The TERRIFYING First Days MACV-SOG Recon Teams Faced Inside Laos 

The TERRIFYING First Days MACV-SOG Recon Teams Faced Inside Laos 

There was one rule that mattered most to a MACV-SOG intelligence officer working in Laos.  And the novice learned it before anything else.  Don’t walk the path.  It was possible to cross the path.  You could photograph the tracks on it. Replace it. Replace it. Or call in an airstrike. What couldn’t be done was to walk along it.

  Because that’s where the enemy was.  And the enemy was there in large numbers. No nine-man team was ever built to survive a meeting.  Everything else a newcomer received in the first week served this single idea. The sterile uniform, the taped equipment, the rehearsed silence —all of it existed so that no one on the other side would ever know he was there.

So why does almost every video about these men show the exact opposite? A small team hunted the North Vietnamese army through the jungle. Whereas the documented task was to see without being seen and then get out again? The volunteers who ended up in these teams were given almost no advance notice.  And it was the detail they weren’t told that had the worst impact on their first week.

  The Green Berets who arrived in the country were taken aside and given a task described only in general terms. It was classified.  It took place abroad. The instructor refused to give a figure for the level of losses.  The person could have said “no.”  And those who refused were quietly transferred to regular A teams without saying anything about it , and that’s worth remembering.

  Because the popular version of this subsection tends to skip the part where refusal was a normal and unremarkable option. Branch 78 of the Special Operations Association published the story of Travis Mills, an officer who created a course for reconnaissance team leaders. And his summary of what the recruits were actually told is straightforward.

  ” Most of you,” he wrote, “will not be immediately assigned as 1-0.”  That was the strange part of the proposal. Accepting it did not make a person older than anyone else.  This made him the least important person on his own team.  And for the first few weeks, it was the only thing that kept him alive. Before it mattered, there was a piece of paper in an office thousands of miles away that decided how far into Laos a person could go.

  Ground reconnaissance across the Laotian border was authorized in September 1965 under the code name “Shining Brass”, renamed Prairie Fire in 1968 and “Fu Zung” in 1971 .  A published diplomatic document, the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, covering the period from 1964 to 1968, shows how tightly the leash was held.

The depth of penetration of helicopters began at approximately 5 km and was expanded only based on the results of disputes.  First up to 12, then to a permanent strip along the border about 20 km deep , and in some sectors a little further.  Individual targets were rejected for sitting too far away. The man holding that pen was the United States Ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, who controlled the depth of penetration, the target, and the duration, since Laos was officially neutral and America was officially not there at all.

The scouts called him Field Marshal, and not affectionately.  General Westmoreland, in a line reproduced in the Veterans Archives at macvsoag.cc, called the Ho Chi Minh Trail ” Sullivan’s Highway.”  The teams even had a cover story for the first mission, that they were searching for a downed American transport plane.

So, the man who got off that helicopter was not acting without rules, no matter what the internet tells you. He operated under greater restrictions and greater political supervision than almost any other soldier who fought in that war. During the early years, there was no school for all this .  The men learned the job from the one who survived the longest in the team.

  And in 1968, this agreement was completely destroyed.    The attrition among experienced team leaders was so great that there simply weren’t enough veterans left to train replacements on the job, which meant that new men were being handed teams they weren’t qualified to lead.  So the unit built its own course at Camp Long Thanh, southeast of Saigon, and continued to maintain records as Detachment B-53.

  Travis Mills, still recovering from wounds sustained during the capture of the Marble Mountain base in August of that year, was sent to start it.  The course mostly taught refusal. How to break contact and disappear, instead of standing and fighting.  How to take off your shirt, backpack, and anything that might rattle or shine.

How to do immediate action training, dry up, and then live until the answer happens before the thought occurs. The camp’s senior medic, Bert Moore, summed up the part about live fire with a line that is still preserved in the veterans’ archives.  “ Our training program,” he said, “includes real targets for back-firing .

”  Students studied the full mission cycle: from warning order to briefing, preparation, commissioning, execution, evacuation, and debriefing.  And then there was the part that almost no one outside the unit talks about.  Graduation exercises were not exercises. The students were sent to a forward operating base, instructed in a real operations center, issued real ammunition and real claymores, and led into a real target through a fence.

The staff quietly agreed that these specific goals would be low priority. The students were never told about this.  Mills described the entire sequence of events in the Sentinel, his department’s newsletter, in 2018. And what is striking is how this deception was maintained , because a person who knew that their first mission was a rehearsal would not have learned what the rehearsal taught them.

  Which brings us back to the issue of rank.  On paper, an American arriving at a reconnaissance company might be a staff sergeant or lieutenant with a jump school rank and patch.  In places, he ran like one or two, the radio operator at the end of the column did exactly what he was told.  The one-zero who ran it could be, and often was, a junior in rank.

  So could the indigenous team members, the Nungas and Montagnards, who made up the majority of each team.  Men who had worked for years toward these same goals, whose knowledge of the landing zone was more valuable than any newly arrived American’s opinion of anything.  A rookie who argued with such an arrangement usually did not receive a second mission.

  The last hours before launch were spent making the person disappear on paper.  No badges, no ID, no letters from home, no photos, no unit patches, no jump wings. Nothing with the name.  John Stryker Meyer, who led the intelligence group from Northern Command, described it the same way in interviews for decades.  According to him , during all missions they did not wear any identification marks and their uniforms were sterile.

  The stated reason was diplomatic rather than tactical.  If a person was killed or captured in a country where the United States publicly had no ground troops at all, there should be nothing on their body that Washington would have to explain.  Then the cargo arrived.  Grenades by the dozen, not the handful that an ordinary infantryman carried .

  A few hundred rounds of ammunition, a claymore mine, water, and almost nothing else.  Everything is taped.  Everything was checked manually for noise. The team was jumping on the spot near the playground and listening to themselves.  And if something jangled or moved, it was torn off and reglued. Because the difference between a team that made it home and a team that didn’t was often no more complicated than a buckle knocking on a flask at the wrong moment .

  If you want to read more stories like this, subscribing really helps this channel continue the archival work these stories need.  Each statement here is linked to a named source, and a full list is provided in the description.  Until the morning of launch, all the man had been trained for was a single helicopter flight. The landings were carried out by South Vietnamese Air Force crews of the 219th Squadron in old Sikorsky helicopters, which everyone called ” Queen Bees”, and later also by American crews.

  Planes landed at false landing zones along the way, so anyone watching from the ridges had several places to search instead of just one.  Then the team descended, and the noise of the rotor died down over the valley.  And this was the moment that the entire first week of human learning was leading up to. No one moved. The team lay down on the edge of the forest at the edge of the clearing and did absolutely nothing.

Sometimes for a quarter of an hour or longer, just listening.  They listened to the signal shots that were transmitted from hill to hill, to the voices, to the whistles, to the dogs.  Anyone who watched this helicopter take off would have given themselves away in the first few minutes.  And if he did, the team called for an evacuation, and the mission ended before it even began.

The shelling itself during the unit’s introduction was grounds for immediately terminating the operation, since a covert infiltration that the enemy had already seen was no longer covert. For the novice, who lay motionless in the damp undergrowth, doing nothing while his heart pounded, this was the most difficult discipline in the work.

  While that team lay motionless on the edge of the clearing, the other side had been preparing for exactly this for years .  The Ho Chi Minh Trail was never an empty jungle with a road running through it.  Major John L. Plaster, who directed Central Command intelligence and later wrote the standard history of the unit, listed countermeasures created by North Vietnam specifically to catch out these teams.

There were special reconnaissance platoons, specialized counterintelligence companies, sniffer dogs, and radio direction finding equipment that could determine the location of the team at the time of the signal transmission. Trail monitors sat at the likely landing zones for weeks, doing nothing but waiting for the helicopter.

  So, the nine- person team did not slip into the empty area. She was logging into a system designed with her arrival in mind.  That’s why the trail rule existed, and that’s why breaking it on the first mission so often ended the way it did .  And it looks almost completely different from the version of this unit that is currently circulating on the Internet.

  Let’s start with the figure that everyone repeats, that SOG intelligence suffered losses of over 100%.  This was not invented, and HistoryNet publishes this rule, borrowed from Plaster’s work, but it is consistently misapplied.  Robert Noe, a SOG veteran who conducts detailed research into casualties in the unit’s own veterans’ archive , has checked the general version based on records and rejected it , as noted, because it routinely stretches across the entire organization and to theaters of operations where these casualties did not occur.    The

honest version is narrower. She describes reconnaissance during the worst years, including being wounded more than once.    The murder rate is even worse. Figures like 158 enemy dead for every American lost are taken from American estimates based on body counts, a methodology discredited decades ago, and they are not North Vietnamese estimates of anything.

Then there is Operation Tailwind.  In 1998, an American television network broadcast a claim that the unit had used nerve gas in Laos and was hunting American defectors.    The TV station retracted the story within weeks. The Minister of Defense found these allegations unfounded, and the producers were fired .

  It is still being spread as fact. And Marine Corps Intelligence, which is mentioned in one video after another as a component of Special Operations Command , was not like that.  This correction comes from Special Operations Command historian , Dr. Jared Tracy.  And the Veterans Archive also contains it.  None of these corrections diminish the significance of the story.

  They make it proven, and that’s the whole point.  If all of that is taken away, what remains will be smaller in scale and significantly more difficult to execute.  Of the approximately 2,000 Americans who have passed through the organization over its entire existence, only a few hundred have conducted cross-border intelligence at all.

  Plaster estimates the cost of these operations at about 300 Green Berets killed, including 57 who are still missing.    The Special Operations Association has recorded more than 2,000 individual awards for valor. Among them are at least 10 Medals of Honor and the Presidential Certificate of the unit, which was awarded only in April 2001.

29 years after the unit was disbanded, and long after most of the men it celebrated had returned home. None of this was earned by hunting anyone. This was earned by a handful of men lying in the undergrowth near the road they were forbidden to walk on, counting trucks, marking targets, and getting out again before anyone knew they had come.

The first rule, really, was all the work.  Don’t walk on the path.  Every document, photo, and interview used here is linked below, and you can find much more of this work if you subscribe.