For those of us who fought the war in Laos with a rag tied around our head and a car 15 in our hands, the war ended with an oath of secrecy and little sense of accomplishment. The official citation says we kept 50,000 North Vietnamese troops off the battlefield. That sounds impressive, but we know it’s just a madeup number.

The answer lies with the enemy. Their documents brand SOG operators strategic saboturs and commonly call us commandos. In total, they describe a frustrating paradox that we did not understand at the time. For the fact was once a recon team was on the ground, the disruption of their supply lines began. No amount of damage they inflicted on the team would change that.

And often the more damage they did to the team, the greater the disruption to their supply lines. Let’s take a look at SAG operations from the North Vietnamese point of view. On 19th May 1959, Ho Chi Min’s 69th birthday, the 559th Group was established as a transportation and logistical unit of the People’s Army of Vietnam to move troops, weapons, and material from the North to the National Liberation Front fighting in South Vietnam.

It was the beginning of a deadly 15-year long cat and mouse game between the group and the United States Air Force that resulted in the creation of the Ho Chi Min Trail, a maze of secret roads carefully hidden from bombing attacks beneath the jungle canopy of eastern Laos. By the time Laos had been declared a neutral country in 1962, the group had carved rudimentary bike and walking trails through the rugged mountain terrain.

In 1964, M Visag began covertly inserting Vietnamese recon teams into Laos under Operation Leaping Lena. Tasked with discovering the north supply routes, these teams were unmotivated and lacked discipline. NVA security considered them little more than a nuisance. In the spring of 1965, truck traffic began to appear on the trail.

Le Oceanian Prime Minister Savannah Fuma agreed to allow the United States to begin the systematic bombing of the La Oceanian panhandle. As the bombs began falling, the 559th Group responded by upgrading the camouflage and creating redundancy in its roots. In early 1966, a new kind of soldier entered the Le Oceanian jungle.

For months, North Vietnamese intelligence services had been reporting that the Americans were forming a force to perform reconnaissance and interdiction operations on their supply routes. The first realization that this force was operational didn’t come from a single incident, but from the extraction signature.

The NVA noticed that when these teams were encountered, they fought furiously and the sky turned into a wall of fire. The US Air Force would risk dozens of aircraft to rescue a single six to 10man team. This indicated that the personnel on the ground were high value assets. By mid 1966, security elements west of Longve reported sightings of tall, heavy set commandos operating alongside mountain scouts.

They found sights with no cooking fires or trash, signaling a level of discipline they hadn’t seen before. Captured gear, including sophisticated US radios, confirmed the presence of a professional force. In October, the first recovered bodies of Americans in Laos revealed a total lack of standard identification, leading the NVA to refer to these commandos as CIA puppets for years.

The Green Beretss of Misog and their special commandos were on the North’s radar. In early 1967, Senior Colonel Dungi Nuin was appointed commander of the 559th Group. He would remain in that position until the end of the war. During his tenure, the group expanded from a regimenal size unit to an army corps and he would rise in rank to lieutenant general.

Appalled that the troops of his new command were sitting ducks to American bombing, he installed the logistics as combat doctrine. The 559th group consisted of regimental size binrans, each responsible for the movement of supplies and troops over specific areas. In one of his first moves, he assigned anti-aircraft battalions to the bin trams.

On two June 1967, an NBA forward headquarters in Bentram 34 was hit with a B-52 strike. Following the bombing, a SOG hatchet force was inserted into the target area codeamed Oscar 8 with the mission of killing the commanding general of the North Vietnamese Army. The SOG force and aircraft crews incurred significant losses and did not accomplish their mission.

The precision of the timing and target of the attack was a wake-up call for now General Danguin. It’s important to understand how the NVA viewed Sag’s threat. The United States was attempting to disrupt their supply lines with bombing and that bombing came in two forms. The first was precise and directed at known choke points.

The second was random, sometimes directed at targets of opportunity, but mostly it was just area carpet bombing. The American pilots derisively called it bombing trees and contacts. The North Vietnamese called SOG the eyes of the Air Force. They provided the bombers with the one thing they lacked, accuracy.

After the June attack, it was evident that the threat they posed could no longer be tolerated. Saga operators were declared strategic saboturs. The general ordered his staff to prepare a plan of action. Importantly, he directed that any steps taken to counter SOG must not interfere with their ability to keep the trucks rolling. After action reports from the bin trends revealed that ground contact with the Americans always resulted in a series of air strikes.

Even if the air strikes didn’t directly destroy their infrastructure, they forced their supply trucks into protected positions for hours. And those delays caused the severe backup in the supply chain. The North Vietnamese were constantly plagued by sending out search parties looking for soldiers and trail workers who had wandered off into the jungle.

They knew it was hard enough to find someone who wanted to be found, let alone a skilled enemy. Common sense told them that it would be a lot easier to kill the Americans in the air than on the ground. The vast majority of helicopters and small fixedwing aircraft flying over the Ho Chi Min Trail west of South Vietnam belonged to Assa.

The general doubled the number of anti-aircraft batteries he had ordered. The weapon of choice was a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun. It was portable and lethal against low, slow aircraft and most importantly readily available. While the Ted offensive and the siege of Kesan were underway, 559 group planners developed tactics to counter SOG’s operations.

The additional anti-aircraft battalions arrived quickly and were assigned to guard potential landing zones in Bintran 34 that controlled route 922 leading to the Ashawa Valley Carter and in Bintran 37 on route 110 which accessed the central highlands in the triborder area. Ground security units were trained to coordinate with the anti-aircraft positions in what they called the vertical ambush.

Acknowledging that their security forces were no match for SOG’s professionals in the jungle, their troops were trained to maintain a safe distance and shadow the SOG team from the rear and the flanks. using small groups to fire from multiple directions, forcing the commandos to a landing zone that was covered by 12.

7 machine guns. The gunners were to open fire as the extraction helicopters approached the LZ, concentrating fire on the pilot and the tail rotor. But like all tactics, the NVA’s plan seldom lasted past the first gunshot. They had a manual. SOG had plan B, the ability to make up new tactics on the fly.

The hurting shots fired by the NVA alerted the teams and gave them additional time to call for emergency extractions and air support. The Maguire rig threw a wrench in their tactics because SOG didn’t need a landing zone, just a hole in the jungle canopy for extraction. The 559th Group countered by ordering the 24th Independent Security Regiment to form Hunter killer teams tasked with quickly eliminating SOG units on the ground before they could call in air support.

Though they were successful in finding SOGS teams and inflicting casualties, they were rarely able to prevent the air strikes. Even with plan B, the costs were staggering. John Plaster found that air crews supporting SOG were 20 times more likely to be shot down than those supporting conventional units.

Their heroism cannot be overstated, even if it is often overlooked. This chart of US killed and missing in Laos displays the brutal reality. By 1969, General Wind’s vision of the trail as a battlefield was fully realized. The number of anti-aircraft gunners on the trail actually surpassed the number of truck drivers.

At the same time, more Americans conducting SOG missions were lost in the air than on the ground. For a SOG operator, the uncomfortable fact was that time spent in a helicopter was at least as dangerous as time spent on the ground. From the DMZ to the triorder area, the Ho Chi Min Trail was hidden in 5,000 square miles of jungle.

We seldom had more than a couple of dozen Americans on the ground at any one time. So, of course, we wondered if we were accomplishing anything. For all we knew, the program was set up and bureaucratic momentum kept sending us out getting our ass shot off so the brass could keep their cushy jobs in Vietnamese girlfriends in Saigon.

And we got absolutely no feedback. It took decades, but from the unit histories of the 559 group declassified after action reports from the BNTR and interviews that became available after the war, one thing is certain. SOG definitely got into the heads of the NVA commanders of the Ho Chi Min Trail.

They kept very specific statistics on the damage done by SOG, but it’s not what we expected. It’s not how many people we killed or how many trucks we destroyed. The NBA were obsessed with throughput. How many tons of supplies they moved from here to there on a very tight schedule while carefully conserving the resources it took to do it. Here are some facts.

We’re the commandos that they keep referring to. Internal 1969 reports from BINTRAM 34 reported that the Commando’s presence caused an average of 4.5 hours of engine off time per night. Due to the constant presence of the commandos, transport convoys passing through Bentran 37 were bottlenecked an average of eight hours per night.

The sweep to clear the commandos forced the Bentran to mobilize two engineer battalions to recamouflage the storage depots and bypass roads. Several bentrms reported that they were forced to offload trucks and hide supplies in caves during the day due to the commando’s presence. This doubled the labor and half the speed of the logistics chain.

I could go on and on here, but you get the point. General Duncene constantly complained that SOG’s activities were slowing throughput by 15 to 20%, turning his logistics system into a parking lot. That was probably an exaggeration, but his insistence on eliminating SOG teams and shooting down their extraction helicopters was a big part of the problem.

I was surprised that the field reports from the bin trams never reported SOG teams inserted unnoticed, calling in air strikes and departing unopposed, what we called a perfect mission, until I realized that a team getting in clean was considered a serious security breach.

Commanders would always credit some airborne spotter or random luck for the damage. Their reports of SOG encounters all said generally the same thing. I’m paraphrasing here. Succeed in killing the team or shooting down their helicopter and the Americans would always respond with air strikes and a rescue team and more air strikes resulting in greater loss of throughput, ammunition expenditure, and lost man-hour in repairs.

In cases where the hurting force made contact, then lost track of the team, the team would often be extracted with no or minimal air strikes and transport activity would return to normal within hours. Firing at the helicopters prematurely during insertion would force the commandos to depart with almost no interruption.

Keeping the teams off the ground in the first place using LZ watchers firing warning shots seems like it would have been their most effective tactic, but I saw nothing in their documents to suggest that the emphasis was always on shooting the helicopters down. SG operations were a dark paradox for the NVA.

the more successful they were at destroying the strategic saboturs, the more damage was done to their supply system. That fact was well understood at the office for special activities at the Pentagon. You will find my book Dawson’s War worthwhile. Rather than just accounts of Maki Sag’s various missions, Dawson’s War is the story of five men, three Americans and two Brew Mountainard mercenaries.

I’ll take you with us for a year. You’ll get your fair share of gunfights in Laos because we did. But Sag was so much more than gunfights. SOG was a brotherhood. And unless you experience the camaraderie we shared, you can’t really know SOG. Through Dawson’s war, these five men will become your friends. And like we do, you’ll miss them when it’s over.

In the end, you’ll be able to answer SOG’s most asked question. What kind of men ran these dangerous missions? Get a copy today at Amazon. Hey, do me a favor. Like and subscribe. It helps. Thanks.