Lasting Pain, Minimal Punishment

'Americans don't do things like this,' an officer thought when he learned of three villagers' deaths. His shock grew when the soldier convicted continued to serve.

By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse, Special to The Times
August 20, 2006

BINH DINH PROVINCE, Vietnam — On the morning of Feb. 25, 1969, Platoon Sgt. Roy E. Bumgarner Jr. led a five-man team on a reconnaissance patrol that took them into a rolling landscape of rice fields.

The soldiers crossed paths with an irrigation worker and two teenage boys tending ducklings. The boys carried only bamboo cages and herding sticks, the irrigation worker a hoe.