This was difficult to put down. I can't add much more than the other reviewers have written. I did question some of the "thoughts" that are put in the heads of men who were dead before the book was written. I felt that detracted from the authenticity of the work.

However, the cover ups that took place after the initial investigation and after the most recent one are not surprising but are disturbing. Don't the leaders get it? Practices will not change for the better if mistakes of the past are not recognized.

As for winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, this volume is full of more information why that could never happen and I will not be surprised if I read books in a few years telling the same troubling occurrences taking place in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oops! Those stories are already in the press. ( )

Tiger Force was disappointing to me. Billed as a group of high-speed special operators, the Tigers were in reality, I came to understand very early in the book, merely a regular leg infantry scout platoon. Every battalion's got one. That set the book out on the wrong foot because from the dust jacket to the first chapter, you realize the authors have churched it up for the sake of sensationalism.

The book was well researched and written, though, and an interesting story.

In all, I think the authors put too much focus on portraying the atrocities committed as the result of psychotic soldiers run amok without supervision and just mentioned in passing the institutional and higher level leaders who set the conditions in which this type of horror can take place.

Let's not forget the Stanford Prison Experiment, or the Milgram Obedience Experiment, which makes quite clear that good, well-meaning, and average people will do unconscionable things if the environmental conditions are set in ways that foster those behaviors.

So this is a decent read, but it is an expose--it is investigative journalism doing the work of investigative journalism, NOT the work of war narrative or of military history.

Tiger Force was too sensationalized for me. ( )

Expertly written and impeccably sourced. The authors are likely deserving of their Pulitzer, even if only for remembering to make history readable and accessible, humanizing the key players without passing judgment. Raises a thousand questions that undoubtedly nobody wants answered. Just the most obvious: to what extent is command culpable for the actions? Where does the admittedly great responsibility of the ground troops end? Why were the incidents swept under the rug in the name of "closure"? And had these revelations come out contemporaneously, would we still be witnessing abuses in our current military situations? ( )

In 1966 the 45-man elite platoon Tiger Force was organized in Vietnam to "out guerrilla the guerrillas." Hopped up on amphetamines as well as the sanction of superiors, members of Tiger Force intentionally killed helpless unarmed civilians, raped, beheaded, scalped, and in general spent seven months perpetrating every sort of atrocity, unchecked by higher authorities. After the war they were investigated, but never charged. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to prosecute; he did not want the matter publicized. Nevertheless, Toledo Blade reporters Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss and John Mahr exposed the whole matter in their Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in 2003, from which this book is derived. The cruelty is endless. The crimes are unpunished. Read it and weep.

(You can read the original articles at http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE. You can also read an interview with the authors at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/24/weiss/index.html. The Salon Mag interviewer points out that the investigation was reopened after their award-winning series, but it hasn't moved forward in two-and-one-half years. He asks them, "Realistically, is the investigation over?" Weiss: "Realistically, it's dead -- this is the Bush White House.")

(JAF)

This was an interesting book my wife bought me for Father's Day. There was obviously a lot of research done in putting the book together. ( )