SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Major John L. Plaster was a retired US Army Special Forces soldier, regarded as one of the leading sniper experts in the world. A decorated Vietnam War veteran who served in the covert Studies and Observations Group (SOG), Plaster cofounded a renowned sniper school that trains military and law enforcement personnel in highly specialized sniper tactics. He is the author of SOG; The Ultimate Sniper: An Advanced Training Manual for Military and Police Snipers; The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting; and Secret Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG, a memoir of his three years of service with SOG.

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SOG

1

COLBY’S SECRET WAR

IT WAS A MISERABLE sea yet navigable despite the looming islands and the swells that propelled the heaving 38-foot junk. February was well into North Vietnam’s monsoon season, and when there weren’t full-fledged typhoons there were squalls and showers, day after day, wretched conditions for small craft like this junk—but people must eat, so fish must be caught.

Despite the modern times—February 1961—the bobbing boat had been hand built in the Vietnamese tradition, crafted by the very half dozen men who manned her. Wooden hulled and two masted, above deck she had just a small squarish wheelhouse aft, and like all North Vietnamese fishing boats, displayed proudly Communist red sails; they were her only propulsion. And because she lacked modern navigational instruments, her captain steered as had his ancestors for ten generations, by the stars. But in tonight’s overcast it was not his knowledge of the heavens but his familiarity with the towering limestone islands around them that allowed him to steer closer to the seaside town of Cam Pha.

Two nights earlier they’d passed the glowing horizon that was Haiphong, North Vietnam’s major port city, and this evening during a quiet sunset they almost could see the hazy mountains of Kwangsi Province, China, some 40 miles northward.

No other fishing boats braved tonight’s squalls or teased the darkened reefs and shoals. On so miserable a night, surely no government craft could come to their rescue if they were swamped.

But on the other hand, neither would a Communist Swatow-class patrol boat stop them and make difficult inquiries, which actually was their main concern. Despite its authentic appearance, this junk had been built not in North Vietnam, but 800 miles away at Vung Tau, South Vietnam. And while the men who made and manned her were once simple fishermen, in more recent years they’d become refugees who fled the Communists; and even more recently they’d been trained by CIA paramilitary officers who also had financed this entire expedition.

When at last his junk reached calmer, leeside waters behind a jagged island, the captain called up a thin, middle-aged man from below. Several crewmen lowered over the side a small woven basket boat crammed with a radio and provisions, and off he went: Agent Ares, the CIA’s first long-term North Vietnam–based operative, had been successfully landed.

The man to whom Agent Ares ultimately reported was as much his opposite as was imaginable. Catholic, Ivy League, with intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, William Colby looked and sounded more like a corporate executive than the CIA’s Saigon station chief. Comfortable in a bow tie and business suit on even the sultriest tropical days, the man who oversaw this expanding covert enterprise hardly appeared to be a rising CIA star and longtime veteran of the secret wars.

In 1944 then-Lieutenant William Colby had parachuted into Nazi-occupied France as one of the OSS’s most elite operatives, a Jedburgh officer, to help the Resistance disrupt German defenses behind the Normandy beaches. A year later he was sabotaging Norwegian rail lines to prevent German units from reaching the Reich before its collapse. While several of his OSS colleagues became founders of U.S. Army Special Forces, Colby joined the new postwar civilian intelligence agency, the CIA. His career progressed steadily.

Soon after Colby’s 1959 appointment to the ever more important Saigon station, there began a troubling reappearance in South Vietnam of old Communist Viet Minh fighters who had emigrated to the North in 1954, after the French-Indochina War.

At its April 1959 15th Plenum, the North Vietnamese Communist Party Central Committee had voted in secret session to return covertly to South Vietnam thousands of such Viet Minh veterans. These infiltrators were to work with party cadres who’d remained in South Vietnam to execute a conquest intended from its inception to be deniable and thus undercut any rationale for foreign intervention. To infiltrate on such a scale, the Central Committee created a special Army unit, the 559th Transportation Group—the numbers commemorating its May 1959 founding—which in tandem with North Vietnam’s Trinh Sat secret intelligence service would train people and move them southward. From his headquarters in North Vietnam’s Ha Tinh Province, the infiltration commander, Brigadier General Vo Bam, cautioned, “This route must be kept absolutely secret.” Therefore, when the first group headed south in August 1959, they wore untraceable peasant garb and carried captured French weapons.I

The returning Viet Minh marched 10 miles each day among busy detachments of Army engineers sent to improve and expand these simple foot-paths they called the Truong Son Route because it meandered through a similarly named mountain chain. Westerners would call this network the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

CIA station chief Colby found gathering information about the Truong Son Route difficult. Indeed, this landlocked Laotian wilderness was largely unmapped, with misty valleys so blanketed by jungle that flyovers and aerial photos disclosed nothing. To find what was there required putting men on the ground.

The CIA recruited French coffee planters at Khe Sanh on South Vietnam’s northwest frontier to travel every few weeks along Route 9 to the quiet village of Tchephone, Laos, 30 miles away. Despite keeping their eyes peeled, the planters brought back little intelligence because infiltration parties were small and crossed Highway 9 at night.

The incoming Kennedy administration expanded Colby’s covert effort to detect Communist infiltration and insinuate an expanded network of CIA saboteurs and agents into North Vietnam. National Security Memorandum 52 authorized the CIA to employ Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs to train and advise the South Vietnamese who would execute Colby’s covert missions.

Technically the Green Berets and SEALs weren’t working for the CIA—they worked for CAS, an innocuous cover whose initials stood for Combined Area Studies. At the seaside resort town of Nha Trang, American Special Forces trained South Vietnamese 1st Observation Group commandos to explore the growing Ho Chi Minh Trail; during 1961 and 1962, the 1st Group mounted forty-one recon operations into the Laotian infiltration corridor, but its teams were too cautious to learn much. The CIA-funded Mountain Scouts penetrated Laos, too; however, these courageous but illiterate Montagnard tribesmen could not comprehend map reading and couldn’t associate what they discovered with a recordable location.

Meanwhile, in Danang, the SEALs trained junk crews to land secret agents in the North and organized a civilian raiding force, the Sea Commandos, for hit-and-run coastal attacks. Soon the Sea Commandos began across-the-beach raids on North Vietnam, to plant a clever weapon designed by SEAL Gunners Mate Barry Enoch. Enoch rigged a packboard with four cardboard tubes—each containing a 3.5-inch antitank rocket—wired to a delay mechanism, so a raider could slip ashore at night, aim the packboard toward, say, a radar station, activate the timer, then paddle back to a waiting boat. The raiders would be long gone by the time the North Vietnamese got their sunrise surprise.

After several successes, some raider junks were intercepted by enemy Swatow patrol boats,...