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 simply asked, do you think a murderer should be retained in the United States Army? 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. She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare, Eriksson said. There, corpsmen deposited him on a bed alongside that of a battalion officer he knew and liked. It had to be him, and no other chaplain, he recalled, smiling. Sounding as though he felt he would be years mining its lessons, he told me, I decided that whatever jobs Id get, they werent going to be as important to me as the way I lived. Conscience was one thing that crossed over from civilian life to war, he said. Accompanied by troops of the South Vietnamese government, the two women had eventually come to the hootch on Hill 192, where they had found Maos brassiere, flecked with blood; the troops had burned down the hootch. That word handle! Eriksson said reminiscently. Sprawled on the ground after the meal, Meserve, refreshed, glanced at his fellows and then, with a knowing smile, indicated the partly ruined structure. Translating the testimony of Loc, who was two years younger than Mao, an interpreter informed the court, She said they come in, use flashlight and shone around the house and saw her mothers face and her sisters face and all of them wake up at the same time. 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. [12][13], Gervase died on March 23, 1981. No doubt, Eriksson said, the close brushes that he and his friend had been through had something to do with this, but in his own case he had been deeply impressed while he was overseas by what he called an upside-down mentality, which he believed explained the general unconcern there about incidents like the one he had taken part in. Loc and her father had moved from their native hamlet; they now lived in a village several miles from there. I saw that Clark had his hunting knife hidden in one of his hands. It was in the next seconds that deer-gutting sounds issued from the bushes. In due course, they came upon Mao, her remains a rigid crescent settled grotesquely in a half nest of soil and rocks and matted foliage. Acknowledging the danger in which Eriksson had placed himself, the Lieutenant told him, If I sent you out with that patrol, youd never make it back.. Just who, I wanted to ask, was the man in Manuels patrol who started the shooting? In the meantime, Erikssons orders placed him on temporary duty with a carpentry detail that was constructing additional housing for the base, whose population came to twenty thousand. He said it would be good for the morale of the squad.. It was also noted that, like Meserve, Clark was the product of an impoverished and broken home. He himself, he imagines, must have looked glum. 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. 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. 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. In recalling it for investigators later on, Manuel stated, He told us he had attempted to keep the incident quiet but that now he couldnt give us any further advice or help. The M.P.s took the enlisted men to the Provost Marshals office at An Khe, where they were given an initial interrogation before being remanded to the stockade at Long Binh. Hey, Sven, how do you know that girl wasnt a V.C. They lingered in it longer than they had in the other hootches, but since Eriksson was standing outside the hut he is unable to describe what went on inside. A: Well, no, sir, until theyvenot until they serve their sentence. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories, Like their predecessors in all wars, American veterans of the Vietnamese campaign who are coming home to civilian life have their heads filled with memories that may last the rest of their days, for, no matter how far from the front a man may have spent his time as a soldier, he will remember it as a special time, when, fleetingly, his daily existence appeared to approach the heroic. It was certainly possible to do so, as I knew for myself from having read the court record of the trials he had brought about: seven bulky volumes in the offices of the Clerk of Courts, U.S. Army Judiciary, in Falls Church, Virginia, which included Erikssons testimony against the members of the patrol; their convictions and appeals; interminable correspondence between judges and opposing counsel; and depositions concerning the character of individual defendants. Q : You feel that the government has done you a grave injustice in bringing you here today for trial? He also remembers that she was wearing dusty earrings made of bluish glass; he noticed the trinkets because they gave off a dull glint one bright afternoon when he was assigned to stand guard over her. Through an interpreter, Loc related that after the patrol finished with their hamlet, she and her mother had searched desperately for Mao. 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. His discontent abated when he managed to remind himself of the plan he had made during his leave to reach out beyond his jobs, whatever they might be. 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. It was to take them, ultimately, to Hill 192a height, in the Bong Son valley, that overlooked a ravine laced with a cave complex, which was suspected of serving as a Vietcong hideout. It was the same sentence he had been serving, but now, having been transformed into a new verdict, it was subject to another review, the effects of which soon worked to Rafes advantage, for in August, 1969, the commanding general at Fort Leavenworth shortened his term to twenty-two months. Daniel Lang's "Incident on Hill 192" - YouTube For protective custody, they said., From that point on, Erikssons life in the Army was radically changed. In 1966 in Vietnam, a squad of five American soldiers, lead by Sgt. All the others in the patrol had raped or killed her. 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. His parents stayed home plenty of Sundays.. 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.