by Tom Clancy
MACVSOG was involved in a wide range of activities, not just deep reconnaissance. A great deal of effort, for example, was put into operations against North Vietnam: Agents were inserted, with the aim of setting up intelligence or resistance cells (most were captured soon after insertion and executed or turned). There were seaborne commando raids against the North Vietnamese Navy and North Vietnam's coast. There were psychological operations and dirty tricks. And teams were sent to observe the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Later, teams conducted raids against it.
Beginning in 1961, Special Forces personnel, under CIA direction, had been involved in cross-border surveillance into southeastern Laos. For the next two years, close to fifty teams sent over the border gave the Agency eyeball proof that the NVA had a strong and growing presence in Laos and were infiltrating at least 1,500 troops a month into South Vietnam. Between 1963 and 1965, for political reasons, this surveillance was halted. For those two years, Americans were not allowed to conduct cross-border deep reconnaissance against the Trail, allowing the NVA the opportunity to greatly build up and extend their facilities and capabilities. By 1964, it was estimatedthat at least 45,000 troops had infiltrated south, and the numbers were growing.
In March 1965—and after considerable struggle-the JCS finally convinced the Lyndon Johnson White House to allow MACVSOG to resume covert cross-border operations into Laos, with Special Forces personnel leading the teams. The SOG operational plan was ambitious (and just maybe workable). It had three phases: (I) Short-stay, tactical intelligence missions would identify NVA headquarters, base camps, and supply dumps. These would then be attacked by air strikes. This would be followed by (2) company-size raids against NVA facilities discovered by recon teams. This would be followed by (3) the recruiting, organizing, and training of local tribesmen living near the Trail to become the nucleus of long-term resistance movements against the NVA. This phase was based on the earlier — and successful — White Star Program in Laos. The overall aim of the plan was to interdict traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
No one will ever know how well the plan would have worked. Using the preservation of the 1962 Geneva Accords as a reason, the State Department successfully opposed the implementation of the second and third phases, and severely limited the first.
The terms of the deal worked out with the State Department allowed teams into Laos to observe the Trail, but only a few of them could go in each month, their time inside Laos was extremely limited, they had to walk in (they couldn't use helicopters or parachutes), only a very small part of the border was open to them, and they could penetrate no more than five kilometers into the country (their area of operations was in all about fifty square miles). Targets that the teams identified could be bombed, but only after the American Embassy in the Laotian capital had approved the target, and the targets would have to be bombed by U.S. planes based in Thailand.
The man chosen to run this program was (by then Colonel) Bull Simons.
He quickly put together a field organization and headquarters staff, and recruited teams-usually three Americans and nine Vietnamese from one of the minority tribes, such as Nungs and especially the Montagnards.
The mission was to be totally covert, and the teams infiltrated into Laos were to be, in the jargon of the covert world, "sterile." That meant they wore non-American/non-Vietnamese uniforms that were made somewhere in Asia for SOG. The uniforms showed neither rank nor unit insignia.
In the fall of 1965, the first teams crossed the Laotian border; excellent results soon followed. After two years of unrestricted operations in Laos, the NVA didn't expect trouble. They'd gotten overconfident. SOG teams quickly identified truck parks and fuel depots, supply caches, bridges, and other storage sites. Air strikes were called in, with the BDAs (Bomb Damage Assessments) often claiming eighty to a hundred percent destruction.
Continued success resulted in expanded missions. Thus, in 1966, helicopters were allowed for insertion of SOG missions, though they could penetrate no deeper than five kilometers inside Laos. The team inserted could now, however, go another five kilometers on foot. In other words, the limit was now ten kilometers and not five. Missions would last up to five days.
Though the SOG teams' primary mission did not change — covert teams identifying targets on the Trail for air strikes — other missions came to be added, virtually identical to those conducted by Project Delta within South Vietnam:
Teams conducted BDAs, tapped NVA land communications, captured NVA soldiers to gain intelligence, rescued U.S. personnel who were evading or escaping capture, and inserted electronic sensors along the Trail to detect targets for air strikes. Thousands of seismic and acoustic sensors were placed, most of them by air, but SOG teams also carried many in on their backs. Larger teams came to be formed and used for conducting raids, ambushes, and larger-scale rescue.
In 1967, the depth of insertion by foot or by helicopter was allowed to grow to twenty kilometers; the size of the teams was allowed to increase, as was the number of teams per month (from a high of fifteen to forty-two); and Cambodia was added to SOG's area of operations (the NVA had significant facilities and operations there, including the main NVA headquarters in the south, called COSVN — the Central Office for South Vietnam). However, operations in Cambodia would be limited to reconnaissance, and missions were limited to no more than ten per month. There'd be no air strikes, no raids, no combat except to avoid capture. Teams were expected to avoid contact, and helicopters could only be used for emergency exfiltration.
Just as in 1966, SOG had much success in 1967. They'd caught the NVA napping. "For two years," Richard Schultz writes, Bull Simons and his "SOG teams had used surprise, diversion, deception, and operational deftness to outfox the NVA on the Trail." In 1968, that began to change. The NVA started countermeasures. The NVA's Laotian defenses "had become redundant, layered, and in-depth. Hanoi knew it could not sustain its war in South Vietnam without unfettered use of the Trail, and it took the necessary steps to defend it."[17]
The chief agent for this change was the Tet campaign, which consumed enormous quantities of supplies and enormous numbers of troops. The NVA had to have free movement on the Trail for Tet — and for the most part they got it — but they needed it even more after Tet. During the next two years, they exploited that strategic victory (though, to repeat, it was a tactical defeat). Tet convinced the White House (in both its Johnson and Nixon years) that the war in Vietnam was not winnable. The best outcome was thought to be a dignified withdrawal combined with help for our South Vietnamese friends.
Tet also had a number of practical consequences:
During the offensive, the SOG teams that would have been tasked for deep recon inside Laos and Cambodia were needed for fire brigade missions inside South Vietnam. Observation of the Trail suffered, of course.
Meanwhile — with characteristic ingenuity and common sense — the NVA were setting up their defenses. These were — characteristically — primitive, and terribly effective. As early as 1966, the NVA had placed spotters at high points (ridges or treetops) along the border to listen or watch for insertion helicopters. When helicopters were detected, the observers would communicate back to headquarters by radio — or by drums, bells, or gongs. Later, the NVA began to scout the possible helicopter landing zones — since there were only a finite number of these — and placed spotters to observe them. Antiaircraft weapons began showing up in ever-increasing numbers. (Lyndon Johnson's Tet-inspired bombing halt over North Vietnam released large numbers of personnel and equipment for expanding the Trail's security system.) Trackers began to hunt for SOG teams; they then coordinated their findings with follow-up military units. The NVA studied SOG operational patterns and methods (night movements, phases of the moon, and the like) and set up traps and ambushes. A very mobile, Ranger-like unit was formed to attack the teams. Spies in Saigon passed over plans and schedules to the NVA.
The consequences were predictable: Casualties during recon operations in Laos and Cambodia dramatica
lly increased, while average team time on operations in Laos decreased from the Bull Simons goal of five days down to no more than two days. That was how long teams were able to avoid the NVA searching for them.
By 1970, the magic word out of the Nixon-Kissinger White House was Vietnamization. U.S. Forces would withdraw from Vietnam, white South Vietnam's forces would be given "all the help and support they needed" in order to take over the war. (It should not be forgotten that the American buildup had originally been justified as a way to give South Vietnamese forces time to grow strong enough to take care of their own war. That never happened.)
For the next two years, SOG recon teams continued to cross over into Laos and Cambodia. Large-unit incursions went into both countries to attack the Trail and the NVA command facilities located along it: In Cambodia it was a joint U.S. — South Vietnamese effort. In Laos, it was solely South Vietnamese — and a great disaster. Bombings came and went. The reconnaissance produced valuable intelligence, and there was considerable heroism, but the end game was in motion. The final moves were already determined.
In the spring of 1972, MACVSOG was disbanded.
Not many months after that, the NVA no longer needed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
VII
BETWEEN THE WARS
In 1966, Special Forces had seven active component groups — the 1st, 3d, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th Special Forces Groups, four of which were augmented with PSYOPs, civil affairs, engineers, support, etc., to meet other special requirements.
After Vietnam, Special Forces were drastically cut back, and by 1978 their force structure had been reduced to only three active groups — the 5th, 7th, and 10th. Promotions dried up and the overall scope of activities was severely diminished. The focus of the military establishment withdrew from operations involving foreign internal defense and development, and returned to the tried-and-true conventional doctrines and procedures in which professional soldiers had long found comfort. The main emphasis now was seen as preparing for a potential major land war against the Soviets, and that called for modernized conventional forces, not the more unorthodox ways of special operations.
The survival of Special Forces itself was never in doubt, but the survival of the organization that people such as Bill Yarborough had envisaged, capable of performing a multitude of roles on a big stage, was.
This was despite the fact that SF had had many successes in Vietnam. The 5th Special Forces Group had operated long and hard there; it was the most highly decorated unit in the conflict, and had more Medal of Honor winners than any other regiment-sized unit. Many young officers who served in SF assignments in Vietnam went on to achieve flag rank, and sevcral of them became four-star generals. Many NCOs retired with the rank of sergeant major. Nevertheless, many of the regular officers who had risen to higher positions of authority on the conventional side would see a lesser role for unconventional-type units in future conflict — and Special Forces did not have a champion in the higher levels of decision-making. There was a lot of discord between SF and the main army in Vietnam.
And it had to be said that Special Forces did not always help matters. Retired Special Forces Major General James Guest explains:
In Vietnam, the 5th Special Forces Group operated independently for the most part. It had a small staff section that would get missions from the field force commander, an Army three-star general. The SF units that came in to do the missions didn't work for the division commander or for the senior adviser, but for the overall commander, and were forbidden to brief lower commanders on their missions. Because of the urgency of the missions, it often happened that neither the field force commander nor the units explained them to the local division commanders, and in the process they also ran over a lot of bureaucratic staff officers. This inevitably led to bad feelings. What many division commanders and their staffs saw was uncontrolled wild men running around in the bushes.
Now we had our characters on those kinds of missions. And they were high-stress missions. That kind of stress sometimes leads to bizarre behavior.
Some of our guys stayed on teams three and four years, running some kind of intense operation. When they came back into a base camp, they often just let it all hang out in ways that upset the others.
The A camps, whose missions were area control and interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were particularly misunderstood. They were perceived by the conventional forces as country clubs established by SF, with all the amenities of home — refrigerators and things like that. Yet nobody stopped to think about how it would be to live in one of those places. They were exposed. The Camp at Lang Vie, for example, was overrun by North Vietnamese tanks.
A similar kind of situation went on out in the A camps themselves. They were normally out in the hills, but close to divisions, so the people in the divisions could see that the way the SF guys did things was not necessarily the way everybody else in the Army did them. And, of course, on occasion, SF might "liberate" equipment from the division — which had a lot of equipment. They needed it, so they took it.
Or one of the SF guys might come into the division, and he just didn't look like an American soldier. He might have long hair, and be wearing tiger fatigues and big, brass Montagnard bracelets (which meant a great deal to the Montagnards), and be carrying a Sten gun or other foreign weapons. In the context of the A camp, all this was perfectly appropriate (Special Forces have always trained to use foreign weapons), but to everyone else, it was bizarre — nonregulation.
Furthermore, the Special Forces habit of rubbing the rest of the Army the wrong way did not end with the war in Southeast Asia. Since most of the Army distrusted them, the Special Forces tended to react accordingly, to overplay their skills, and then rub in their triumphs in a way certain to cause resentment.
In 1977 and 1978, Jim Guest was with the 10th SFG at Bad Tolz in Germany, a unit often called upon to mimic Soviet special-operations units, particularly those trying to "penetrate" secure facilities. Guest's penetration teams were almost invariably successful — to their delight and the consternation of their targets.
On one occasion, the VII Corps deputy commander had Guest run an operation against the VII Corps Tactical command posts.
Jim Guest relates what happened:
"What do you want us to do?" I asked.
"I want you to attack the CP as if you were Russian operatives, Soviet Special Forces," the general answered.
"Yes, sir," I said. Then we went to work. Of course, he didn't tell the corps staff to expect us, and neither did we. Part of the game was to avoid tipping off corps headquarters.
We assigned one and a half A-Detachments to run the actual operation — ODA-6, reinforced by a six-man Ranger team from the Ranger detachment stationed at Bad Tolz, where they normally ran the USAREUR (U.S. Army Europe) survival training course. The team rehearsed in several ways. It moved into the operational area, occupied mission support sites, cached equipment, established observation on the targets, identified the critical parts of each target and selected routes into and out of the target areas. There were attacks on the targets, immediate-action drills, helicopter operations, sniper operations in which the snipers were used to secure the mission support sites and to provide overwatch for the attacking elements during attacks in the Corps areas, and finally, VII Corps field SOP — especially those items that would apply to the team as they conducted operations. The detachments were particularly interested in the way the Corps military police operated, since they planned to operate as MPs.
Meanwhile, we gathered all the open data on the corps we could find — how the Corps uniforms were worn, how their vehicles were marked, the normal separation distance between elements of the Corps field CP, how the VII Corps specifically provided security forces, and their estimated reaction time, and what kind of equipment we could expect to be confronted with. We also studied everything available about communication systems, about how to visually recognize secure facilities, and about antennas. We identified the differen
t CP locations by the types of antennas, and we knew where the units were because of the orientation of their antennas. And finally, we made mock-ups of how the CPs looked laid out on the ground.
When the time came to run the operation, we did a little recon near the gates. I had soldiers hang around until they heard the challenge and the password, then we immediately passed the info on to the strike team. When they were ready to go, we put the strike team itself into VII Corps MP uniforms, and took our own jeeps and marked them up like MP jeeps. That's how our guys made the initial infiltration.
Once they were inside, they successfully penetrated and knocked out all the communications installations, simulated an attack on the operations complex with standoff weapons (81mm mortars carried in the trailers of our look-alike MP jeeps), and took out the critical technicians, such as the computer operators.
The teams successfully gained access to all its target elements in the Corps area, with the primary emphasis on the operational complex and on the areas with technicians.
Then, for show and tell, the team took pictures with KS 99 cameras. They photographed the antenna configurations, the operational complex, vehicles (with identifying markings prominently displayed). Corps security points, the technicians' living and working areas, helicopter pads with helicopters parked, the Generals' Mess, where all the key leaders and staff officers congregated on most nights for the evening meal, and routes in and out of the Corps areas, including the vehicle parks.
Here is how they took out the computers:
In those days, their scarcity value made computers more important than they are now; there were so few of them and they were so big and cumbersome. So our guys found the big van where they kept the ultracomputers, and went down, again dressed as MPs but carrying satchels like couriers, and banged on the hatch.