@Bigun @Smokin Joe And on strategy: "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.... it was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units .... our operations were never compromised by attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage, but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out the bottom .... if all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts.
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Not entirely true. I ran both reconnaissance as well as platoon sized operations in both Laos and Cambodia with MACV-SOG. Nobody mentioned us until long after the war because we went in with "sterile" uniforms and weapons,no ID cards,and no dog tags. We were there illegally and the US was not about to admit they were breaking international law by sending us in,and the NVN were not about to admit we were doing it because they never admitted they had combat troops in Cambodia and Laos until after the war ended.
We normally operated with 6 man recon teams manned by 3 Americans and 3 Montegnard mercenaries. Missions ranged from general area recon to see if anybody was around,who they were,and what they were doing,to POW snatches,
targeted hits,breaking into their store houses and destroying or booby-trapping their supplies and ammo,to tapping their phone lines,or just sitting along the Ho Chi Mihn Trail and calling in air strikes on them as they moved down the trail.
SOG recon teams were occasionally used to try to rescue pilots shot down in Laos or Cambodia,but it rarely worked. At best,it would be a body brought back at the cost of several more bodies.
The North Vietnamese later admitted they ended up having to deploy several thousand experienced NVA troops in what they called "counter-recon operations" to try to stop us. We did have a few teams just mysteriously disappear without a trace or a whisper,but it was rare.
Remember the big hoo-hah about CNN and "Operation Tailwind"? That was my old Hatchet Force Platoon that was involved,and it ended up costing Ted Turner and CNN millions. It cost Peter Arnette his career,as well as some news chick named "April something.
BTW,*I* was NOT a member of the Operation Tailwind team. I had already been out of the army for a year or so before that went down.
Check into the published information on "Operation Tailwind" and then try to tell me we didn't cause the NVA any grief.
SOG was Top Secret back then,but that has all expired now,and Amazon and other places are full of books about SOG now.
