"I'll look into it. You leave it alone," said my boss.

"But this looks awful suspicious. This isn't much evidence
that she was killed by the enemy."

"I told you I'd look into it. Don't say anymore about it."

"Colonel, we need to investigate this and make sure just how she was killed."

"Shut the f-up. I told you not to say anything more about it."

And that afternoon, we got orders to take our entire company thirty miles into the jungle by helicopter. The three-day mission turned into a ten-day mission. .

When we returned, the soldiers were busy cleaning weapons and equipment. I was called to HQ and told that our scheduled two days in the rear to rest up from the mission had been canceled. We were leaving at dawn on another mission.

Mission completed. Same routine. No rest. Just reload and go. These were not mission essential operations. They were far outside the higher HQ area of responsibility. They were operations designed to punish me and my troops for asking for the investigation.

I learned to keep my mouth shut when the colonel said so. And the death was never properly investigated.

This many years later, I still feel like a creep for telling the story. No matter how mad I was at the colonel for not investigating, and no matter how terrible the operations were, I still feel like there is some dishonor in revealing that this kind of thing goes on.

I tried to report the boss to his higher HQ at the time and got in even more trouble when my leaders found out about it. This and many other things corrected my view that all high ranking officers felt the same call to Duty-Honor-Country that we were taught.

These kinds of incidents were probably isolated to my incompetent boss and a few others like him, but there is some kind of code of honor that makes me feel like a creep to post it here for the world to see. It adds to the level of guilt for not having succeeded even though I tried to do something about her death.

We're taught that everything that happens in our area of responsibility or with people in our command is to our credit or to our fault. All of it lies with the commander - It gets tangled with the ptsd of other combat experiences and makes me feel totally at fault.

Troy - the whistle blower - the creep