Secret Commandos

Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG

John L. Plaster

• Editore: Simon & Schuster
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781439142479
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

Major John L. Plaster recalls his remarkable covert activities as a member of a special operations team during the Vietnam War in a "comprehensive, informative, and often exciting…account of an important part of the overall Vietnam tragedy" ( The New York Times ). Before there were Navy SEALs, there was SOG. Short for "Studies and Operations Group, " it was a secret operations force in Vietnam, the most highly decorated unit in the war. Although their chief mission was disrupting the main North Vietnamese supply route into South Vietnam, SOG commandos also rescued downed helicopter pilots and fellow soldiers, and infiltrated deep into Laos and Cambodia to identify bombing targets, conduct ambushes, mine roads, and capture North Vietnamese soldiers for intelligence purposes.Always outnumbered, they matched wits in the most dangerous environments with an unrelenting foe that hunted them with trackers and dogs. Ten entire teams disappeared and another fourteen were annihilated. This is the dramatic, page-turning true story of that team's dedication, sacrifice, and constant fight for survival. In the "gripping" ( Publishers Weekly ) Secret Commandos, John Plaster vividly describes these unique warriors who gave everything fighting for their country—and for each other.

PART I

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Fort Bragg

1

Like many young men graduating high school in 1967, I went directly into the Army, much as our father’s generation had done during World War II. In blue-collar, northeast Minneapolis, it was assumed that you served your country; the only question was whether you waited to be drafted for two years, or enlisted for three, choosing what you wanted to do. Along with several gung ho classmates, I followed the latter course, enlisting for Airborne-Infantry—paratroopers.

After Basic Training that sweltering summer at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, we were shipped to the pine forests of Fort Gordon, Georgia. There, in a cluster of Quonset huts called Camp Crockett, we trained to be Airborne-Infantrymen, bound for Vietnam and elite units, such as the 173rd Airborne Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, and the 1st Air Cavalry. In addition to lots of instruction on patrolling, weapons, and small unit tactics, we underwent tough physical training. Soon we found ourselves running five miles each morning in heavy jump boots, followed by hours of physical exercise. Our trainers, themselves Vietnam Airborne veterans, cut no slack. We expected none.

All that running and calisthenics later enabled us Camp Crockett graduates to skate through Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia, while most Airborne trainees struggled and one quarter washed out. Then we got our great payoff—we jumped from airplanes, just like the World War II paratroopers we’d grown up admiring. Descending gracefully onto the Fort Benning drop zone among those billowing canopies, I forgot about all the harrassment and physical agony. I loved being a paratrooper.

One morning, in our final week of Jump School, a rugged figure in a green beret appeared. He just stood there, watching our company while we underwent morning exercises. Afterward, he addressed us; anyone interested in volunteering for Special Forces could meet with him that evening. My neighborhood buddies had had enough training—I was the only one of them to go with twenty-five other Airborne students to listen to the Special Forces sergeant.

Unlike any other job in the Army—such as an infantryman or military policeman—you could not enlist to be a Green Beret. To be considered for Special Forces, the recruiter explained, you had to be a qualified paratrooper, with an intelligence test score high enough to attend officer candidate school, and meet the Army’s highest physical fitness standard. All of us met these requirements, but there was still a special aptitude test, the recruiter explained.

Could I be a Green Beret? The Green Berets were gods. Only one year earlier, in 1966, the largest selling 45-rpm single was not recorded by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—it was “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” sung by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. Before that, the Vietnam War’s first Medal of Honor had gone to Roger H. C. Donlon, a young Special Forces captain, while Robin Moore’s novel The Green Berets had hung on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. Only five years earlier, over the protests of Pentagon bureaucrats, President John F. Kennedy had authorized the green beret to these superb warriors, declaring their headgear “a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.”

During my childhood in Minnesota, I’d heard Scandinavian neighbors speak in awe of the Norwegian Resistance and their inspiring fight against the Nazis. I read books about them, and the French Resistance. Such gallant guerrilla fighters had shown that small groups of dedicated men operating behind enemy lines can have effects far beyond their numbers—just like America’s Special Forces. And now, as a freshly trained paratrooper, I had a chance to volunteer for the Green Berets—at least maybe.

Originally, Special Forces accepted only experienced soldiers—at least twenty years old, with a minimum rank of specialist four. Heavy casualties in Vietnam had compelled lowering the age to nineteen, and the rank to private first class, neither of which I met. I was only a private, and three months past eighteen. “But I’ll be nineteen by the time I finish training,” I tried to persuade the recruiter.

The Green Beret sergeant looked me over, then announced, “You can take the Special Forces Qualification Test with the others. Let’s see how well you do.” Designed by RAND, a defense think tank, this was the strangest test I’d ever taken, resembling the opening scene in the TV series Mission: Impossible, with tape-recorded instructions, exotic scenarios, photos to study, then a series of questions offering only imperfect answers. I could not tell how well I’d done.

The next afternoon, the Special Forces sergeant called back eight of us. I had a 477 out of 500, the highest score in our group. I was in—I had a chance to earn a green beret. An hour after graduating and pinning on our silver paratrooper wings, I said goodbye to my neighborhood buddies, and boarded a chartered bus for the 450-mile drive to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

It was after dark when I awoke to see the bus headlights illuminating a sign—“Headquarters Company, Special Forces Training Group.” At Basic Training we’d been greeted by shouting drill instructors; at Camp Crockett’s Airborne-Infantry school it was more screaming drill instructors; at Fort Benning the black-hatted Airborne cadre had shouted and dropped us for push-ups. How much worse would it be here?

Momentarily, the headquarters company door opened, out strolled a lone Special Forces sergeant first class with a clipboard. The eight of us trotted dutifully before him, but he just let us stand in a cluster while he pulled out a pipe.

After puffing it to life he announced, “We’ve kept the mess hall open for you. Stow your duffel bags inside the hallway. After chow, I’ll issue you bedding. Any questions?” His tone was relaxed, almost friendly. Until now, we’d been housed in World War II-era wooden barracks or crude Quonset huts, with forty men bunked in large open rooms. Here at Fort Bragg the sergeant ushered us into modern brick buildings resembling college dormitories, with just eight men per room. Our quarters were immaculate, with brightly painted walls and tiled floors.

Yes, Special Forces was different. Now we’d have to prove ourselves in the six weeks of Phase One, the initial and most difficult portion of SF training.

Where would we start? Learning to master explosives? Sabotage? Raids?

“To accomplish your missions,” an old master sergeant told us during orientation, “you must be both a warrior and a teacher. Therefore, the first subject that will make or break your future in Special Forces is MOI—methods of instruction.”

What! A teacher? We wanted to kill the enemy and blow things up. Instead, we faced a whole week of MOI. “If you cannot learn to teach,” the master sergeant warned, “there’s no room for you in SF.” He was serious.

That first week was devoted to teaching skills, instructed by the sharpest group of Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) I’d yet encountered in the Army—bright, devoted, well spoken, and just rough enough around the edges to make them Special Forces. All were combat-seasoned with plenty of first-hand experience to make teaching points.

Our most unforgettable instructor had to be Sergeant First Class Morris Worley. Recovering from serious combat wounds, rather than convalesce at home Worley sat in a chair in front of us, lecturing on effective teaching techniques. Despite his clumsy cast and bandages covering much of one leg and his face, he never even hinted he was in pain, though we could see ugly red scars beneath his right sleeve from which his hand hung stiff and almost unusable. He struggled to write on the blackboard, but did so legibly, pretending it was entirely normal.

Unknown to us, each morning another instructor, Sergeant First Class Bob Franke, helped Worley dress, then put him in the back seat of his car and drove him to our classroom. Before we arrived, Franke and a third instructor, Sergeant First Class Bob Jones, put Worley in a chair, then carried him to the podium.

Truly, Worley was a man of humility and indomitable spirit—and, we learned one day, of great courage. During a break, a fellow student told us Worley had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest heroism award, just below the Medal of Honor. Worley had been in something called, the student thought, SOG. None of us knew what those letters stood for, and when one student asked an instructor, all he got was an angry glare. Whatever SOG was, we were not to inquire about it.

That week of MOI opened our eyes to the reality of Special Forces. One morning Worley noted, “Montagnard tribesmen can only reason up to an arithmetic value of three—‘One-two-three-many.’ How,” he challenged us, “do you teach him that an M-16 has a twenty-round magazine?” Yes, we had to pull off our boots and show him fingers and toes.

Or, you’re to teach a class on the M-72 Light Antitank Weapon, and you won’t get your first M-72 air-dropped for another week—What do you do? We handcrafted a model from wood, string, and wire, and instructed on that. From hand-making our training aids to using a sandbox and pine cones to teach tactics, our instructors encouraged improvisation and field expedients. For our final test, each of us had to teach a class to the instructors (acting as foreign guerrilla students), with one playing the role of interpreter, further complicated by a few invented “cultural taboos” that we would discover only during our class. It was hilarious to figure out our guerrillas were offended by a pointed finger, or the word “the,” but the lesson was well learned.

A few men failed, and that was the last we saw of them. For the rest of us, it all made more sense now—of course, to be Special Forces we had to be teachers.

The rest of our Phase One training focused on Unconventional Warfare—landing behind enemy lines to recruit, train, and lead local guerrilla bands, and through them create intelligence networks and organize underground railways to assist downed pilots and escaped POWs.

We learned much from the World War II experience of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, a quasi-military U.S. secret agency, whose veterans went on to found both the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Army Special Forces. Just like the OSS, we studied how to survey an aircraft landing site in an occupied country, set up encoded marker lights, then quickly move away with the arriving supplies and personnel before enemy security forces reacted. Or how to hold a message aloft on wire and poles, to be snatched up by a low-flying airplane. To communicate with our agent network, we employed a dead letter drop—a concealed message left at an agreed-upon spot, so we’d never have to meet face-to-face.

If the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe, dozens of Special Forces teams would parachute behind Russian lines—to recruit Czechs, Poles, East Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, even Russians—and especially ethnic minorities—to create an immense resistance movement throughout Eastern Europe. Already, our instructors hinted, more than adequate stockpiles of weapons, radios, and supplies had been secretly cached from Norway to the Swiss frontier of Germany so that still more Special Forces teams could stay behind as the Russian invaders surged westward, adding dozens of additional teams in their rear, and thousands more guerrillas.

To fulfill this role, the twelve-man Special Forces A-Team was structured to operate autonomously for extended periods. Led by a captain with a lieutenant assistant, the A-Team’s ten NCOs possessed an ideal combination of technical skills—two medics, two communications men, two weapons men, two demolitions men, and two operations and intelligence men to plan training and operations. Not only did this mean an impressive force multiplier—500 foreign combatants for the investment of twelve Green Berets—but it put these local guerrillas in direct support of the U.S. armed forces. What better way to integrate a guerrilla movement into U.S. military operations than to have it trained and led by Americans, communicate with American forces, and coordinate their operations? It was brilliant.

During the fourth week of Phase One, everyone’s attention switched to Vietnam, where the news was not good. Two North Vietnamese divisions had encircled the U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh, who were pounded day and night by heavy incoming fire. Then came the Tet ’68 Offensive, an unexpected countrywide attack and temporary seizing of most major towns in South Vietnam. And especially ominous, for the first time in the war, enemy tanks struck, overrunning the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, only six miles west of Khe Sanh. This was close to home—there were NCOs in Training Group who knew the Green Berets at Lang Vei, or had even served there themselves. There was genuine doubt about the direction the war was taking.

Grim as this sounded, at Training Group there still were light moments.

One morning, the acting first sergeant of our company, Sergeant First Class Ernie Fant, was pacing before the morning formation when he noticed one man lacking the requisite pistol belt and canteen.

“Just where is your pistol belt, trooper?” Fant demanded.

Of course he’d lost it or forgotten it somewhere, but that would have been admitting a foolish mistake—for sheer originality, utter genius under stress, this guy deserved an award. Standing at perfect attention, he responded, “The moles took it.”

Fant didn’t know what to say. He eyed that young trooper up and down in amazement. “Moles?”

The young soldier lifted his hands to his mouth and flexed his fingers sideways, the way a little furry mole digs. “You know, Sergeant, moles.”

Fant fought back a smile. “Well, do you s’pose the moles will bring it back?”

“I sure hope so.”

He got away, clean, and everyone admired him for it, including Fant.

By now, a month later, we had only one more week of Phase One to go, then the worst would be over. Just a seven-day field exercise—why, we could skate through that as easily as we’d skated through Jump School at Fort Benning, we thought. Then, during a cigarette break, a grizzled master sergeant told us, “We only want men who really want to be in Special Forces.”

In the early 1960s, he recalled, the 77th Special Forces Group faced a reduction, with his company finding it had only fifteen slots for thirty NCOs. “So the sergeant major took us behind headquarters to a sawdust pit used for parachute training, and told us, ‘The last fifteen of you in that pit, you’ll stay in Special Forces. The other fifteen, the ones who end up outside the pit, you’ll go over to the 82nd Airborne Division.’

“Twenty minutes later,” he concluded “we knew who really wanted to be in Special Forces. By the end of next week, we’ll know which of you really want to be here.”

A hint of what was coming was a detailed inspection of our gear just before we left. The instructors went through our pockets, through our rucksacks, even unrolled our dry socks, to ensure we carried no food. Then we rode to Pope Air Force Base, donned parachutes, and climbed aboard a C-123 transport. Well after dark, we jumped into Camp Mackall, a separate training base that adjoins Fort Bragg.

After forming up on the drop zone, we force-marched a few miles—to “escape” enemy security forces—then established a perimeter in thick forest. This was no campout, but a tactical situation in which we pulled perimeter security and practiced noise and light discipline. But we had at least eight hours sleep, so it didn’t seem very difficult.

At dawn, we met the NCO who ran Camp Mackall, Sergeant First Class Manuel Torres, a matter-of-fact sort who neither cajoled nor cursed us. Either we would meet his standards and become Green Berets, or fail. It was up to us. To put us in the right mood, he began with a “stroll” on the Torres Trail, a quarter-mile of waist-deep swamp that we trudged in full rucksacks. Filthy, soaked, and winded, at the end we were greeted by instructors with spit-shined boots, a knife-sharp crease in their starched fatigues, and a clean green beret. Rotated twice per day, the instructors always looked parade ground sharp, in contrast to the students’ steadily declining appearance. Their instruction was excellent, especially classes on raids, patrols, and ambushes, using bare dirt as a chalk board and a tree limb as a pointer.

Our survival instructor, an old Cajun chicken thief, covered everything from serious skills to amusing animal lore. City boys were fascinated by how he put a live chicken to sleep: Fold the bird’s head under a wing, grip her firmly and rotate the bird in a slow, arm’s length circle, then gently sit her on the ground and release your grip—the bird would sit there, perfectly asleep, until he clapped his hands. To hypnotize the chicken, the old Cajun sergeant held the bird’s beak to the dirt, then drew a line with his fingertip, from the beak outward about four inches, over and over, slower and slower, until the chicken’s pea-brain became so mesmerized that everything beyond that dirt line faded into oblivion. The bird just stared, bug-eyed, until the sergeant clapped his hands.

“You know why they call SF ‘snake eaters’?” he asked. “Back in ’62, when JFK come down here, our committee gived the demo-stration. One a my sahgants, he hold up the rattlesnake, ready to cut it up for dinner, an’ Pres-dent Kennedy, he say, ‘What do yah do when you got no knife?’ An’ that sahgant, he just bite that snake’s head clean off, yessir! An’ duh Pres-dent, he just laugh and laugh. That sahgant, he promoted next day, yessir! Ever since, we be ‘snake eaters.’ ” He stuck his chest out.

It was all very funny. Then he handed us lunch—live chickens and rabbits. From then on, we no longer received canned C rations—all our food was on-the-hoof. If we couldn’t start a fire, or proved too slow skinning, gutting, and cooking our rabbit or chicken or goat, we simply did not eat. And if you didn’t like it, the instructors offered, “Just quit and you’ll have all the ...