The TERRIFYING First Days Every Vietnam MACV-SOG Recruit Faced 

The TERRIFYING First Days Every Vietnam MACV-SOG Recruit Faced 

A man exits a helicopter at a forward base in South Vietnam. He is qualified as a paratrooper.  He completed the Special Operations Forces qualification course.  Most often, this is an experienced non-commissioned officer who has already served his term in this country.  And he volunteered three times to be on this particular patch of red earth.

  In a week, he will be carrying the radio at the end of the line, following orders from a sergeant who has no seniority, and learning how to navigate the jungle from the teenagers he formally commands. So how does the most elite unit in Vietnam manage to take its best men and put them at the bottom?  Let’s start with a word that almost every video on this topic misinterprets.  Recruit.

  The “Research and Observation Group” never had any recruits.  There was no recruitment, basic training, or recruiting station.  A published history of a U.S. Army unit directly describes this mechanism. The personnel was voluntary, and anyone could leave without any consequences.  By the time he arrived at the base gates, the American had already volunteered at the paratrooper school.

He re-enlisted in the Special Operations Forces and completed a qualification course .  He usually volunteered for Vietnam a third time, and then a fourth time—for an assignment that no one told him anything about .  Some of these men had decades of uniformed service behind them.  Some wore master sergeant patches.

  This was not the kind of organization that created soldiers from scratch.  She took ready-made fighters and informed them that almost none of their achievements would matter.  One more organizational issue before we go any further.  This abbreviation does not stand for ” Special Operations Group “.  The name ” Research and Observation Group” was a cover, chosen precisely because it sounded like a research office full of clerks.

Getting there was strange by design. People passed through the headquarters of the 5th Special Operations Forces Group in Nha Trang.  And a first- person account published by a veterans’ organization describes what it felt like from the inside.  According to that description, the secret unit ” absorbed” most of the new military personnel arriving in the country.

It was described to arriving soldiers only as a top-secret organization operating in locations that no one named.  Secrecy was directed both outward and inward.  Even the soldiers assigned to the 5th Group headquarters, behind which the unit was hiding , were mostly unaware of what this organization was actually doing in their building.

  Instead, the newcomer received a letter code in his assignment order.  This code indicated to the personnel officer which of the three detachments the fighter was heading to: northern, central, or southern, which in practice meant Danang, Kon Tum, or Ban Me Huot.  One veteran, Ed Wolkoff, officially described this route.

  Encrypted orders, processing at Fort Bragg, stop in Nha Trang, then flight to Kontum on the unit’s plane. He could still refuse.  The history of the army clearly shows that a person could leave without consequences, and there were.  But no one has ever published a reliable figure on exactly how many.  Therefore, anyone who gives you a dropout rate for this unit is quoting something that is not in the archives.

  For many of them, Saigon came first .  The transit point was Camp Goodman, and it’s worth correcting the geography, because it’s constantly confused.  Camp Goodman was located inside Camp Le Van Duyet in District 10 of Saigon, not in Cholon . The unit’s actual headquarters was much less dramatic than the mythology suggests: a three-story former apartment building at 137 Pasteur Street.

 The building housed an advisory group for an American university in the 1950s.  Then there was a briefing that changed the person’s understanding of their own work. The operations were classified: “top secret”, limited distribution, no foreigners.    The United States government did not simply remain silent. He denied the existence of the organization itself.

New arrivals signed a non-disclosure agreement that was said to be in effect for 20 years.  In their documents, they were listed as representatives of some innocent unit with an inconspicuous name. Think about what this means.  If he were captured on the other side of the border, there would be no mechanism by which his own government could acknowledge where and why he had been sent.

  And then, having learned all this, he was given a radio.    The command structure is clearly outlined in the Army unit’s history.  The team commander had the call sign “1-0”.  His assistant was “1-1”.  The radio operator was “1-2”.    The local team members had their own numbering: “0-1”, “0-2” and so on.  The newly arrived American stood on the lowest step.

Not because he was considered stupid, and not because anyone doubted his preparation.  Because in this area, the main currency was experience abroad, and he didn’t have any. John Stryker Meyer landed in Vietnam in April 1968 and reached Forward Operating Base One at Phu Bai the following month.  His account of what happened next is worth hearing from his own lips.

So, along with Spider was Don Walken, who had some experience in the country.  We formed a team.  “Spider” was the team commander, “1-0”.  Don was the assistant commander , “1-1.”  I was hired as ” 1-2″, a radio operator.  And, uh… He describes a moment when the ladder system was explained to him , and notice what he doesn’t mention.

Rank.  He is simply not in this story .  Fair point, because this channel would rather point out wobble than hide it.    The Army’s own history is cautious here, describing the American assistant group leaders and radio operators as 11th or 12th.  In an article from the U.S. Army War College, Kent Bolster calls the radio operator position the 13th.

Usage varied by base and year.  And anyone who tells you that there was one fixed dictionary is smoothing something that was never smooth.  So, was it really a matter of rank?  Is it just a good story? Bolster’s article for the War College is the best source for verification, as it is based on approximately 40 interviews with veterans of the unit.

  The conclusion there is straightforward.    The most experienced soldiers, regardless of rank, led the way. Bolster quotes Staff Sergeant Bill Krempa of the Florida Reconnaissance Group , describing his own arrival.  In his first group, 1-0 was a sergeant, a full rank below him, and Krempa says rank in the groups simply didn’t matter.

  He adds that in other groups, young non-commissioned officers led intelligence, and officers worked as their second-in- commands.  Read this again.  Lieutenants receiving instructions from sergeants in a combat zone is common practice.  This also applied to the arriving officers.  Travis Mills, writing his own account for the Special Forces Association, arrived as a lieutenant and served 1-1 before being entrusted with commanding the group.

The climb required effort and witnesses. Veteran David Hayworth wrote that a person needed at least five missions in the 1-1 position before being considered, most had closer to 10, and someone had to recommend them.    An academic review of Nick Brockhausen’s memoir notes the mathematics underlying it all . Group leaders were in this role for about four months on average.

Four months.  This was the average length of time at the top of the ladder, the bottom rung of which the newcomer had just found himself.  There is another group of teachers in this story, and popular narratives almost always sentimentalize them or leave them out.    The American intelligence group was mostly non- American.

Army history gives the standard composition as two or three Americans alongside six to nine local soldiers, representatives of the Montagnard tribes, ethnic Nung Chinese, and Vietnamese. Many of them had been on these missions long before the newcomer appeared, and the newcomer’s survival depended on their judgment of the terrain, which he could not read.

If this kind of work is useful to you, subscribing really helps, because searching through military college archives and declassified manuals takes a lot of time, and this channel prefers to do that rather than simply repeat what is on the Internet. Myers’s reconstituted team included a translator named Heap, who knew four or five languages ​​and, according to Myers himself, helped him improve his English.

  The team also had a Vietnamese counterpart to the American group leader.  I want to be careful not to make this relationship warmer than it actually was.  When Myers’ team was rebuilt after heavy losses, the three new local fighters they hired were all 15 years old.  He repeats this number twice in his story, as if he still can’t believe it.

  These people were paid on a different scale than the Americans next to them.  They suffered disproportionately high losses, and what happened to many of them after the war is quite difficult to read. So this humiliation was real, and it went both ways.  After that, there were weeks of taking them apart and putting them back together again.

    A declassified 1970 combat intelligence manual and eyewitness accounts closely overlap. Immediate action training, first “on dry land” and then with live ammunition, rappelling from a tower, then from helicopters, evacuation on a rope, endless repetition of what to do in the first 4 seconds of contact. Myers describes how his own team would go beyond the base , work on trails near the village, conduct emergency drills , and then fire thousands of bullets at the range.

They practiced loading into the helicopter so precisely that specific people took seats near specific windows so that the aircraft could fire from both sides.  Since late 1968, Camp Long Thanh also operated a formal school, founded by Travis Mills after he was wounded during the capture of Forward Operating Base Number Four.

  An attack that killed 16 special forces soldiers, and according to some reports, 17.  This remains the heaviest single-day loss in Special Operations Forces history .  Which disproves another myth.  No new recruit was sent across the border alone, and no one went on assignment on their first day.  The first missions were often chosen to be intentionally boring.

  Myers’ first three missions involved installing sensors with almost no firing, and he himself calls them boring. The system worked perfectly until someone started acting against it.  In October 1968, a specialist named Lynn Black was a radio operator for Spike Team Alabama.  Black was no rookie.  He served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade and had real combat experience.

The person assigned to lead the team, according to Myers, only got the job because he had a higher rank than Black. Not because she had more experience fighting this enemy.  This team was destroyed.  Myers is the source of this interpretation, and he served in the same unit at the same time.  So treat this as participant testimony, not as a document.

  But this is the exception that proves the rule. When the unit allowed itself to be guided by experience, people returned home. When someone instead turned to the table of ranks, everyone in the reconnaissance companies learned new names.  Which leaves the numbers, and this is where the internet does its worst job. You’ve almost certainly heard that this unit had a casualty rate of over 100% .

  Major John Plaster, who served there, explains what that number really means. During 1968, casualties exceeded 100%, as every reconnaissance or rapid reaction platoon soldier was killed, wounded, or missing.  And the same thing happened to some of their replacements .  It takes into account injuries in relation to a very small denominator.

  HistoryNet describes the same year directly.  Every scout was wounded at least once, and about half died. Half is a terrible number, but it’s not 100%. The difference matters if you are interested in accuracy.  On a larger scale, The National Interest reports that of the approximately 20,000 Green Berets who served in Vietnam, about 2,000 served in this unit, with only four hundred to six hundred engaged in intelligence at any one time .

Plaster estimates cross-border losses at approximately 300 Green Berets, 57 of whom are missing. Two more clarifications.    The dropout figures listed online almost always refer to the intelligence school in Nha Trang, where, according to Vietnam Gear, over 5,600 people studied, and approximately 3,500 graduated.

 A truly difficult school, and a completely different school.  And about the poison pill. There is no evidence that cyanide capsules were routinely issued to scouts here . International Espionage Museum historian Vince Houghton was asked directly if a cyanide- laced tooth had ever existed , and his answer was a resounding “no.”  As for the idea that these people were forced to remain silent for the rest of their lives under threat of prosecution, the agreements have expired .

  That is why there are memoirs on which this scenario is based .  So what did the rookie really go through in his early days?  He arrived with more training than almost anyone else, signed a waiver of his right to speak for 20 years, was given a radio station, was placed behind men younger and lower in rank, and was ordered to watch the Montagnard soldiers read the trail.

  And then, a few months later, during a mission in the A-Shau Valley, Mayer grabbed his assistant group commander as he slipped near a punji trap and said something that summed up the whole story better than any statistic. Back.  I’m not ready to be number one yet. I’m just a radio operator here. All sources in this scenario are listed and linked below, including the Army unit history and the War College article, available for free reading.