BROOKE GLADSTONE: Recently, the Toledo Blade ran a deeply disturbing series, the result of a hot tip and many months of investigation. It details the seven month killing spree of an elite Army unit called Tiger Force in South Vietnam 36 years ago. Elderly farmers, women, children, hundreds of civilians were summarily executed. After an unprecedented four and a half year investigation into the crimes of Tiger Force back in the early '70s, the military determined there was enough evidence to convict but no one was convicted. Information reached the highest levels of government, but the files were locked away for good under President Gerald Ford and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as Ford urged the public to heal the wounds of Vietnam. Oddly, this explosive scoop has not grabbed headlines in the rest of the media, although the Pentagon has responded by re-opening the investigation. Michael Sallah was one of the lead reporters on the story, and he joins me from Toledo -- welcome to the show.

MICHAEL SALLAH: Thank you. Glad to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So about a year ago you received a tip about a file of Army records that was being held in Washington. Did you realize what kind of story you were holding in your hands right from the start?

MICHAEL SALLAH: I think we realized that this was serious stuff that we were dealing with -- the killing of men, women and children, unarmed --throwing grenades down in bunkers -- creating mass graves where women and children were hiding. You know, then-- you can tell from the reports that many of these charges were substantiated by the Army. What we didn't know, though, was whether this had been promulgated or printed in any way by the media from the post-war years or even during the war.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And did you do a search?

MICHAEL SALLAH:We did. We did an intensive search, and we realized from even the people that were considered scholars of the war none had ever heard of this unit called Tiger Force nor had heard about this war crimes investigation which had lasted four and a half years.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you spent eight months on your investigation after you received the documents. How did you spend that time?

MICHAEL SALLAH:Once we got those, we began to make Freedom of Information Act requests of the Army. We were unsuccessful. The, the Army kept saying no --these are privacy matters; we're not going to release these particular reports to you. We then asked for a Freedom of Information with the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. There, we actually had to wait several weeks because they had to redact most of the copies. Then we were handed about a thousand pages of reports. Many of the sequential numbered pages were missing, but the heart of the investigation was there. We were able to fill in a lot of the blanks as to who some of these soldiers were, and the investigation took off from there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you went to those soldiers -- those who are still alive.

MICHAEL SALLAH:We eventually did. We went to actually 43 soldiers over the course of that period, and some broke down. Some were very honest. Very painfully honest about what had happened. Their remorse over either not stopping what they saw or even participating in some of the atrocities. Some of course were unrepentant and offered no apologies for what they did.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Here's a piece of tape that seems to be the piece that stands in for the series as a whole. If one were to reduce it to a shorthand, it would probably be this piece of tape. [TAPE OF INTERVIEW PLAYS]

WILLIAM DOYLE: We don't expect to live. No--nobody out there has any brains expects to live.

QUESTION: Mm-hm?

WILLIAM DOYLE: Surprised to be alive next week. So you know, you, you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing.

QUESTION: Mm-hm?

WILLIAM DOYLE: And especially to stay alive. I'm not saying you give up and die. You struggle to live. But the way to live is to kill. Because you don't have to worry about anybody that's dead.

QUESTION: Mm-hm?

WILLIAM DOYLE: But you have to worry about the living.

QUESTION: Yeah.

WILLIAM DOYLE: So the idea is - if it crosses your mind, you pull the trigger! If it just crosses your mind, you pull the trigger.

QUESTION: So in other words if, if you went into a village and-- you weren't sure--

WILLIAM DOYLE: Every - if everybod-- if I walked in a village and everybody wasn't prostrated on the ground, I shot those standing up!

MICHAEL SALLAH: That's Sergeant William Doyle, who was a team leader for Tiger Force. It does summarize the actions of this unit. It exemplifies in many ways the culture that had developed within this unit over that seven month period and even prior to that time. They were a small platoon broken into small groups. They weren't a larger line company where you had a lot of witnesses. As Sergeant Doyle said, they could pretty well do what they, what they wanted to do.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I think it's important to point out as the soldiers did in your article that these weren't, you know, fog-of-war killings -spraying indiscriminately in the midst of battle. These were executions.

MICHAEL SALLAH: They were pre-meditated murders. These were going into villages and saying wait a minute -these people aren't supposed to be here. They're supposed to be in a relocation camp. And-- many of them would be killed. The, the war in 1967 in Vietnam was one of body count. That's how we measured our success. It was not a war over the winning of territory or land or hamlets or villages. It was measured by how many more of them that we can kill than they can kill of ours. And so when the soldiers would go into these villages and they would kill civilians, they would routinely count them as either VC, Viet Cong, or NVA - enemy soldiers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think that the soldiers involved would have been ready to talk to the extent that they did to you unless there had been the passage of 36 years?

MICHAEL SALLAH: Well I think it's clear from the records of the sworn affidavits from many of the soldiers that they opened up and confessed to Army investigators even back then, which makes the story even more poignant -- the fact that the Army would have known that these things happened and would not have in any way carried out military justice as promised in the wake of the infamous My Lai Massacre. The soldiers were talking about this even then, during that period.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did your interviews with the soldiers here compare with the interviews you did when you went to Vietnam?

MICHAEL SALLAH:The, the soldiers here clearly remember specific instances that had been documented many years earlier. The Vietnamese villagers remembered many of the same instances. These are events that are still etched in the minds of people that are living there. They remembered the victims, and they still remember them to this day in various Buddhist prayers and ceremonies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Seymour Hersh, the, the noted investigative reporter who uncovered My Lai many years ago wrote about your investigation in the New Yorker, and he was interviewed in turn by Salon.com, and he was asked if he was surprised by the lack of media pickup of your story, and he said "I'm enraged. Are you kidding?" He said that he's particularly shocked that the New York Times has not even run a wire story about it. How about you? Do you think that the story has gotten the kind of bump up, as they say in the biz, that you think it should have?

MICHAEL SALLAH: Well, Brooke, I think the print media has certainly done its job at picking up the story both domestically and internationally. I know AP did a, a fairly large pickup on this. It was picked up by nearly every major daily in the country. It got particularly widespread play in the foreign press, both in Europe and in-- the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, and it was translated in several languages. Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel both ran pieces on the Tiger Force series. But I'm a little surprised at the other networks.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:How do you account for the fact that the media coverage of your investigation has been so much greater in the foreign press than it has been in the domestic press and that there hasn't been a big press from reporters in Washington to get on this story?

MICHAEL SALLAH: I think that our domestic press, particularly the networks, they - I think there is a sense that we should not be too openly critical and evoke these painful memories of Vietnam when we're already in a conflict. I know that the, the Bush White House has kind of accused the Washington press corps of just looking for the negatives and, and spinning on the bad stuff. And so I believe that the Washington press corps has other more pressing issues that they're willing to take to the president than a 36 year old Tiger Force case, even if it is the, the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Is there a role for journalists in all of this? We spoke to an Army major -- Major Bateman, before the embed program was actually under way, and he said he thought the embedding of reporters with troops could prevent future My Lai's. What do you think?

MICHAEL SALLAH: I totally agree with that. I think that it can, and I think that with embedded journalists, the soldiers are more conscious of their rules of engagement and also international law. I think that they are more conscious of the fact that they must be as professional as they can be. Right now we're not in that situation in Iraq, though. I think that we have a lot of soldiers over there, and they are doing maneuvers, and there are no embedded journalists, and I think that this is where we have to be a little bit on our guard. The red flags should be going up. And I think we need to keep our command on their toes so that these things don't get out of hand, and you don't have a unit like a Tiger Force spinning violently out of control.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Michael Sallah, thank you very much.

MICHAEL SALLAH: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Michael Sallah is the national affairs writer for the Toledo Blade in Toledo, Ohio. He is one of the authors of his paper's expose, Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths: An Investigation into the War Crimes Committed by the Elite Tiger Force Unit During the Vietnam War.

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan, Tony Field and Jamie York, engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and Wayne Shulmeister, [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Dave Goldberg. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]

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