by Mark Moyar
After fifteen minutes, they heard voices speaking an alien tongue, and then four North Vietnamese soldiers appeared on the trail, walking in their direction. When the North Vietnamese reached the stretch where the Americans and Nungs had chosen to halt, they caught sight of Meadows and went for their weapons. Before they could fire, Meadows sprang forward from the brush and gunned down all four of them with his Swedish K submachine gun.
Moving forward, Meadows and the rest of his team began calling for Woods by name. Their voices drew the attention of other North Vietnamese soldiers, who were likewise looking for the American airman. The jungle erupted with the sound of North Vietnamese bugles, vectoring the North Vietnamese search teams toward the rescue party.
Meadows, whom no one had ever accused of excessive caution, concluded that the North Vietnamese had so many men in the area as to render the risks prohibitive. They would have to forget about Woods and try to avoid capture themselves. Meadows radioed for an emergency extraction from the original landing zone. Racing back to their point of arrival, the Americans and Nungs rendezvoused with two Sea Kings and clambered aboard before the pursuing North Vietnamese soldiers could put any bullets in them.
As the Sea Kings arose from the landing zone, North Vietnamese antiaircraft shells gouged one of the helicopters. The pilot was able to fly the chopper to the sea, but it did not have enough strength left to reach the Intrepid. Gently setting the Sea King on the water’s surface, the pilot was able to spare the passengers from injury. The helicopter rolled onto its side and began taking on water, whereupon the crew and passengers donned life vests and jumped into the cool blue of the Tonkin Gulf. The destroyer USS Henley sped to the location and dispatched a motorboat, which recovered all of the men.
Lieutenant Woods was taken prisoner and incarcerated in a North Vietnamese jail until March 1973, when he was released under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords. That the futile operation to rescue him went down as one of the most renowned special operations of the war had much to do with the valor of the participants and their suspenseful encounter with the enemy. It also resonated with American veterans because it was a microcosm of the war as a whole—the struggle of brave and skillful men against overwhelming odds in a place the American nation would eventually write off.
While SOG and the CIDG advisory effort were the largest and most famous Special Forces programs in Vietnam, the Army’s psychological operations branch also carved out a large niche. Equipped with high-speed printing presses, the four battalions of the 4th Psyop Group spent most of their time producing leaflets for aircraft to disgorge over areas trafficked by the enemy. The leaflets contained propaganda messages on such subjects as the inevitability of North Vietnam’s defeat and the superiority of life in South Vietnam. Some promised good treatment to Communist soldiers who brought the leaflet along when they surrendered to the South Vietnamese government. The 4th Psyop Group also dropped thousands of transistor radios into enemy base areas, each one pretuned to a 50,000-watt radio station that served anti-Communist fare.
American psychological operators often took an active role in crafting the propaganda messages because of Vietnamese apathy or incapacity. But few of the Americans had the deep familiarity with Vietnamese culture required to create messages that would press the right psychological buttons and avoid the wrong ones. As a consequence, they defaulted to messages suited to American audiences, often to the befuddlement of the Vietnamese. One group of American propagandists wrote a comic strip based on an old American yarn about bullying, with only the superficial details tailored to the Vietnamese context. In the comic strip, a Vietnamese peasant put a brick on the ground and covered it with a hat that he had inscribed with an anti-Communist slogan. When a Viet Cong bully saw the hat, he kicked it, breaking his toe. The Americans were surprised to find that no Vietnamese found the comic strip funny. When they asked what could be done to improve it, one Vietnamese man replied that they should put a hand grenade under the hat.
Officers in conventional US military units were a good deal more skeptical than psyops officers about the impact of psychological operations. They noted that although thousands of Vietnamese Communist soldiers deserted or defected while bearing leaflets promising good treatment, interviews of prisoners suggested that their defections resulted mainly from unremitting pounding by potent American weaponry. Other critics faulted psychological operations units for an unimaginative, bureaucratic mentality. “Psychological operations were essentially defensive in nature,” remarked Colonel Francis J. Kelly, who commanded the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. “Opportunities or suggestions for offensive psychological operations were usually buried in the useless and meaningless statistics of numbers of leaflets delivered or broadcasts made.”
Few of the American special operators in Vietnam served in elite strike teams of the sort for which SOF would later become famous. The principal exceptions were to be found among the Navy SEALs, who in 1966 began using fourteen-man SEAL platoons for raids and ambushes. Operating mainly in the shallow waterways of the Mekong Delta, they flitted to and fro on specially designed boats, such as the Light SEAL Support Craft, a twenty-four-foot vessel powered by twin Ford V8 engines and Jacuzzi water-jet pumps.
The independent SEAL platoons were freed from the problems that went with working alongside local nationals—the poor marksmanship, the lack of noise discipline, the barriers of language and culture. But the SEALs discovered that independence had its drawbacks. The absence of partner forces who spoke Vietnamese kept them from obtaining information from the population, and few other intelligence sources were to be had. Practicing endlessly on the rifle range and loading boats to the gunwales with ammunition did little good when the SEALs could not find anyone to shoot.
A number of enterprising officers determined that the SEAL platoons needed to find South Vietnamese partner units if they wanted to find the enemy. Well-led South Vietnamese forces, of which a considerable number existed, obtained information on Viet Cong targets with an ease that astonished the Americans, principally by talking with their own family members in the villages. The SEALs were particularly drawn to the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), the best of the South Vietnamese forces by a wide margin.
Created in 1964 for the mission of attacking the Viet Cong in their lair, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units operated under the control of CIA paramilitary officers. The CIA appointed the South Vietnamese PRU commanders and seconded American special operators and other US military personnel to serve as advisers. The key to the program’s success lay in the CIA’s authority over personnel decisions, for it removed the politicization of command appointments that compromised the leadership of other South Vietnamese forces.
The PRUs carried the enemy’s weapon, the AK-47, and at times dressed in the black garb of the Viet Cong. The units received scraps of intelligence here and there from the Phoenix program, an intelligence-sharing program whose coordination centers fused information from different agencies. For the most part, however, they obtained targeting data from their own informants.
Numbering approximately 5,000 men, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units eliminated 10,000 or more of the enemy per year while sustaining remarkably few casualties. No other organization was as successful in targeting Viet Cong leaders. It should be noted, though, that they were far from a precise instrument, at least in comparison with the precision-strike special operations units of the twenty-first century. The Viet Cong leaders rarely lived in the villages after 1965 because of the probability of getting caught, and instead resided with military units. If the Provincial Reconnaissance Units or their US partners captured or killed a Viet Cong leader, it was usually by chance during a routine military engagement.
The year 1967 heralded a sharp intensification of SOG’s cross-border activities. Operations into Laos, which were now called Prairie Fire, faced increasingly sophisticated North Vietnamese countermeasures. North Vietnamese Army units positioned sentries and listeni
ng devices along American flight paths and at open areas where US helicopters were most likely to land. Tracker dogs and one-hundred-man “hunter-killer” teams from the 305th North Vietnamese Army Airborne Brigade combed the border region for traces of intrusion. With sophisticated direction-finding equipment obtained from their Communist allies, the North Vietnamese could locate SOG teams via their radio transmissions. Once the North Vietnamese obtained a fix on a SOG team, they beat gongs or sent messages by phone or runner to summon swarms of North Vietnamese Army soldiers to the area and inform North Vietnamese antiaircraft crews where to prepare a rude welcome for American rescue aircraft.
Over the course of 1967, the SOG leadership lobbied aggressively with General Westmoreland for a loosening of restrictions on the Laotian operations, in order to increase their effectiveness and reduce their vulnerability. Westmoreland, himself distraught at the continuous cascade of enemy men and supplies through the supposedly neutral country, was sympathetic to the proposals. Whenever he attempted to obtain greater latitude for Prairie Fire, however, he was stopped at the iron gates of Ambassador Sullivan, whose contempt for the military had been calcified by prolonged arguments over the use of US ground forces to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Sullivan cabled the State Department in October that Prairie Fire “involves a gung-ho group who, by their very nature, are always attempting to exceed the political limitations of more reasonable men everywhere” and “constantly pressing… for more and more reckless and irresponsible endeavors.” Sullivan mused that the Prairie Fire controversy was “largely a problem of morale for overgrown adolescents and I certainly don’t wish to disappoint their inevitable image of parental rigidity. Therefore, largely for their own good, it is wise to be most severe on Prairie Fire.”
The military did achieve a breakthrough on Cambodia in the spring of 1967, after years of fruitless complaints to Washington about North Vietnamese exploitation of Cambodian territory for sanctuary and logistics. The White House authorized SOG to commence ground reconnaissance on Cambodian territory in May, under the code name Daniel Boone. Like Prairie Fire, Daniel Boone labored under severe restrictions on its size and activities, with the teams permitted to enter and leave Cambodia only on foot and to go no farther than twenty kilometers past the border.
SOG’s activities in Laos and Cambodia caused the enemy more trouble than Ambassador Sullivan and other detractors recognized at the time. The targeting data provided by SOG teams greatly improved the accuracy of American air strikes. Damage inflicted by SOG-directed strikes undoubtedly figured prominently in the North Vietnamese decision to assign 40,000 men to the security of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia during 1967. No amount of SOG activity, however, could have choked the trail to the extent required to starve the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. Only the presence of US infantry units could have had such a strategic effect, and Lyndon Johnson was unwilling to deploy infantry into Laos or Cambodia.
In 1967, SOG also undertook a new type of ground operation into North Vietnam, in grudging recognition by the White House that prior operations had come up empty. On direction from Washington, SOG infiltrated Short Term Reconnaissance and Target Acquisition (STRATA) teams of between five and fifteen Vietnamese men into the North Vietnamese panhandle. Dressed in North Vietnamese Army uniforms, the teams were to install seismic wiretap devices, observe road traffic, locate enemy installations, and acquire targets for air strikes.
Two STRATA teams entered North Vietnam in 1967, only one of which made it back out. But the mere fact that one escaped was celebrated as a major victory, in light of the failure of all previous infiltrators to return. Twenty-four STRATA teams entered the North in 1968, with the average mission lasting thirteen days and a significant number of teams returning home. The teams obtained intelligence of only modest value and caused little trouble to the North Vietnamese, provoking accusations from American advisers that the Vietnamese personnel were inordinately preoccupied with coming back alive. Captain Roy Meeks, the assistant chief of staff of operations for the STRATA teams, complained, “I got the feeling that every time we inserted them, they found a hole to hide.”
SOG’s operations into North Vietnam ended in October 1968 because of President Johnson’s decision to discontinue the bombing of North Vietnam after three and a half years of intermittent, slowly escalating strikes. Cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia, however, increased in number during the subsequent period, peaking in 1969 with more than 400 operations. SOG personnel strength also reached its apex that year, with over 1,000 Americans and several thousand Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, and Laotians.
In 1969, SOG operations received a major boost from the introduction of the newly developed AC-130 Spectre. Based upon the C-130 transport aircraft platform, the AC-130 was bigger, faster, tougher, and deadlier than the AC-47. Outfitted with a weapons suite that the Air Force called “Surprise Package,” featuring 40mm Bofors antiaircraft guns and 20mm Gatling guns, the AC-130 could fire from higher altitudes than the AC-47, reducing its vulnerability to North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns. The Air Force, which had kept the AC-47 out of Laos since 1966 following the loss of four gunships to antiaircraft fire, decided to send the new gunship into the Laotian gauntlet to see if it could make it back.
The sudden appearance above the Ho Chi Minh Trail of hundred-foot-long gunships that could lay down sheets of projectiles for minutes at a time came as a nasty surprise to the North Vietnamese. The antiaircraft weapons positioned along the trail could not shoot the AC-130s down, and Hanoi was unable to send new weapons that were up to the task. For North Vietnamese truck drivers and porters, the Spectre became the devil of the sky, its appearance instantly instilling fear. In 1970 and 1971, the AC-130s of the Air Force’s 16th Special Operations Squadron destroyed 2,432 North Vietnamese trucks, accounting for more than 60 percent of all trucks destroyed by American air power.
During SOG’s last years in Laos and Cambodia, as the North Vietnamese regime further beefed up the defenses of the Ho Chi Minh Trail for fear of incursions by the hardnosed President Richard Nixon, teams routinely bumped into large concentrations of North Vietnamese Army troops. The average operation lasted only two days, down from an average of six days in 1965, and many teams had to be pulled out after only a few hours. When on the run from tens or hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers, SOG teams were often extracted with “McGuire rigs,” six-foot slings tied to hundred-foot ropes that dangled from helicopters into the jungle canopy. Of the 481 total US personnel assigned to Prairie Fire in 1969, 19 were killed, 199 were wounded, and 9 disappeared.
Recon Team Colorado, entering Laos in January 1971 on one of SOG’s last cross-border operations, had been on the ground for three days when it made contact with the North Vietnamese. The first member of the team to catch wind of the North Vietnamese was Sergeant David Mixter. An athletic young man from a prominent New England family, the six-foot-six Mixter towered over his teammates, who had nicknamed him “Lurch” after the butler of The Addams Family. One fellow Green Beret said that Mixter “was a soft-spoken gentle giant who laughed easily but rarely made anyone else laugh. Practical jokes, rubber barf, and gags were more his style. His virtue was generosity. He would give you the shirt off his back. Mix would share his last buck with you and was always good for a short-term loan.”
While the team was on a rest break, Mixter heard what he suspected to be North Vietnamese soldiers. He alerted team leader Pat Mitchel and radio operator Lyn St. Laurent, who passed word of the danger to the team’s Montagnards. Soon enemy soldiers came into Mixter’s field of vision. Sighting them in his crosshairs, he opened fire.
The clanking of AK-47 shots that answered Mixter’s weapon came with such rapidity as to indicate that the enemy had at least two squads. More could be on the way. With the North Vietnamese already holding a much superior number of pieces on the chessboard, Mitchel decided on flight over fight. Sergeant Mixter laid down fire while the other Americans and the Montagnards pulled
back. He then rejoined them under their covering fire.
“Got bad guys all around us,” Sergeant St. Laurent radioed. He requested immediate air strikes. Mixter, from the inside of a bomb crater, flashed a mirror to show airmen the team’s position. The reconnaissance men rejoiced at the appearance of two F-4 Phantoms, jet fighter-bombers capable of flying at twice the speed of sound.
Unbeknownst to Recon Team Colorado, the North Vietnamese had detected the team’s presence the previous day, and during the night had encircled the team with 37mm antiaircraft guns. Opening fire at the sight of the F-4s, the guns revealed themselves to be so close to the recon team’s position that the US jets could not bomb the North Vietnamese without a high risk of harming the Americans and the Montagnards. As the F-4s backed away, North Vietnamese infantrymen pressed in from all sides.
Trading fire with the North Vietnamese, Recon Team Colorado sought to hold them off long enough for US helicopters to arrive for an emergency evacuation. A well-aimed rocket-propelled grenade exploded near Mixter, killing the big man instantly and injuring St. Laurent. At this calamity, the Montagnards decided that the team was doomed and ran away.
Mitchel and St. Laurent, aware that they could not fight off multiple squads of North Vietnamese by themselves, resolved to take Mixter’s body to a new location from which they would be extracted by helicopter. But with St. Laurent wounded and both of them much smaller than Mixter, they were unable to carry the body. Back on the radio, St. Laurent contacted John Plaster, who was coordinating action from an OV-10 Bronco overhead, to say that they intended to stay with Mixter until they could be picked up. Plaster could see large bunches of North Vietnamese in nearby positions, who would surely shoot apart any helicopter that landed near the spot where Mixter lay dead—if they had not already killed Mitchel and St. Laurent by the time a helicopter was ready to retrieve them. Plaster told St. Laurent that he and Mitchel needed to move, even if it meant leaving Mixter behind. “It’s OK, Lurch would understand,” Plaster radioed. “We have to think about the living right now, partner. Now get moving.”
