Meserve was now an ally, he and his second-in-command apparently having arrived at a meeting of minds while the others were filling the patrols canteens. Seeing him and Greenacre chatting together, Eriksson went on, had made him realize that the only chance he had of escaping the chain of command was through a chaplain. 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. In addition to the occasional remarks he heard in the police barracks, a train of other developments served to remind him of the girl. A: Sir, Sergeant Meserve, he joined the unit in approximately February of last year, and he served under me when I was a rifle-platoon leader, and the reason he is a sergeant today is because we put the duties of squad leader upon him. The poor guys guts were out, Eriksson said. The five-man squad, led by a 20-year-old sergeant, Tony Meserve, had been sent on patrol. It was based on the actual incident on Hill 192. Eriksson did not have sexual intercourse or harm her in any way.) Meserve and Clark denied any wrongdoing, and the leader of the misbegotten patrol insisted that his motives had been misconstrued. 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. We all looked at the paper, and he asked us what this was all about. Q: Did he endeavor to actively join in with the free-time activity of the rest of the people, or did he have to be coaxed. Time and again, at chow or during a break out in the field, someone would tell him (as Vorst had told him) that it was pointless to throw good lives after bad by having Meserve and the others up on charges, since (as Reilly had said) violence was the language of war, and, naturally, it could not always be controlled. Subjects I might say I was praying to God that if I ever got out of there alive Id do everything I could to see that these men would pay for what they did., Eriksson now lapsed into the longest of his silences with me, and when he spoke again, it was, for him, at great length. We were all told to look for the girl. All five men shot, but Eriksson aimed his weapona grenade launcher, which looks like a shotgundown into the valley, away from the general direction of Mao. Of those who were asked the question, only Captain Vorst, lifer though he was, stated that if Meserve was guilty of rape and murder, then he did not care to have the Sergeant in his command. There, corpsmen deposited him on a bed alongside that of a battalion officer he knew and liked. Incident on Hill 192 Daniel Lang Published by Secker & Warburg, London, Great Britain, 1970 Seller: Secondhand Books 'n' Things, Ross Creek, Australia Seller Rating: Contact seller Book First Edition Used - Hardcover Condition: Good 44.51 Convert currency 9.15 Shipping From Australia to United Kingdom Quantity: 1 Add to Basket Hardcover. an exit. He was merely asking, Vorst said, but had Eriksson really thought through what he was doing in pushing his charges? He himself, he imagines, must have looked glum. Eriksson shook his head again. Unfortunately they do nothing but settle for him to be relocated in order to not be killed by his fellow squad members. 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. All soldiers (excluding Storeby) were dishonorably discharged from the Army. The land was very changeable. We were each acting the way we had to, he told me. We would be fools to think those men couldnt do again what they did before., He would never cease to condemn the members of the patrol personally for their crime, Eriksson said, but that didnt mean they were beyond pity. One M.P., I remember, told me he could have understood it if Id gone to bat for a G.I. The two men had arrived in Vietnam at the same time, and he had known Meserve as a considerate, agreeable man. I called him back and commended him on the job that he did and reported it, in turn, to the company headquarters.. 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. Incident on Hill 192 View source 19 November 1967. But then I dont know how much the C.I.D. Whatever I could do about her depended on finding someone with both the rank and the conscience to help me, he told me. The group walked from the airstrip to Hill 192. Eriksson had no occasion to fire his grenade launcher, and that was just as well, he told me, since his mind was on Maoon the part of the war that, as he put it, had got to me. Perched on the mountainside, listening to the gunfire and the helicopters, he found his thoughts returning repeatedly to the fact that Rafe and Manuel had refused to kill the girl.

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