The Ingenious Weapons SOG Teams Used That No One Else Had

On June 6th, 1968, near the Cambodian border, American soldiers found a [music] dead North Vietnamese fighter lying next to his rifle. The weapon hadn’t been hit by a bullet. It had detonated. The bolt had been blown straight back through the chamber into the man who pulled the trigger. His own ammunition had killed him.

 And that was not an accident. It was the work of a secret American unit that fought a war the United States swore it wasn’t fighting. They crossed borders that didn’t officially exist. Wearing uniforms with no flag, carrying weapons built to leave no fingerprints. This is the story of the strangest arsenal of the entire Vietnam War.

 Some of it was genuinely like nothing else on earth and some of it was a myth that we are going to clear up today. Their name was the studies and observations group. It sounds like an office full of clipboards, and that was the point. The bland title was camouflage for one of the most secretive military units America ever fielded.

SOG ran reconnaissance and sabotage missions deep behind enemy lines, mostly in Laos and Cambodia. Officially, the United States had no troops in those countries. So officially, these men did not exist. And that one fact that they could never be admitted to shaped every weapon they carried. Think about it. [music] If you are captured carrying standard US Army gear, you’ve just handed the enemy proof that America is lying to the world.

 So SOG needed weapons that were quiet, deniable, and in some cases, genuinely one of a kind. The man who would become their historian, John Plaster, ran [music] recon for three tours with SOG. He later wrote that no other American unit ever carried such an array of weaponry. But here’s where most videos get it wrong. They tell you these were all secret super weapons no one else had.

 The truth is more interesting than that. So, let’s separate what was real, what was shared, and what was pure legend. Let’s start with the one weapon that genuinely had no equal. It wasn’t a gun. It was the ammunition itself. It was called Project Eldest Son. The idea came from the head of SOG, Colonel John Singlob, a veteran of World War II’s OSS.

 The concept was simple and brutal. Take enemy ammunition and sabotage it. Here’s how it worked. A CIA laboratory on Okinawa would take a captured AK-47 round, pull it apart, and remove the gunpowder. Then they would replace it with a high explosive that looked almost identical. A normal AK could handle a chamber pressure around 45,000 lb per square in.

 According to plaster, the doctorred round generated about 250,000. The rifle didn’t fire. It exploded in the shooter’s hands. They did the same thing to heavy machine gun ammunition and even to 82 mm mortar rounds, which would detonate inside the tube and kill the entire crew. Now, here is the genius part, the part that makes this real trade craft and not just a booby trap.

SOG teams would sneak these rounds into enemy ammo caches deep in the jungle, but they never planted more than one bad round in a single stash. Why? Because if the enemy found two tampered rounds, they’d realize it was sabotage. One catastrophic blowup looks like a manufacturing defect. And that’s exactly what SOG wanted them to think.

 To twist the knife, SOG forged documents made to look like Chinese quality control warnings, [music] suggesting whole batches of ammunition were defective. They wanted every enemy soldier to hesitate before pulling the trigger, wondering if his own rifle might kill him. and it worked. Captured enemy fighters talked about the fear.

 Trust in their own ammunition cracked. That’s a weapon you can’t buy or hold. It’s a psychological. But this weapon had a dark side that cut both ways. We’ll get to the day it killed Americans in a moment. First, you need to understand the weapons these men actually carried in their hands. On a recon mission, the deadliest thing you can do is make noise.

 So SOG became obsessed with silence. Their favorite quiet weapon was a Swedish submachine gun called the Carl Gustaf, nicknamed the Swedish K. The CIA supplied them, often painted in a pale green enamel with a suppressor built right into the design. Plaster called it SOG’s most accurate submachine gun. But when Sweden found out its guns were being used in Vietnam, it cut off the supply.

 So, American crews adapted, suppressing old World War II [music] grease guns and British Sten guns to fill the gap. Then there were the pistols. And this is where I have to correct something you’ve probably heard. A lot of videos will tell you SOG’s signature silenced pistol was the famous Hush Puppy, the suppressed Smith and Wesson built to take out guard dogs.

 It’s a real weapon and it is genuinely cool. But the hush puppy was primarily a Navy Seal program, not a SOG one. Only a little over a hundred were ever made, and they belonged mostly to the SEALs. SOG’s actual quiet pistol was older and stranger. It was a high standard 2 caliber pistol, a design that traced back to the spies of World War II with the suppressor built into the barrel.

Plaster called it S OG’s most popular suppressed [music] pistol used for snatching prisoners without waking the whole jungle. So yes, SOG had whisper quiet weapons, but the silence wasn’t unique to them. The SEALs and the CIA had the same tech. What made SOG different was something else entirely. It was what they did with ordinary weapons when no factory would help them.

If Eldest son was SOG’s secret laboratory weapon, this was SOG’s garage. Because some of their most famous weapons weren’t invented by engineers. They were hacked together by the men themselves. Take the M79 grenade launcher. Normally, it’s a long singleshot weapon like a fat shotgun that lobs 40mm grenades.

 Sogg men sawed off the barrel and the stock until it was barely bigger than a pistol. Now, one man could carry a personal artillery piece on his hip, firing high explosive buckshot or flesh rounds while still keeping his rifle ready. John Striker Meyer, a team leader we’ll hear from shortly, called it exactly that, handheld artillery.

 Then there was the RPD. That’s a Soviet light machine gun. SOG recon men took captured ones and sawed off the barrel and stock, chopping a heavy beltfed weapon down to something they could fire on the move. Plaster called the cut down RPDSog’s deadliest small [music] arm. And carrying a Soviet gun had a second purpose.

 In a firefight, the enemy heard the distinct sound of an AK or an RPD and got confused about who was shooting who. That confusion could buy a six-man team the seconds they needed to survive against hundreds. Their pointman often walked in full North [music] Vietnamese uniform carrying an AK so that for a few critical heartbeats, the enemy wouldn’t realize Americans were right in front of them.

 This is the real answer to our title. The weapons no one else had weren’t always strange inventions. They were ordinary guns cut down and turned backwards used in ways the enemy never expected. We’ve been describing these weapons from the outside, but one of the men who actually carried them sawed off M79 and all sat down to explain the gear in his own words.

>> I I’d like to cover the weapon if we could grab that thing. It’s I think it’s got the bolt to the rear >> and uh but this is what you carried. Yeah, >> sir. This is it. This is a different Ours version what I think was the 177 X2. >> Okay. Yeah, the E2. Yeah, >> E2. I’m sorry. And the barrel would be a little bit longer, but the same flash suppressor on the end or >> whatever the official name I always called it a flash suppressor.

>> Well, because when the M the M16 came out, right? And uh and then you guys wanted something shorter. >> So, I think they they initially put a 10-in barrel on it, which this one’s got a 10 in, but then it was uh it wasn’t as accurate as it needed to be, so they went with a 12in barrel. So that was your E2 or your E3 the uh or E2 rather because you had this longer flash suppressor on it.

 What that allowed you to do too was uh was put a grenade launcher on the bottom >> and some guys did that but again in the jungle it would get caught up a lot. >> Gotcha. Well black always carried it. >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. And he liked the firepower cuz uh when we ran [snorts] out of here you had one round for your M79. >> Yeah. >> The 148.

 And uh so on my case, I just didn’t like it because it was just cumbersome. I mean, we had this sawed off M79, which we could talk about later on, >> but yeah, this is our original baby. When a man who survived missions across the fence tells you the gear was built for one thing, staying alive in places nobody would come to rescue you.

 You believe him? And the price of those missions was about to become horribly clear. Remember project eldest son, the sabotaged ammunition? That genius had a terrible cost. On November 30th, 1968, a helicopter was carrying SOG’s Eldest Sun team and their crates of doctorred ammunition. Enemy fire hit the aircraft and the sabotaged rounds did exactly what they were designed to do. They exploded.

 A major named Samuel Tumi and seven Green Berets were killed. Their remains weren’t recovered for 20 years, and the program itself couldn’t stay secret forever. By 1969, the story leaked to the New York Times and to Time magazine. Once the enemy knew the sabotage was real and deliberate, the psychological weapon lost its edge.

S OG renamed it twice, and then the whole stockpile was ordered destroyed. It’s a reminder that the cleverest weapon in the world is still a weapon. It doesn’t care whose hands it ends up in. So, let’s close the loop on the myths because your channel’s whole thing is getting this right. Myth one, the China Lake grenade launcher.

 A pumpaction weapon that could fire grenades as fast as you could rack it. Real weapon, incredibly rare, but it was built for the seals. Of the couple dozen ever made, only two reached ESOG. So, it’s a seal story, not a SOG one. Myth two, the Gyrojet, a science fiction pistol that fired tiny rockets instead of bullets.

 SOG really did get a few, but they were acquired on the mistaken belief that the rockets were silent. They weren’t. They made a loud whoosh, and the gun was wildly unreliable. A curiosity, not a wonder weapon. And myth three, the big one, the cyanide suicide pill, the capsule every spy movie says these men carried to bite down on if captured.

 The suicide pill is real cold war history. But the claim that SOG recon men were routinely issued cyanide capsules is thinly sourced at best, treated as legend until someone produces the proof. The real story never needed the myths. It was strange enough on its own. So, what did SOG actually have that no one else did? Not a magic gun.

 They had sabotaged ammunition that turned the enemy’s own rifles into bombs. They had a willingness to saw a Soviet machine gun in half and walk into Laos dressed as the enemy. And they had men who trusted that improvised gear with their lives in a war their own country wouldn’t admit was happening. The ingenuity wasn’t really in the metal.

 It was in the deception, the silence, and the nerve. If you want the next piece of this secret war, watch the video on screen right now. It picks up exactly where this one leaves