Krichten, had been in Vietnam only a month. None of these Marines, except Herrod, was considered proficient in night patrolling, although all had volunteered for the mission. Herrod, recently transferred from the 3d Marine Division, was awaiting court-martial for unauthorized absence. He was acting as team leader on this occasion because better qualified men were fatigued by days of continual combat.
January and February 1970 had been difficult months for Company B. The company had helped defend FSB Ross against the 6 January sapper attack. On 12 February, Company B had nine Marines killed in a well-executed enemy ambush. Weeks of day and night operations had brought the men close to exhaustion, and boobytrap casualties had compounded anger and frustration at the 12 February losses. The company commander, First Lieutenant Louis R. Ambort, a 23-year-old from Little Rock, Arkansas, reflected the tension in the unit in his instructions to Herrod's patrol. Ambort, according to subsequent accounts, exhorted his men to "get some damned gooks tonight" and avenge the company's casualties. He gave the impression that age, sex, and military status were not to be taken into account, although the platoon sergeant made a point of warning Herrod before the patrol went out that the lieutenant really meant only enemy soldiers.
In the field, the "killer team" moved to the small hamlet of Son Thang (4),* about two miles southwest of Ross, inhabited by a group of known Viet Cong families. The people in Son Thang had refused both American and GVN offers of relocation to a safer area, preferring to stay near where their men were fighting. Under the rules of engagement for this area, night patrols could enter such hamlets to search for VC; this night, Herrod's team entered Son Thang (4). The Marines went to a hut and called out the occupants, all women and children. One woman broke for a nearby treeline. The Marines shot her and then, allegedly at Herrod's command, gunned down the others. They went on to two more huts, ordered the inhabitants of each to come outside, and cut them down with small arms fire. In all, 16 Vietnamese—five women and 11 children—died that night in Son Thang (4).
Returning to the company position, the patrol reported a fight with 15-20 armed Viet Cong and claimed to have killed six.3 Lieutenant Ambort passed the report on to battalion and regiment. The next morning, another 1st Battalion patrol, acting on a report from Vietnamese civilians, found the bodies in Son Thang (4). When battalion headquarters challenged Ambort's initial report, the lieutenant at first stuck by it and produced an SKS, actually taken some time before, as a weapon captured in the nonexistent fight. Later, he admitted that he had made a false action report. Information on the incident moved rapidly up the division chain of command. On 20 February, Major General Wheeler, the 1st Marine Division commander, reported to III MAF that a "possible serious incident" had occurred, involving elements of Company B and the civilians of Son Thang (4).4
The Son Thang (4) incident was not the first of its kind in the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in most earlier counterguerrilla campaigns, conducted by the United States and other western and nonwestern nations, the butchery at the small hamlet would not have been viewed as unique. Even in the conventional and relatively gentlemanly American Civil War, Union commanders summarily shot and hanged rebel bushwackers, burned towns and farms, and threatened retaliation against civilians for irregular acts of resistance. During his 1864 march through Georgia, General William T. Sherman ordered Confederate prisoners driven ahead of one of his columns to find or detonate enemy road mines. In the Philippines in 1901, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller was court-martialed for directing the execution of 11 treacherous native guides** Brutality charges, some of them valid, marred the pre-World War II Marine occupation of Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.5 In Vietnam, such cruelties were no part of American policy. Nevertheless, the fear, rage, and frustration of battle against an evasive enemy, compounded often by deficient unit training and leadership, by individual personality defects, and by racial and cultural prejudice, led to isolated incidents of murder or abuse of prisoners and civilians and mutilation of enemy dead.
* On American maps, this hamlet was named Thang "fay (1) and this name appeared in initial dispatches. Later everyone substituted Son Thang (4). which was the hamlet name used by Que Son District authorities.
** Waller was acquitted. The entire court -martial, convened by the Army, later was ruled invalid, as Waller's Marines had not been formally assigned to Army command when the incident occurred.
