by Mark Moyar
US aircraft would attempt to suppress the North Vietnamese while the two men made a run for it. To get a bead on enemy forces that might interfere with the escape, Plaster directed St. Laurent to prepare a white phosphorous grenade. “I’ll give you a countdown,” Plaster yelled over the din, “then I want you to throw it and give me an azimuth and distance to the enemy.” As Plaster’s turboprop Bronco dove toward the ground, he started the countdown. When St. Laurent’s grenade burst into sizzling white streaks, the enemy mistook it for a rocket from the aircraft and concluded that an American pilot had already zeroed in on them. Most of the North Vietnamese dove into their bunkers, alleviating the pressure on Mitchel and St. Laurent and giving them a fighting chance of slipping away.
Leaving Mixter behind, the two men dashed through the smoke from the white phosphorous grenade and broke out of the encirclement undetected. The nearest clearing was four hundred yards away from the Americans, next to a road running toward the east. As Cobra gunships and propeller-driven A-1 Skyraiders arrived on the scene with their vicious automatic cannons, Plaster directed the SOG men to run toward the clearing as soon as the aircraft were in position to shoot up the surrounding area.
Upon receiving the signal, Mitchel and St. Laurent sprinted toward the open ground, coming up onto the road. During the final stretch, as they were moving between the road and the clearing, Plaster radioed, “Stop! Get back on the road! There are people in that field!”
The Cobras and Skyraiders turned their metallic fury onto the field, scattering the North Vietnamese soldiers who had congregated there. Other aircraft strafed the road to prevent North Vietnamese trucks from shuttling reinforcements to the field. A Huey helicopter flew toward Mitchel and St. Laurent, banked hard, and set down on the ground. Scurrying aboard in the glowing ecstasy of survival, the two men watched the ground pull away until the North Vietnamese were the size of ants and the helicopter leveled off for the flight eastward toward safety.
THE MOST FAMOUS special operation of the war, the Son Tay raid, involved neither SOG nor the CIDGs, but rather a separate force created for the sole purpose of conducting the operation. During the latter part of the 1960s, US forces had raided dozens of suspected POW camps in Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam, but in nearly every case they had come away empty-handed. In the first forty-five raids, only one prisoner was retrieved, and that individual died a short time afterward from wounds that his captors had inflicted just before his liberation.
An opportunity of unprecedented promise arose in May 1970, when US reconnaissance aircraft photographed a highly unusual building compound at Son Tay, twenty-three miles west of Hanoi. In the courtyard, laundry had been hung in a pattern that to an overhead observer spelled the American code letters for search and rescue. Brigadier General Donald B. Blackburn, the special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities, proposed a nighttime rescue operation, in which US special operations forces would fly in, scoop up the prisoners, and get out within thirty minutes. American planners estimated that thirty minutes was the minimum time required for the nearest North Vietnamese Army troops to pile into trucks and drive to the camp.
It came as little surprise that a president nicknamed “Tricky Dick” approved planning for the operation. Nixon relished the prospect of rescuing American captives while at the same time delivering a kick to the nettlesome North Vietnamese on the outskirts of their own capital. He expressed concern, though, that landing US troops in North Vietnam would stir up the antiwar movement at home, as the incursion of US forces into Cambodia had done earlier in the year. “Christ, they surrounded the White House, remember?” Nixon remarked. “This time they will probably knock down the gates and I’ll have a thousand incoherent hippies urinating on the Oval Office rug. That’s just what they’d do.”
Blackburn’s choice to lead the rescue force was Brigadier General Leroy J. Manor, commander of the Air Force’s Special Operations Force, which in 1968 had supplanted the Kennedy-era Air Force Special Warfare Center as the central node of Air Force special operations. For second-in-command, Blackburn selected Bull Simons. Manor and Simons handpicked the pilots and the ground troops from large pools of experienced men, assembling a team that included Dick Meadows and numerous other all-stars.
Because of internal debates and pressing international matters, the White House waited until November—six months after the sighting of the laundry—to launch the operation. During the long waiting period, Simons rehearsed the ground assault at a mock-up of the camp up to three times a day and three times a night, more than 170 times in all. He modified the scenario on each iteration so that the members of the raiding party could think through all potential hiccups and opportunities. At the end of each rehearsal, Simons examined the cardboard silhouettes that signified enemy guards and counted the number of bullet holes in each. If the cardboard men had not been sufficiently perforated, he made the men go through the whole rehearsal again.
During the final days of preparation, the Pentagon received aerial photographs and other intelligence suggesting that the prisoners had been moved out of the Son Tay camp, together with other information suggesting that they were still there. In a meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Intelligence Agency director Donald Bennett held aloft a large stack of photos and cables in one hand and pronounced, “I’ve got this much that says ‘They’ve been moved,’” then lifted a stack of comparable size in his other hand and asserted, “I’ve got this much that says ‘They’re still there.’” Even if the odds of success were much less than fifty-fifty, as some intelligence analysts believed, the chance to rescue American POWs for the first time seemed worth a shot in the minds of most of those involved. On November 18, Nixon decided that the mission was a go.
The raiding party of fifty-six Special Forces soldiers took off from the Royal Thai Air Force Base in Udorn, Thailand, on the night of November 20. Flying in six assault helicopters into the world’s densest air defense system, they winnowed through holes in North Vietnamese radar coverage that had been located by analyzing the motions of radar dishes. Fifty-one other Air Force aircraft flew in support of the mission, including five F-105 Wild Weasels with radar-homing Shrike missiles and ten F-4 Phantoms that could intercept any North Vietnamese aircraft that had the audacity to take off. Fifty-eight US Navy aircraft from the carriers Ranger, Oriskany, and Hancock staged a fake attack on Haiphong Harbor, dropping flares and simulating the mining of the harbor, to draw North Vietnamese attention to the east coast while the assault force intruded from the west.
One part of the raiding force landed four hundred yards south of where it was supposed to land, its navigator having mistaken another building compound for the prison camp. US intelligence reports had previously identified this compound as a school. The compound was, in actuality, a barracks full of North Vietnamese troops. Scrambling out of bed, the North Vietnamese shot at the Americans from windows and doors. The errant landing actually worked to the advantage of the Americans, for it enabled them to engage this unanticipated hostile force before it could get organized. In an astonishing display of marksmanship, the twenty-two Americans who landed outside the barracks killed an estimated one hundred to two hundred North Vietnamese soldiers in five minutes without the loss of a single American life. Then they put the barracks to the torch, incinerating the dead and dying North Vietnamese in a bright orange pyre.
The primary breaching force, thirteen men under the leadership of Dick Meadows, touched down at the intended destination. Toting a bullhorn, Meadows announced, “We’re Americans. Keep your heads down. We’re Americans. This is a rescue. We’re here to get you out. Keep your heads down. Get on the floor. We’ll be in your cells in a minute.” As the Special Forces swept through the facility, they shot forty-two North Vietnamese soldiers. But they could find no sign of prisoners.
Shocked by the initial reports of vacant prison cells, Meadows told his men to search the cells again. After ten more minutes of futility, Meadow
s radioed, “Negative items,” meaning no prisoners. It was later learned that the North Vietnamese had moved the prisoners from Son Tay on July 14, probably because of heavy summer rains that had flooded the nearby Black River.
Twenty-seven minutes after arrival, the rescue team took off. Only two members of the raiding force were wounded during the entire operation, one sustaining a broken ankle, the other a gunshot wound. Every one of the more than one hundred aircraft that participated in the operation survived the flight out of North Vietnam’s dreaded air defense system. Although the Americans had been unable to retrieve any hostages, they could take some satisfaction that they had displayed exceptional skill and had lost neither a man nor an aircraft.
One month after the Son Tay raid, the CIDG program was dissolved in conformance with “Vietnamization,” Nixon’s multiyear drawdown of US forces. The Special Forces had spent nearly a decade supporting the CIDGs, whose strength exceeded 50,000 for most of the program’s lifespan, making it by far the largest and most significant program in the brief history of the Green Berets. The South Vietnamese government integrated 15,000 of the CIDG members into units operating in the country’s western border regions, which were seeing as much North Vietnamese traffic as ever.
On March 31, 1972, by which time no US ground forces remained in South Vietnam, SOG shuttered its doors. The organization went into retirement laying claim to an extraordinary record of efficiency. According to SOG statistics, enemy casualties resulting from SOG operations were more than one hundred times the friendly casualties.
When a conventional North Vietnamese offensive vanquished South Vietnam in 1975, critics of special operations forces seized upon the cataclysm as evidence that counterinsurgency and its SOF champions had doomed South Vietnam by diffusing resources that should have been concentrated on the conventional war. SOF personnel and their supporters countered that the United States had lost because hidebound Army officers had adopted a conventional military strategy against an unconventional adversary, misusing SOF in the process. That both of these interpretations were erroneous did not prevent them from proliferating.
In the years immediately following the war, the opponents of counterinsurgency held the upper hand within the US Army. At a time of dwindling defense budgets, they made sure that the Special Forces felt much of the pain. The number of Special Forces groups fell from seven to three, with the total strength of the Special Forces tumbling from a peak of 13,000 in 1971 to 3,000 in 1974. Budgets for Special Forces training and equipment suffered larger cuts than those for conventional units. Navy leaders delivered similar blows to the SEALs, slicing the number of SEAL teams in half. Opposition to the SEALs among the rest of the Navy ran so high in the mid-1970s that they likely would have been disbanded had they not enjoyed the protective shield of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.
NO US PRESIDENT, before or after, gave as much attention to special operations forces as John F. Kennedy. His insistence on expansion of special operations forces drove the Navy and Air Force to birth new forces and the Army to multiply its Special Forces. His emphasis on counterinsurgency ensured that the armed services put those forces to use in Vietnam. Without Kennedy’s actions, special operations forces might forever have remained the small sideshow of the 1940s and 1950s, if they managed to survive at all. The rapid growth he fathered, however, would necessitate a lowering of SOF standards and a shortening of SOF training, to the detriment of the quality and reputation of special operations.
Lyndon Johnson, who did not share Kennedy’s interest in special operations forces, saw in them a means of jabbing North Vietnam inconspicuously at a time when he wished to keep Vietnam out of the newspapers. By exploiting the secrecy surrounding special operations forces for personal political gain, he set a perilous precedent. His insistence on avoiding support for resistance movements barred SOF from the type of work for which they were best prepared, and ensured that the North Vietnamese would wipe out the small teams that SOG sent north. For reasons of both politics and policy, Johnson relied on SOG for covert operations into Laos and Cambodia instead of positioning large conventional forces across the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which would have been far more effective at obstructing enemy infiltration. That decision, moreover, set the State Department and special operations forces against one another, sparking a rivalry that would grow in the coming decades.
Kennedy’s advocacy of counterinsurgency broadened a SOF repertoire that hitherto had been limited to the tunes of unconventional warfare. The CIDGs began as a counterinsurgency program, though over time they became closer to an unconventional warfare program, as the Montagnards executed guerrilla operations against the North Vietnamese Army in the no-man’s-lands of South Vietnam’s jungles and mountains. SOG drew the Special Forces into agent insertion, compelling them to copy CIA methods that worked no better for the glamorous Green Berets than for the anonymous CIA. SOG’s reconnaissance operations into Laos and Cambodia, the advising of the CIA’s Provincial Reconnaissance Units, and the employment of SEAL strike forces were all new missions. Beyond Vietnam, the thrusting of the enlarged Special Forces into new environments caused them, by improvisation and necessity more than by design, to latch on to the objective of training foreign security forces of all sorts, an activity that would become an enduring feature of the Special Forces.
The tactical and strategic effectiveness of special operations forces in Vietnam ran the gamut, and as usual the assessment of effectiveness stimulated heated disputation, much of it self-serving. During the war’s early years, the CIDG program clearly achieved success in the large-scale organization of South Vietnamese tribal minorities for counterinsurgency. When the North Vietnamese Army shifted to large offensive operations in 1964, the war’s increasingly conventional hue sapped the CIDGs and their Special Forces advisers of strategic influence; the South Vietnamese Army, and later the conventional US Army and Marine forces, became the lead strategic actors. Nevertheless, the CIDG program made important tactical contributions to the conventional war by collecting intelligence, assisting conventional forces, and drawing enemy units into battle.
SOG caused the enemy considerable tactical grief through its cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia, but, like the CIDG program, it could not exert strategic sway. The air strikes that SOG guided never disrupted the flow of traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail enough to stymie North Vietnamese offensive operations in the South. As for SOG raids and agent insertions in North Vietnam, unalloyed tactical failure guaranteed strategic impotence.
The glamorization and meteoric growth of special operations forces during the Vietnam era enlarged the psychological gulf separating them from the rest of the military. Their elevation as a premier counterinsurgency force would come back to haunt them after the war, when critics pinned the loss of Vietnam on the special operations forces and demanded their emasculation. The special operators survived the end of the war, but they would once again have to search for new tasks to convince spendthrift lawmakers, bureaucrats, and generals to keep them afloat.
CHAPTER 6
JSOC AND SOCOM
In the depths of the post-Vietnam doldrums, special operators went about the now-customary brainstorming for new hills to climb and new dragons to slay. Tossing around ideas over coffee or beer, they followed any glimmer that might foretell the starburst, the brilliant idea that would excite individuals of influence at the Pentagon, in the White House, or on Capitol Hill. As had so often been the case, however, internally generated ideas were to gain little traction in the absence of external events and external personalities who were prepared to exploit those events.
Repeating another familiar pattern, the seminal events were to come from a direction no one had anticipated. In the mid-1970s, Islamic extremists perpetrated a spate of airplane hijackings and other attacks on Western targets as a means of punishing Western nations for supporting Israel. At the Olympian levels of the US government, the rash of incidents kindled interest in a new count
erterrorism force, one that would be capable of killing terrorists with such speed and precision that no harm would come to their hostages. Over the next decade, the quest for such a force would drive the development of new special operations forces and new commands. It would forever change the face of special operations forces, influencing their employment and their relations with conventional forces far beyond the realm of hostage rescue.
IRONICALLY, THE INITIAL surge came from Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, who had long disparaged elite forces as an unwise segregation of the Army’s top talent. Abrams saw a new counterterrorism force as an opportunity to improve the nation’s emergency readiness, increase the Army’s relevance in the post-Vietnam era, and bolster the big Army at the expense of two rivals that purported to possess rapid-reaction counterterrorism capabilities—the Marine Corps and the Army’s own Special Forces. Abrams resolved to form new Army counterterrorism units separate from the Special Forces, using manpower slots that would otherwise have gone to the Green Berets. The new units would be able to rescue hijacked airplanes, secure American embassies, and conduct raids by parachute, helicopter, and boat. Rather than create an entirely unprecedented force, Abrams chose to reincarnate the Rangers, capitalizing on their storied legacy to subdue institutional resistance to the addition of forces at a time of declining budgets. In the fall of 1974, Abrams reactivated the 1st and 2nd Ranger battalions and designated them the nation’s premier counterterrorism units.
Two years later, another of the Army’s leading lights, General William DePuy, concluded that the Army needed an even more elite force for hostage rescue. Viewing the British Special Air Service as a model for the new organization, DePuy put the project in the hands of Colonel Charlie Beckwith, a Special Forces officer who had served a tour with the Special Air Service in the 1960s. Broad of shoulder and face, his lower lip protruding above a sharp jaw, Beckwith had the look of a man in a perpetual state of ferocious insolence. In contrast to later generations of ultra-elite warriors, for whom the ideal officer had the waist of a triathlete and the head of a monk, Beckwith was a man who let it all hang out, whether it was his expansive belly or his combustible emotions. At times, he demonstrated a lack of self-control under stress that flagrantly violated the ethos of his new organization, which demanded exceptional poise at the most stress-inducing of moments.
