Tiger Force was an experiment, a group of specially selected soldiers from the Armys 101st Airborne Division whose main objective was to find the enemy in the jungles of Vietnam and call in air strikes. But it was an experiment that went horrifically wrong. During a seven-month rampage in 1967, members of Tiger Force went over the edge and into the abyss. They murdered innocent civilians, and spun dangerously out of control. Their victims ranged from old farmers to newborns, and were so numerous that the soldiers sometimes did not even bother to count the corpses. If the Devil had a unit, these were his men. And then their crimes were covered up. Told from the viewpoints of the soldiers who tried to resist this descent into hell, and those who did not, and including accounts from Vietnamese who witnessed the Tiger Forces rampages, this is history at its most harrowing. It is also the astonishing story of how these events, buried by the Army for decades, came to light at last through the heroic persistence of a few individuals who could not forget.

Mitch Weiss is an editor with the Charlotte Observer.