by Mark Moyar
Once the Americans began to suspect a systemic compromise of the SOG teams, they changed security procedures. But the pattern continued. Of the nearly 250 agents whom SOG inserted into the North between April 1964 and October 1967, not one returned. None of the teams ever provided information of significant value, and only one known act of sabotage took place, the total effect of which was to blow a leg off a footbridge.
The abysmal failure of agent operations into North Vietnam elicited much pointing of fingers. SOG leaders laid blame on America’s civilian leadership for refusing to authorize resistance movements that could have protected SOG’s recruits from North Vietnam’s internal security apparatus. Whether North Vietnamese resistance organizations could have prospered in the face of fierce Communist countermeasures is not certain, but at minimum they would have compelled the North Vietnamese to divert resources from the war in the South. Others in SOG criticized high officials in Washington and Saigon for continuing the missions after the folly had become obvious. “We were all amateurs,” asserted Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Carney, head of SOG’s Airborne Operations Section. “We had no business sending brave young men on missions which had almost no chance of success.”
Marginally more successful than the agent insertions were SOG’s raids on the North Vietnamese coast. During 1964, at McNamara’s direction, American speedboats carried South Vietnamese commandos to the coast to conduct acts of sabotage and general harassment. Their demolitions felled bridges and scalded buildings, but the successes came at a heavy cost in commando lives. As the raids mounted, the North Vietnamese wised up and thickened their coastal defenses, further diminishing returns for the raiders. Escalation of the war in 1965 and 1966 caused the United States to strike coastal targets overtly with aircraft and large warships, which could do much more damage and with considerably less risk, reducing the SOG raids to insignificance.
The Special Forces’ CIDG program, by contrast, remained significant after the 1963 coup, both because it mobilized friendly populations and because senior American leaders adapted it to new military realities. In response to Hanoi’s intensification of the war in 1964, General Paul Harkins and his successor as the top US military commander, General William Westmoreland, integrated the Montagnard fighters of the CIDGs into a new strategy for thwarting Hanoi’s designs. This strategy sent conventional South Vietnamese units into the wilderness to hit big enemy units before they could reach South Vietnam’s population centers, in order to maintain the initiative and buy time for the civil government to get back on its feet. Pursuant to this strategy, the mission of the CIDG program shifted from defense of the Montagnard population to reconnaissance and offensive operations against North Vietnamese troops infiltrating into South Vietnam.
American construction teams built new CIDG camps in unpopulated areas near South Vietnam’s borders with Laos and Cambodia, flying in pallets of sandbags and railroad ties to fortify them against large North Vietnamese assaults. The Special Forces formed some of the Montagnards into mobile strike forces of battalion size, which could be used to relieve camps under attack. They even experimented with “mobile guerrilla forces,” company-sized units that operated in enemy base areas for weeks at a time, receiving periodic supply drops by air, though that effort was terminated after the enemy brought large forces to bear on the mobile guerrilla units with unexpected frequency.
Air Force special operations did their part in defending remote CIDG bases by developing the AC-47 fixed-wing gunship, the first US aircraft unique to special operations. Built upon the frame of the World War II–era C-47 transport aircraft, the AC-47 sported three electrically driven miniguns, each of which had six barrels that rotated around a central axis and could fire 100 rounds per second. Executing pylon turns at an altitude of 3,000 feet, the AC-47 could concentrate fire at a target roughly one mile away, putting the slow-moving aircraft beyond the reach of enemy machine guns.
At CIDG outposts, the defenders built large wooden arrows to guide the fire of the AC-47s. Swiveling the arrows in the direction of hostile forces, they lit flares to indicate the distance, with one flare representing one hundred meters. Many an American and Montagnard would owe his life to the torrential fire that the AC-47 brought onto the pith helmets of the North Vietnamese assault forces. Grateful American foot soldiers nicknamed the aircraft “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Some of the special operators and their advocates were to argue that the shift in CIDG activities represented the victimization of the program by a conventional US Army establishment that simply did not understand the importance of protecting the population in counterinsurgency. But protecting the population was the overriding problem only so long as the enemy’s forces operated solely as guerrillas. By 1964, the Vietnamese Communists had acquired formidable conventional military capabilities, fielding heavily armed regiments of 1,500 men apiece that could execute the final phase of the revolutionary warfare espoused by Mao Zedong, in which conventional forces destroyed the enemy’s army and conquered its cities. To ignore those regiments was to allow the enemy to concentrate where and when he pleased, an invitation to defeat in detail.
The accommodation of the Special Forces to the comprehensive US military strategy ensured that their tactical achievements would serve a larger strategic purpose. It did not, however, entirely spare them from aspersions by conventional officers about their tactical and strategic effectiveness. General Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, faulted the Special Forces for anchoring the CIDGs to fortified bases instead of keeping them active in the field. The Special Forces claimed to be “highly mobile, disdainful of fixed installations, innovative, not requiring organized logistical support,” Johnson groused, but “what they did was build fortifications out of the Middle Ages and bury themselves with concrete.” Other critics noted that the Special Forces camps did not prevent the enemy from moving large numbers of troops through their areas of operation. A number of senior military officers, moreover, disputed the notion that peculiar attributes of the Special Forces accounted for the successes of the Montagnard units, asserting that Special Forces soldiers were, on average, no better than other Americans at advising the South Vietnamese.
Some of the units did indeed show a tendency to spend inordinate amounts of time inside their camps. But even had all the CIDGs kept as active as Stonewall Jackson’s Army of the Valley in the Shenandoah, they were spread out too far to stop the infiltration of the North Vietnamese Army. With sixty-three strike force companies at eighteen border sites, the CIDGs could, at best, assign one platoon for every twenty-eight miles of border, and it was a border consisting mainly of jungles and mountains that were particularly conducive to surreptitious movement. Their patrolling and summoning of air strikes did, nevertheless, cause the enemy some harm and irritation—enough to make the CIDG camps targets of frequent North Vietnamese onslaughts.
On July 6, 1964, eight hundred Communist troops assembled in the darkness of a remote South Vietnamese valley near the Laotian border. The Special Forces had recently established the Nam Dong CIDG camp in the valley by fortifying an old French installation and expanding its defenses outward. At 2:30 a.m., Viet Cong mortar tubes spewed a barrage of white phosphorus shells at Nam Dong. Exploiting information from an informant inside the camp, the Communist mortar crews made quick work of the command post, supply facility, and dispensary. Viet Cong infantrymen rushed forward, hurling grenades toward the perimeter foxholes while machine guns raked the camp’s breastworks. Breaking through wire fences, the attackers overran the section of the camp held by the strike force. Of the three hundred men in the strike force, one hundred were wounded or killed. Most of the strike force survivors fled to a shanty town one kilometer away, where their family members were housed.
The assault force then turned its attention to the other section of the camp, the original French fort, defended by a Special Forces team and sixty South Vietnamese guards of the Nung ethnic minority. Although heavily outnumbered and without air sup
port, the Americans and Nungs repulsed repeated Viet Cong attacks on their perimeter, in some cases shooting down the Viet Cong at point-blank range with shotguns and rifles. Directing the whole defense was Captain Roger Donlon of Saugerties, New York, the Special Forces team leader, who ran indefatigably from one defensive position to another to observe the enemy, give directions, buoy spirits, and direct fire. Witnesses saw him pick up grenades thrown by the Viet Cong and toss them back. At one point in the battle, Donlon braved heavy enemy fire to drag a wounded sergeant, several heavy weapons, and crates of ammunition to safety.
Holding the enemy at bay until dawn, the Americans and Nungs bought sufficient time for US aircraft to reach Nam Dong. Chastened by the sight of America’s chariots of the air, the Viet Cong commander knew that daylight would allow US aircraft to locate and pulverize his exposed troops. He ordered a retreat. The Viet Cong departed in such haste and disorder that they left behind fifty-four of their dead. Nam Dong’s garrison suffered a total of fifty-five dead, of whom two were Americans, along with sixty-five wounded. Donlon, who had been hit four times but kept going to battle’s end, would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts, becoming the first recipient of that award for actions in Vietnam.
During 1964, the Americans encouraged Vietnamese Special Forces officers to take charge of the CIDGs, of which they were the titular commanders. But the debilitating purges of the Vietnamese Special Forces following the 1963 coup and ethnic animosity between the Vietnamese and Montagnards necessitated that the Americans remain the de facto commanders. So confident of US backing did the Montagnards become that in September 1964 they staged a revolt against the Saigon government and sought American recognition of their independence. Seizing four CIDG camps and assailing a South Vietnamese Army garrison in Darlac Province, they killed several South Vietnamese soldiers.
The American embassy had long implored the Saigon government to improve its treatment of the Montagnards, but it had no appetite for Montagnard secession. US and Australian advisers pleaded with the Montagnards to end the mutiny before South Vietnamese reinforcements arrived and the bloodletting really got into swing. Colonel John F. Freund, an American with a natural affinity for persuading the Montagnards, talked some of the rebels into laying down their weapons. He induced the others to relent by pointing his pistol at the head of a recalcitrant mutineer.
When US Army and Marine Corps combat divisions arrived in the middle of 1965 to help a weakened South Vietnamese Army stave off a North Vietnamese Army offensive, the CIDGs entered into partnerships with American units, to the benefit of both parties. Possessing air mobility and firepower unprecedented in the annals of war, the US forces came to the aid of beleaguered CIDG camps and patrols with remarkable dispatch. The Montagnards and their Green Beret mentors, for their part, conducted long-range reconnaissance missions to sniff out prey for the big American units. The CIDGs also participated in large operations orchestrated by conventional US forces, in some cases performing unusual missions that exploited their special capabilities, in others serving as regular infantry. The Green Berets bemoaned conventional commanders who employed the Montagnard units as infantry, emphasizing that the CIDGs lacked the heavy armaments to put them on a par with the conventionally equipped North Vietnamese battalions.
As the American military colossus berthed in South Vietnam, SOG expanded its covert war into Laos to contend with mounting North Vietnamese infiltration through that country. Because of the feeble results of reconnaissance operations manned exclusively by Laotian tribesmen, SOG received authorization in September 1965 to send US reconnaissance personnel into Laos. Code-named Shining Brass, this new reconnaissance program undertook 8 insertions in 1965 and 137 in 1966.
Shining Brass belonged, at first, to Colonel Arthur D. “Bull” Simons. As a Ranger in the 6th Ranger Battalion during World War II, Simons had garnered a reputation as one of the toughest, meanest, and craftiest officers in the whole US Army. Gray of hair, with hands twice the size of a normal man’s, he had the look of a middle-aged ox. Simons was also known for his love of artifacts. A collector by instinct, he owned a potpourri of antique Vietnamese spittoons, chamber pots, snuffboxes, and dragon heads, as well as a collection of historical firearms so large that fellow officers joked it could equip an invasion force big enough to take Cuba.
Simons would have been content to spend all his time in Laos hectoring the North Vietnamese, but circumstances forced him to divert much of his energy to bureaucratic battles with the State Department. The US ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, restricted Shining Brass to two small boxes near the South Vietnamese border, and limited the size of SOG units to small teams. A larger program, Sullivan contended, would undermine the Laotian government, and it could provoke stronger reactions from North Vietnam, China, or the Soviet Union. Simons and other military officers thought it preposterous to hold down US involvement so strenuously in a country whose neutrality had been so thoroughly violated by the enemy. Month after month, Simons pressed for expansion of Shining Brass, and each time Sullivan and his State colleagues shot down his proposals. The professional dispute became personal, with Sullivan airing his condescension openly and the SOG officers expressing most of their contempt out of Sullivan’s earshot. One SOG commander told his subordinates that the State Department was full of “shoves.” When asked for clarification, he said, “A cross between a shit and a dove.”
Most of the American manpower for Shining Brass came from the Special Forces, with members of Vietnamese or Laotian ethnic minorities accounting for the bulk of indigenous team members. To conceal the identities of Shining Brass personnel, SOG issued them plain uniforms that bore no rank or unit insignia. Their weapons included 9mm Swedish K submachine guns, Belgian Browning 9mm pistols with serial numbers that could not be traced, and 6-inch knives that had been manufactured in a secret factory in Japan.
Based out of CIDG camps along South Vietnam’s western frontier, the Shining Brass teams flew across the Laotian border by helicopter, usually near dusk. After disembarking at preselected landing zones, they set up night ambushes around the insertion point in case the enemy had sighted their arrival. Moving out in the morning, they hacked, scratched, and clawed through dense jungle vines while laboring to avoid making noises that would give away their position. Oftentimes they advanced only a few hundred yards before their machetes had been dulled and their muscles exhausted.
The reconnaissance men watched roads to see the magnitude of enemy traffic and the types of materiel moving through, snapping photographs with pocket cameras when possible. They searched for truck parks, arms depots, storage facilities, and other targets vulnerable to bombing. Communicating by radio with forward air controllers flying overhead in propeller-driven aircraft, they could summon an Air Force jet to a target within thirty to forty minutes. SOG communications specialists eavesdropped on North Vietnamese field telephones with state-of-the-art electromagnetic couplers that could retrieve conversations through induction without having to splice into the line.
The cross-border missions lasted anywhere from one day to several weeks. Certain men thrived in prolonged isolation in enemy territory and were eager to go on missions again and again. Others were worn down by boredom or fear. “There are some people that once they hear the helicopters go off in the distance, their ass gets so tight they can’t breathe,” commented Captain Jim Storter, a SOG veteran. “When it gets quiet and you’re on your own, a lot of people can’t handle it.”
Reconnaissance was always the most common type of mission for Shining Brass teams. The team members, though, also participated in pilot-rescue operations under the code name Bright Light. One of the most famous episodes in SOG’s history took place in October 1966 when Sergeant Dick Meadows led a team into North Vietnam to rescue Lieutenant Robert D. Woods.
Countless special operators could have been the protagonist in a Horatio Alger novel, but few were as qualified for that distinction as Meadows. Born on the dirt flo
or of a moonshiner’s cabin in West Virginia, he had enlisted in the Army in 1947 at age fifteen, having prevailed upon his mother to lie about his age. Many of the young men who entered the Army with Meadows disliked the regimentation and privation of basic training, but for him the living conditions surpassed anything he had ever experienced. He was astonished to receive three meals every day along with all the milk he could drink.
Entering the Airborne, Meadows fought in Korea with the 187th Regimental Combat Team, and in 1952 joined the 10th Special Forces Group. His meticulous planning and rehearsal, his creativity, and his ability to make every task fun for his subordinates caused the young sergeant to stand out among the noncommissioned officers. Within the 10th Group, he became known as the man who always succeeded.
On October 12, 1966, North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire hit the A-1 Skyraider flown by Lieutenant Woods, forcing the young pilot to eject. His parachute came down on a jungle-covered ridge thirty miles from Hanoi. Using a survival radio, Woods sent word of his hiding spot, which was located twenty meters from the intersection of a downed tree and a dirt trail. Meadows and his team of Americans and Nungs were flown to the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier that was prowling the South China Sea. After reviewing aerial photographs of the area, Meadows selected an insertion point eight hundred yards from the pilot’s reported location.
At dawn on October 15, Navy Sea King helicopters ferried the rescue team from the deck of the Intrepid into the North Vietnamese jungle. Landing without incident, the team headed toward Lieutenant Woods. When they were within one hundred yards, the Nung pointman froze, then motioned for the others to halt. The team hid behind the flora next to the trail and lay still, guns at the ready, wondering whether the pointman’s instincts were correct.
