters, where there were officers who outranked Reilly, the platoons lone lieutenant. Locs mother was now missing. He was 34 years old. 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. Did Eriksson know that military judges and jurors were notoriously lenient in their sentencing? He thought of her as his plane, full of singing soldiers, took off from Cam Ranh Bay and he held his last look at the unhappy land below. His persistence in reporting the crime to higher authorities eventually resulted in general courts-martial against his four fellow squad mates. 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. Weiss Causualties of war Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2013 Verified Purchase The movie "Casualties of war" (1986) A: Well, no, sir, until theyvenot until they serve their sentence. 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. Pretty soon, youre going to be an outcast from the platoon. I figured somebody would have to be out there for security, because there were V.C. . Q: Did he endeavor to actively join in with the free-time activity of the rest of the people, or did he have to be coaxed. In fact, it would have been difficult to find any other kind in Vietnam, since the Army was dispensing such benefits all over the place. When Meserve had been convicted but not yet sentenced, he was asked by the law officer, Is there any particular thing that you would like to tell the court? Standing before the bench, Meserve replied, Well, sir, Ive seen a lot of killing, which it is our duty to do, because its kill or be killed. They scare that discipline into you in basic training, Eriksson told me. War crimes such as the Incident on Hill 192 (dramatized in the equally harrowing Casualties of War ), the My Lai Massacre, the Shelling of Highway 1, the Phoenix Program, and many more all involved the torture, rape, and mass murder of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. In turn, the sergeant passed the news on to Lieutenant Reilly, who sent for Eriksson. One of the soldiers stabbed her three times, and when defense counsel challenged Eriksson at the court-martial proceedings to describe the sound that the stabbings made, he testified, Well, Ive shot deer and Ive gutted deer. However, a board of review in Washington, made up of three senior officers, had noticed the C.I.D.s oversight, and it had resulted in a second chance for Manuel. . (Eriksson had done the same for Rafe at his trial in Vietnam.) Where we were, it was a time and place for thousands of men to play for keeps, and that certainly included Meserve and the others in the patrol, because if they wanted to eliminate Sven as a potential witness they had the M-16s to do it with., Eriksson finished telling his story to the chaplain toward midnight, whereupon Kirk pressed him closely, as Vorst had done earlier, to determine whether he was certain in his mind that he was prepared to endure not just the cross-examinations but the risks attendant upon appearing as a government witness in open court. It turned out to be a letter of commendation. Cross-examining, the prosecutor asked, When you say he didnt have a sense of humor, you mean he wasnt a jokester, running around making or seeing the funny side of everything?. or did he just refuse at all times? But. Wed had to support each other in a new way after she was killed. Incensed, the Sergeant uttered the first of a series of threats.