He might turn out to be dumb or brave or to have a wonderful stock of jokes. His parents stayed home plenty of Sundays.. 1. 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. And wasnt it just possible that the victim might not necessarily be Eriksson himself but, rather, his new bride? View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Created by: TrentLane Added: 26 Aug 2021 Find a Grave Memorial ID: 231233841 Sponsored by Jennifer Brown Source citation I figured somebody would have to be out there for security, because there were V.C. A moment later, the two groups went off in different directions. agent, poking through leaves with a bayonet, found teeth, finger bones, and yet more bullet fragments, all of which he deposited in a plastic bag. Events happened fast that day, Eriksson said. 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. . There was little pattern to the verdicts, each of the juries indulging in its own vagaries. . Their eyes were terrified, Eriksson remembers. He called me back in a few minutes, or a couple of minutes, and informed me that he could not catch the girl, that he had had to shoot her. 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. It had been preceded by any number of similar occurrences. But. Manuel showed no initiative in that regard, Eriksson told me, his attitude toward authority being simple and automatic: he heeded it devoutly. Eriksson had considered the jutting and twisted rock a highly unusual one, but now, refamiliarizing himself with his surroundings, he saw, to his surprise, that it had a practically identical twin close by. These guys right here are going to start laughing you out. The men found her feverish and coughing, and Clark was all for rescheduling her death hour to that evening. Acting on this, he enrolled in a non-credit course at the University of Minnesota designed to teach adults with an inadequate education how to study. Its a part of the country where we pride ourselves on not being demonstrative, she said. For protective custody, they said., From that point on, Erikssons life in the Army was radically changed. When he spoke, however, it was about his friendship with the Marine. Late one afternoon, when he and about twenty other G.I.s putting up a barracks were about to knock off for the day, he saw a fellow-carpenter, Boyd Greenacre, detach himself from the crew to have a talk with a passing chaplain, a blond, long-nosed six-footer wearing a captains bars; the two men, Eriksson could see, were on cordial terms. I simply asked, do you think a murderer should be retained in the United States Army? He had scarcely landed in Vietnam, in October, 1966, when he was made aware of these occurrences, each of them apparently impulsive and unrelated to military strategy. In a matter of seconds, the shooting broke off, and another patrol, consisting of another squad in Reillys platoon, emerged from behind the hedgerow. It might have influenced my thinking if Id had that information, but Im not sure. 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. No such thing happened. We all looked at the paper, and he asked us what this was all about. Its obey the man over you, follow the chain of command, or into the stockade you go. Something that added to his feeling of frustration in those trying weeks was that he could not find it within himself to single out Vorst as the arch-villain, from whom all evil flowed. He didnt laugh and joke as much as the other guys did; he was much quieter, the sergeant said. It was an awkward moment, Eriksson said, and Clark terminated it. However, in the last month or so, Rowan told Eriksson, the Sergeant, apparently undergoing changes, had exhibited a mean streak toward the Vietnamese; a couple of weeks before, Rowan said, Meserve had shot at and wounded one of them, giving as his reason afterward that he had felt like it. The way Curly talked about him, Meserve sounded as though he had become a kind of war casualty, Eriksson told me. Evacuated by a medical helicopter, he was flown to a hospital at Qui Nhon. Unless Eriksson went along with the others, Meserve warned, he would run the risk of being reported a friendly casualty. Clark seconded this vociferously, and both Diazes concentrated puzzled stares on the difficult member of the patrol. 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. It had to be him, and no other chaplain, he recalled, smiling. Category. 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. You traded the girls life for your well-being, he was told. The Captaina lifer, or career Army manhad left instructions that he was to be sent urgent messages only, but shortly after Eriksson took leave of Reilly, the Lieutenant, confident that the murder merited his superiors attention, radioed word of it to Vorst. He had a wild mannerhe couldnt stand still, and his eyes looked every which way. 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. He had yet to exonerate himself from the self-imposed charge of having failed to save Maos life. No one would ever know what had become of her, he exclaimed. 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. Incident on Hill 192 explained So now its only the father whos leftor is he? She began to weep, and backed away, cringing. The pro-forma proceedings at Leavenworth took two days, at the conclusion of which the jury came in with a verdict of acquittal. 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. Sure, there were always advance plans to do this or that, but they didnt often stand up in the field. He was paroled on June 18, 1970. 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. His reaction interested me, Eriksson said. It was Manuel, Eriksson told me. [1] Although news of the incident reached the U.S. shortly after the soldiers' trials,[3] the story gained widespread notoriety through Daniel Lang's 1969 article for The New Yorker[4] and his subsequent book. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. It could keep them from believing that life was so valuableanyones life, I mean, even their own. I held a knife to her throat, he told the others. Asked why, he answered, O.K., lets say you are on a patrol. Besides, she was in no condition to reach home or anywhere else. 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. . Bunkers, trenches, trails that were not marked on maps, caches of enemy equipmentthese, too, were to be reconnaissance objectives. Fortunately, he said, his assignments involved no murder or rape cases. You want her gold tooth? Clark called over his shoulder to Rafe, who was then, he testified, a foot away and was staring, aghast, at Mao. . In that season, Eriksson told me, when the M.P.s yakked the hours away together in their quarters, one or another of his fellow-cops would periodically recall what Eriksson had chosen to do. 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. 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. I wanted to get out of the platoon, he stated. Did Eriksson know that military judges and jurors were notoriously lenient in their sentencing? . He has yet to come to terms with the incident on Hill 192, Eriksson told me. 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. I couldnt tell whether it was Charlie or the girl, Rafe testified. A good nights rest might do wonders for Maos health, he pointed out, in which case he, for one, wouldnt mind revisiting her in the morning. It was another case of people doing their job, he told me. And then there was Vorsts invitation to Eriksson to transfer out of the company. Well, during this Operation Thayer II, which started [last October], we ran into a hootch that was burned down. Only Manuel would remain anywhere near Eriksson; he was being reassigned to a different squad in the same platoon. Again according to Eriksson, Clark was given to quick movements and to seemingly abrupt decisions that reflected Meserves thinking in an exaggerated form. He is a short man of fair complexion, blond and blue-eyed, and he is not voluble. The pair had emerged empty-handed from five or six of the huts when Rafe, ever his amiable, accommodating self, pointed to a white hootch ahead and called out, Theres a pretty girl in there! The two other G.I.s in the combat team were a year younger than Eriksson, who was then twenty-two. Conscience was one thing that crossed over from civilian life to war, he said. That this weak, coughing girl had overpowered me? in the area.. They hadnt ever heard Maos voice or seen her carrying Manuels pack.. Meserve testified at his court-martial, The mother came out, like they always do, started crying, talking. Technically, I myself was a suspect, Eriksson told me. Having appeared as a witness before four tribunals in Vietnam, Eriksson told me, he had had his fill of the judicial processof the dogged grillings by lawyers and the repeated strictures of judges insisting on precise answers to questions that were often vague. But caves werent all that the five men would he looking for. 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 He was Sergeant Tony Meserve, a slim, black-haired man of medium height who was twenty years old and came from a town in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. they said if you were fortunate enough to get in a group where you had an old-timer who had been in Vietnam like six months longer than you had, if you followed what he said, you would live longer. Besides, Manuel testified, If he had not gone into the hootch he would have risked becoming an outcast. Sometimes you have your disagreements, and sometimes you dont voice them, you keep them to yourself.. Returning to the patrols briefing, Eriksson told me that Meserve was all business as he plunged into his talk. Incident Hill 192 by Daniel Lang - AbeBooks I had to give one small child mouth-to-mouth respiration and bring her back to life. Ending the first of his brooding silences, Eriksson said, From one day to the next, you could see for yourself changes coming over guys on our sidedecent fellows, who wouldnt dream of calling an Oriental a gook or a slopehead back home. He still has a tendency to fight off its memory, he said, and he thinks the reason for this is that although the experience he had may have revealed certain strengths in himself, he is far more concerned with the limitations it exposed. and went out to check, and she got away from you, right out of the hootch?. Meserve stated that we would get the woman for the purpose of boom boom, or sexual intercourse, and at the end of five days we would kill her. And in Manuels testimony one finds: After we were briefed by Meserve, he said that we would take a girl with us on patrol, or that we would try to take a girl with us to have some fun. Q: How did you react to this particular ambush, Eriksson? Mostly to my lawyer.. Arrested by military policemen at scattered points, the four soldiers passed through Vorsts area in the late afternoon and saw the Captain briefly. For a number of months, though, he found it less than exhilarating to pick up where he had left off. Thus, it assumed pertinence that Meserve came from an impoverished home and that his father had deserted his mother, and the members of his board of review learned, further, through material furnished them by the commanding general at Fort Leavenworth, that the former sergeant had gone through the ninth grade, had no police record, was a lapsed Roman Catholic, had worked in a cannery in upstate New York, and had saved five thousand dollars while he was in the Army, and that he was confident that even though war was a brutal business. It was also noted that, like Meserve, Clark was the product of an impoverished and broken home. had shown for Erikssons safety be explained unless those cracks existed. Sitting by himself on a sofa, Eriksson smiled somewhat ruefully, a deep dimple forming in one cheek. Of course, I was a foot soldier all this time. Yes or no? Eriksson remembers having a deep feeling of ease and calm, as though he were at long last ceasing to be a fugitive from injustice. Going about their tasks with unrelieved efficiency, the men staked out an area thirty feet square in which to conduct their operations, soon gathering a harvest of clues, among them lead fragments of spent bullets, for the ballistics and firearms men, and parts of Maos remains, for the pathologists. Clark, convicted of rape and premeditated murder, was to serve for life. PNP Change of Command Ceremony and Retirement Honors for - Facebook 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. Clark was holding her elbow, and he pushed her forward when Meserve ordered the patrol to get moving.
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incident on hill 192 where are they now