The climb took longer than it had the day before, the mens pace slowed by the packs they bore. Eriksson was bound for Minnesota, for a month at home before his discharge in the spring, but when his plane put down at Seattle he found that he was ten dollars short for the final leg of his journey. 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. Q: For a murder. 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. Sometimes you hate the enemy so bad. Sprawled on the ground after the meal, Meserve, refreshed, glanced at his fellows and then, with a knowing smile, indicated the partly ruined structure. His parents stayed home plenty of Sundays.. The Sergeant had made his announcement with a straight face, leaving his men to interpret it as they would. Rafe, hospitalized at Qui Nhon, was already accounted for; Clark was to take a relatively rear-area post, at battalion headquarters; Meserve was to be shifted to another platoon. The judges had ordered that the incarcerated Rafe be given a new trial, which, like Manuels, was held at Fort Leavenworth. Books. Continually, Eriksson recalls, he heard the familiar argument that the V.C. rallied to the patrols defense that idea seemed less tenable. Meserve fought well that day. We were each acting the way we had to, he told me. Sitting by himself on a sofa, Eriksson smiled somewhat ruefully, a deep dimple forming in one cheek. We were on a plateau in the Highlands, and all around us were small mountain ranges, hazy and green. He said, We all figured we might be dead in the next minute, so what difference did it make what we did? 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. Now, six months later, Clarks case, forwarded from Vietnam, had been gone over in the United States by a board of review, which had reduced his term to eight years. That just shows you it isnt all combat over here. Meserves lawyer, pleading for his client immediately after this, spoke of the pressures on twenty-year-old sergeants. Itll do him good to talk to someone else, she said, her tone lively and teasing. A: Well, in general, sir, [but] in this specific case. Navigation - The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center & School We all looked at the paper, and he asked us what this was all about. 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. The G.I. . The Heroes of Hill 192 - Warfare History Network Another board might have found differently, a colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals office told me.) 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. depredations. This sentence was first commuted to 20 years, then reduced to eight, which made him eligible for parole after half that time. . There was little pattern to the verdicts, each of the juries indulging in its own vagaries. incident on hill 192 where are they now. You should know that the courage and steadfastness you demonstrated make me proud to have you a member of this division. . It was a six-hour trek, over difficult terrain, and when the men finally stood just below the summit, several of them, who were unaccustomed to tramping so long, were near exhaustion. 1989 Topics Trailer, Movie, Drama During the Vietnam War, a soldier finds himself the outsider of his own squad when they unnecessarily kidnap a female villager. For protective custody, they said., From that point on, Erikssons life in the Army was radically changed. Greenacre might react disapprovingly, as the fellows in the platoon hador, for all Eriksson knew, Greenacre might turn out to be Meserves best friend. 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. They send you reeling from the theatre. 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. . Yes or no? Thomas took Mao into a brushy area, and although he stabbed her three times with his hunting knife, he failed to kill her. (who escaped the following morning) wounded five Americans, and Meserve displayed considerable courage in rescuing the most seriously injured of them, a G.I. The enemy did the same thing, and much of the evidence for this came from the Vietnamese themselves. You traded the girls life for your well-being, he was told. I called him back and commended him on the job that he did and reported it, in turn, to the company headquarters.. For the film, all names and some details of the true story were altered. [6] It was during those proceedings that the victim was identified by her sister as Phan Thi Mao. 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. Besides, as the defense could not dispute, the jacket containing the explosive charge of a grenade launcher is made not of lead but of copper, and the search parties experts had found only the lead of numerous bullets from an M-16 rifle littering the immediate vicinity of Maos body. I listened to Svens story with a cops ear, the chaplain said. The poor guys guts were out, Eriksson said. Straggling uphill, he said, they gravitated toward their leader, who stood, unflustered, near the jutting rock formation, surveying the combat situation. He had yet to exonerate himself from the self-imposed charge of having failed to save Maos life. Rebuffed a second time, Meserve lashed out with an attack on Erikssons manliness, deriding him as queer and chicken. The attack didnt bother him, Eriksson told me, but it appears from the court record that it did affect Rafe, who testified that he could not have withstood the epithets he heard Meserve heap on Eriksson; it was his fear of such derision, Rafe stated, that caused him to join those who entered the hootch he had helped make tidy. In ten minutes, they were all together again; by then, too, the helicopters had grown larger and their engines were faintly audible. Vorst filled out transfer forms, and Eriksson signed them. Out on a search-and-destroy mission the morning after leaving Meserves command, Eriksson told me, he encountered a small group of American military men reconnoitring the vicinity of the cave complex. Clark appeared to be beside himself with anticipation, Eriksson told me, and Manuel and Rafe appeared less so. But the assertion was a hard one to prove, for Rafe was on hand to testify that Eriksson was so situated in that feverish moment that Mao wasnt even in his line of vision. 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. Gradually, though, the cops ear gave way to the chaplains. For Eriksson, the trials were totally unlike anything he had anticipated. Bunkers, trenches, trails that were not marked on maps, caches of enemy equipmentthese, too, were to be reconnaissance objectives. To do so, he believed, might only invite their censure, enforcers of the law though they were. Besides, she was in no condition to reach home or anywhere else. That was how my hunch went, and I didnt dare change it in any way. Eriksson moved cautiously. His questions didnt take longmaybe twenty minutesand when they were over he wrote down on a piece of paper, Has no speech defects, steady manner. Offering an evaluation of his own, Eriksson added, He seemed like a nice guy. They may be out in a few months, he said. She had the spark of life., The Oddballs and Odysseys of Charles Portis. 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. When Meserve ended his testimony, the prosecutor inquired how many times and to whom he had told the story you just told on the witness stand., Numerous times, sir, the Sergeant replied. Based on the notorious Hill 192 Incident during the Vietnam War in 1966, De Palma's Casualties of War takes on a much more serious and difficult subject than any of his other efforts and as far as I can tell seems to be his most mature work to date. 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. Deciding that he was looking at a V.C., Rafe let fly with a couple of rounds from his M-16 rifle. 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. At about the same time, other boards of review had dealt with Rafes and Meserves convictions. I held a knife to her throat, he told the others. Necessarily, he said, he was in a position to speak only of the behavior of American soldiers, since they were the people he fought and lived with. . Whatever the answers, Captain Vorst saw to it that Eriksson left his command early the following morning, sending the enlisted man seventy miles away to Camp Radcliff, the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division base, near the small city of An Khe. The lawyers were playing a game, he said. He might turn out to be dumb or brave or to have a wonderful stock of jokes. 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. Based on the actual events of an incident on Hill 192 in November, 1966. At the start, he spoke laconically, but gradually his natural reticence thawed out, and there were timesgenerally after one of his silenceswhen he produced such a burst of talk that it seemed to cost him an effort to bring it to a halt. Yours was not an easy task, but you did your duty as an American soldier. Loc was spared, but Mao was seized by the two soldiers, who bound her hands behind her back with a length of coconut rope. It will even he possible for them to join the Army again., Sven had to do what he did, Mrs. Eriksson said. *The Incident on Hill 192 is what the U.S army calls the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao. Sure, there were always advance plans to do this or that, but they didnt often stand up in the field. It might have influenced my thinking if Id had that information, but Im not sure. However, it was essentially intact, and Meserve quickly converted it into a weapons depot, dumping ammunition stocks, and also food supplies, on its dirt floor. 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. 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. see review David rated it liked it Nov 11, 2021 Glen rated it liked it Jan 29, 2014 Eriksson conceded, however, that the prospect of Meserves and Clarks freedom did disturb him. 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. They scare that discipline into you in basic training, Eriksson told me. There had been times when Id thought that if I had been in Vietnam longer than just a month when the incident took place I might have felt differently about ithad the same attitude, that is, as most of the fellows. 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. Similarly, it was permissible to shoot at any Vietnamese seen running, but, as Eriksson put it, the line between walking and running could be very thin. The day after the one on which his squad was ambushed and half its members were wounded, several enemy prisoners were taken, and, in retaliation, two were summarily killed, to serve as an example. A corporal who was still enraged over the ambush tried to strangle another of the prisoners; he had knotted a poncho, nooselike, around the captives neck and was tightening it when a merciful lieutenant commanded him to desist. Meserve saw to that, for a brilliant sun had come up, its glare exposing the bizarre party as clearly as it did the landscape. 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. Returning to the patrols briefing, Eriksson told me that Meserve was all business as he plunged into his talk. He was brand-new. At first, we all denied any knowledge about it. In one form or another, he said, they took place almost daily, but he was slow, or reluctant, to perceive that they were as much a part of the war as shells and targets were. This is how it is with Casualties of War, Brian DePalma's tale of an atrocity . incident on hill 192 where are they now | Posted on May 31, 2022 | exemple de mise en situation professionnelle fonction publique distribution sacs poubelles la rochelle 2021 Posted on May 31, 2022 | exemple de mise en situation professionnelle fonction publique distribution sacs poubelles la rochelle 2021 Q: You think your fear was apparent to anyone else? . It was the least I could doI had failed her in so many ways. It was maddening, Eriksson said, to realize that military discipline threatened to make Mao its victim again, just as it had on Hill 192, when all that certified Meserves orders was his rank as sergeant. LANG, DANIEL (Author) Secker and Warburg (Publisher) Production date. Eriksson saw Vorst shortly after the three soldiers left the company command post. All soldiers (excluding Storeby) were dishonorably discharged from the Army. Echoing the instructions that a battalion officer had given him earlier, the Sergeant informed the four men of the duties that each was expected to carry out, of the chain of command in the field, and of radio-communication arrangements with the platoon command, and then, consulting the grid cordinates of a map he was holding, the Sergeant described a precise westerly route that the patrol was to follow. He learned it, eventually, when the girls sister identified her at court-martial proceedingsproceedings that Eriksson himself instigated and in which he served as the governments chief witness. Events happened fast that day, Eriksson said. They said that door-gunner duty was too dangerousthat if I was going to be any use as a witness I had to stay alive., Eriksson recognized the abrupt transformation of his military life the morning after his meeting with Kirk. Category. (Asked by a C.I.D. Im not talking about any specific case. Captain Vorst handed Meserve a piece of paper with three words printed on itKidnapping, Rape, Murder. It turned out to be a letter of commendation. 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. Q : Well, you feel you are not involved in any way? wouldnt let me become a door gunner, Eriksson told me. That word handle! Eriksson said reminiscently. It was adduced that even before Meserve left for Vietnam he was regarded as an exemplary soldier, since he had been selected to march in President Johnsons inaugural paradean honor limited to two hundred men with unblemished records. Six months ago, he said, he had taken a Minneapolis bus home from work and, being very tired, had dozed off. Mostly to my lawyer.. 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. INCIDENT ON HILL 192 (from my war diary) They were just doing their job. Once the pair had assessed the gravity of the crimes being charged, they moved swiftly. Enacting the role of chief government witness was not an edifying experience, Eriksson went on. When she finished eating, she mumbled something in Vietnamese; maybe it was Thank youI wouldnt know. Although news of the incident reached the U.S. shortly after the soldiers' trials, the story gained widespread notoriety through Daniel Lang's 1969 article for The New Yorker and his subsequent book. Accordingly, at nine the group struck out for the cliff. Eriksson shook his head. He had no idea how long this feeling would continue, but for the present, he knew, he lived with the charge daily, often wondering how Mao might have fared in a time of peace. Invariably, Eriksson said, he found himself reproved for the deed. Hey, Sven, how do you know that girl wasnt a V.C. Moreover, Eriksson told me, the enemy soldier inflicted casualties on the infantrymen deployed around the cave complex, which was some two hundred metres long and had numerous mouths. Even though the two were alone, Eriksson remained cautious, revealing nothing about Maos murder. Meserve testified at his court-martial, The mother came out, like they always do, started crying, talking. You never knew whose turn it was to die, and that isnt how it was in rear areas. There shouldnt have been, because I had decided, outside, that there wasnt a thing in the world I could do for her. He was merely asking, Vorst said, but had Eriksson really thought through what he was doing in pushing his charges? 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. Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. Calmly and easily, he told Eriksson about an experience that he had undergone three years earlier, when he drove his wife, also a Negro, to an Alabama hospital to have their first child. 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. The girl looked so innocent, so calm, he testified. She looked weary and ill, and she seemed to be getting more so by the minute. 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. It could keep them from believing that life was so valuableanyones life, I mean, even their own. in the area.. 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. 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. It took an hour to negotiate the climb, and the group had barely attained the ridge when Rafe, his eyes sweeping the vista below, saw five Vietnamese in peasant dress making their way along a mountain trail toward the paddy fields near the stream. If he had known this, he thinks, he might have realized then, as he did later, that the Captain was in a bind; that is, he was torn between the dictates of his conscience, which condemned the crime, and concern for his Army career, which, Eriksson later discovered, the battalion commanderwho outranked Vorst, and who was also a liferwas in the habit of admonishing the Captain to bear in mind. Incident on Hill 192 - Wikipedia. He said for me to think that over again very carefully, Eriksson recalled. When you go out on a patrol, you aint going to be as good as you want to be, because these guys aint helping you do anything. Unreasonably, he granted, he had come into court with the idea that he and the others on hand would wonder aloud, in a kind of corporate searching, how it was possible for the young girl to meet the end she did. 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. Do you consider yourself braver than Eriksson?. Erikssons patrol leader delivered a tongue-lashing to his counterpart, who apologized. Possibly because of his coperative attitude at the trials, Rafe was given the lightest termeight years, for the crimes of rape and unpremeditated murder. Im not going to say that, sir. It did not occur in the United States. But caves werent all that the five men would he looking for. Fox and Sean Penn, and is based on the events of the 1966 incident on Hill 192 during the Vietnam War, in which a Vietnamese woman was kidnapped from her village by a squad of American soldiers, who raped and murdered her. . [11], Likewise, Gervase's initial sentence of ten years with hard labor was reduced to eight. 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. said something to the effect, You people acted like animals up there and do not deserve to live. He said he would have never learned about this but one man had the balls to tell [the officers] about it. Vorst was in the group, and Eriksson, detaching himself from his unit, went up to the Captain and told him about Mao. The only thing you could count on out there was that the unexpected would happen. Usually, Eriksson said, it took time for the unexpected to develop, but nowmore than half a day before the patrol was to leave platoon headquartersit happened with stunning abruptness. 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. Here, the C.O. Eriksson now believes he should have foreseen that sooner or later one of these incidents was bound to strike him with special, climactic force. Some Vietnamese people were bringing children out of. As for Manuel, who was fair-skinned and stockier than his cousin, his manner was on the jumpier side. In 1989 Brian De Palma directed the film Casualties of War, which was based on Lang's book. Since the verdicts would automatically come under review and the government might again need him as a witness, he was kept on in the post of military policeman at the division base. He told me that their bond was religion and that the interest each of them took in it had been heightened by their experiences in the war. Just who, I wanted to ask, was the man in Manuels patrol who started the shooting? Clark came back to where we were. Q: Why did you want other members of the squad to think you were a rapist? 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. These varying decisions, it seemed, were attributable to a variety of factors, among them considerations of the defendants character and background. With Greenacre there, it meant that Sven was waiving his right to my silence, he said. Eriksson remembers having a deep feeling of ease and calm, as though he were at long last ceasing to be a fugitive from injustice. De Palma handles this unsettling & disturbing fare with ruthlessness, making it an experience to remember. 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.

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