Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

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 dramatically 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