A Sobering Look at War, Officers, Politics and Injustice | Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War |...

The story stays with you | Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War | Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss

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	• Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss Back Bay Books, 2007 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Book With Flaws

I enjoyed reading this book, however I noticed some inaccuracies just as others have already noticed. I will not go over them again. I also question some other facts pointed out in the book such as the B-52's sighted landing and taking off at an air base in Viet Nam. I was not in Viet Nam in the 60's, but I believe the B-52 bases in the Southeast Asia arena were located in Thailand, Guam, and possibly the Phillipines. These errors, however small, point out the fact that the finished book was not proofread carefully before print and/or researched with impeccable care. If you miss the little facts, which big facts were wrong? I don't doubt there were atrocities committed by at least a few persons in the unit, but if the authors are making public these kind of charges, more care should have been taken. The other point I would like to bring out is that it is a good source to study the beginnings of small unit warfare and the problems encountered.

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A Sobering Look at War, Officers, Politics and Injustice

This book is thoroughly interesting. It is very well-written. I find it amazing that the information revealed in this book is still unknown to most Americans.

The story stays with you

After reading Tiger Force in almost one weekend I felt empathy at the same time angry and sorrowful with the accounts of what happened. It is best in my view to read the book with out stopping to think about it too much...this gives the reader maybe a slight sense of what it might have been like to be left in a land of terror, misdirection, and fatigue. When you turn the final page and read the last word, then stop and think, what would I have done.

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a daughter's view

The book is one huge fallacy. I agree that the small inaccuracies easily channel an observation of multiple errors and misleading information. What I find so disturbing is the number of people who have and will read this book with a predisposed opinion that it's factual. Their biased ignorance have clouded their mind and pushed this issue into a classic witch hunt. I am sickened of how perverse the media can be. I believe much of the information was based on a collection of very few facts, but these facts have undergone so much scrutiny that they have been stretched and stained by people's hunger for sensation. I wish that a greater crowd would become more objective before judging the lives of strangers whom they act so obsessed of condemning. It is pitiful to see Americans pitted against the men and women who have given their lives in order for the rest of us to sit in our ignorance, surrounded by our sinful indulgences and fat pockets. Who here, has killed a man to save one's life? Better yet, who here is willing to give their own life to protect the ignorance of a thousand strangers? The author of this book has only one opinion of a complicated and immense story... and his account of one of the men's childhood is so inaccurate it makes me feel sorry for the people that believe everything they read. I wish more of the truth was exposed so people could make better judgments, although, part of me feels it is irrational to even care. These authors cheapen the Pulitzer Prize. Regardless, they have done an amazing job at writing a believable lie.

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Sadly Enlightening

I think this was a book that definitely needed to be written--lest we forget. Despite the detractors from amongst some of the other Vietnam veterans, this story definitely deserved the Pulitzer. One of its main weaknesses, though, were the writers lack of technical knowledge of the war. But they weren't there, so what do you expect? However, it's been almost 38 years since I left Vietnan. I'm hard pressed to remember a goodly number of the details from my time there. Another small potatoes complaint I have is about some of the excessively flowery metaphors in the first part of the book. Stick to journalism guys. You're not going to be novelists. Besides, you make extremely good journalists--you've got the Pulitzer.

I think they did an excellent job of dissecting the pathology of a combat unit gone terribly, terribly wrong. When your command structure has gone to hell and the strongest characters in your unit are sociopathic at best and psychopathic at worst, you're in a place where most GI's would not want to be. I think it took a lot of courage and character to resist the leadership and strongest personalities of the unit who were intent on the murder of anyone who got in their way--including babies. By no stretch of any sane person's imagination were these honorable acts. Atrocities in the heat of battle, 1 or 2 bad apples in unit gone bad until disciplined by their commanders, etc., these are understandable. But this stuff in this book is as bad as My Lai. My Lai was basically only a one day incident where an Americal Division line outfit went berserk and killed somewhere around 500 people--which God knows is horrible enough. These Tiger Force atrocities were over a period of months. Their commanders clearly knew what they were doing and encouraged it. How far up the ladder it went, I don't know. But it sounds like the news probably got up to at least to the 101rst Division commander. The commanders are the ones whose doorsteps this blame should be laid upon. It was a failure at all levels, but damaged kids like Sam Ybarra always seem to have a way of finding a way into the military. It's up to the commanders to either straighten them out or weed them out. Otherwise, they're more guilty than the grunts committing the atrocities.

Most of the murdered Vietnamese appeared to be only guilty of being peasant farmers that didn't want to leave their land. Only those of the "gook hating" vet persuasion couldn't squeeze out a lot of sorrow for those innocent victims. Yet, I even felt sympathy for their pathetic murderers. So many of them had terrible lives after Vietnam. Drugs, booze, illness, early death.... Whether their pain was inflicted upon them by their own belated consciences or whether it was from the hauntings of the ghosts of their Vietnamese victims, we'll never know.
May all of their departed spirits find peace.

I would hope, though, that the commanding officers who made these events possible be brought to justice. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Next time we decide to march off to war in a patriotic fever, let's check to make sure that this war is really necessary. This applies not only to Vietnam, but also Iraq and many other past fool wars that we've gotten involved in.

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