Original subtitles

The autumn of 1968,

deep inside Laos, 30 km west of the

South Vietnamese border,

eight men from a SOG recon team called

Spike Team Idaho, lie flat in the

elephant grass, listening. They are not

supposed to be here. Officially, no

American soldier has ever set foot in

Laos. This country is neutral. The war

ends at the fence. But the bamboo

clackers are coming. NVA hunter teams

signaling each other through the jungle,

closing in from three sides. The team's

one zero. The American leader keys his

radio and whispers two words that will

set off every emergency channel from

Daang to the Pentagon.

Prairie fire.

It means the team is about to be

overrun. It means an entire NVA

battalion is bearing down on eight men

who don't officially exist in a country

America is not officially fighting in.

This was MACVS

and this was a normal day. Of the

roughly 2,700 men who served in SOG

ground operations during the Vietnam

War, the unit sustained a casualty rate

exceeding 100%.

Every man on a recon team could expect

to be killed or wounded, often more than

once. It remains the highest casualty

rate of any American unit since the

Civil War. But what was MACVS

actually doing out there? Why did the

men who survived it call it the

nightmare they could never wake up from?

And why, for 30 years, did the United

States government refuse to admit it had

ever existed at all?

The unit was born on paper on January

24th, 1964.

The name was Military Assistance Command

Vietnam Studies and Observations Group.

It was the most deliberately boring name

in the United States military, and that

was the point.

SOG didn't study anything, and it didn't

observe. It killed, sabotaged, and

disappeared. It reported directly to the

Joint Chiefs of Staff and to the White

House, bypassing the normal MACV chain

of command in Saigon entirely. Its

missions were authorized at the highest

levels of American government, and they

were authorized in writing nowhere.

Crossber reconnaissance into officially

neutral Laos and Cambodia. Sabotage on

the Ho Chi Min trail. prisoner snatches,

agent insertions into North Vietnam

itself, psychological warfare designed

to make Hanoi believe a resistance

movement existed inside its own borders.

The men were volunteers. They came from

the Army Special Forces, the Navy Seals,

the Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine

Force Recon. Many were on their second

or third combat tour. They were the most

experienced unconventional warfare

soldiers America had and they were sent

to fight a war that on paper wasn't

happening.

One of the men who ran those crossber

missions was John Striker Meyer. He

served two tours in Vietnam as a green

beret with MACVS

and he was the team leader of Spike Team

Idaho, the same Spike Team Idaho named

at the start of this video.

In 2019, he sat down for a long- form

interview with Joo Willink and described

what the work was really like.

>> It was like you guys are out there on

your own. And I mean, we'll get into

some stories where you're out there on

your own

>> for sure. And you know, and uh um it's

that that element of it is uh an extra

contingency. We had no artillery, no

traditional army or marine corps support

that and of course no SEAL teams.

>> Yeah,

>> they were busy doing their stuff on the

coast and uh so it was quite something

to go across the fence and in a way

we're flying into the 18th century

because everything was so old the way of

working and they used to do slash and

burn agriculture. So you come in with

the helicopter, everybody will hear you

coming and the local people had to

cooperate with the NVA cuz their model

was work with us or we're going to kill

your dumb ass. So um the game was on.

>> If a SOG operator was killed across the

fence, his family was told he died in

South Vietnam.

Sometimes the body came home. Sometimes

it didn't. And here was the paradox. The

most decorated American unit of the war

was the unit its own government

officially denied existed.

They had no rank insignia. They wore

sterile uniforms. They carried weapons

that couldn't be traced. And on the maps

in Washington, the places they fought

and died didn't exist.

The men called it the fence. It wasn't a

wall and it wasn't marked. It was the

border with Laos and Cambodia, and

crossing it was the moment the rules

ended. South of the fence, you were a

soldier in a war the United States was

fighting.

North or west of it, you were a ghost in

a war that wasn't happening. In a

country America was not at war with

recon teams were small by design. Two or

three Americans, four to nine indigenous

troops. Montanards from the central

highlands, Chinese nungs, Vietnamese

special forces.

Invisibility was survival. A team of

eight could hide. A team of 40 could

not.

Insertion was its own form of terror.

Huey slicks skimming the treetops at 100

ft. Meuire rigs and stabbo harnesses,

ropes that yanked men off the jungle

floor and dragged them through the

canopy. Halo jumps from 20,000 ft into

triple canopy at night. There was no

good way in. The target was the Ho Chi

Min Trail. By 1968, the trail was not a

footpath. It was a logistical artery

moving 10,000 tons of supplies a month,

defended by anti-aircraft batteries,

tracker dogs, and dedicated counter

recon battalions.

The NVA hunted SOG specifically. The

3005th Sapper Battalion was raised in

part to track and kill recon teams.

Standard mission length was 5 days. The

average team in heavy contact lasted

under 24 hours before extraction or

annihilation.

The math was simple. Insert eight men,

hope eight come back. The math almost

never worked.

It started with the compromise. The

moment a team knew it had been seen.

Tracker dogs barking in the distance.

Bamboo clackers signaling NVA.

Hunter teams through the jungle. One

ridge to the next. The radio call every

one zero learned to make and dreaded

making. It meant the team was about to

be overrun. It meant every available

asset in two countries was now

scrambling to reach eight men who would

probably not be alive when help arrived.

Then came the casualty rate. Over 100%

documented.

Some men ran 20 missions, 30 missions, a

statistical impossibility lived out by

men who watched friends die on every

other insertion.

Then came the MIA.

SOG accounted for a disproportionate

share of the wars missing. Men pulled

off Maguire rigs by NVA ground fire. Men

separated in the jungle who never came

back.

Names still on the wall in Washington

with no recovery, no remains, no grave.

Then came the captures. SOG men taken

alive across borders that officially

didn't exist. The Geneva Conventions

didn't officially apply because

officially they were never there. What

the NVA did to them was a different kind

of nightmare entirely.

Then came the bright light missions.

Going back across the fence to recover

dead Americans or rescue downed pilots,

knowing the LZ was already an ambush,

knowing the bodies were bait. And then

for the men who made it home, the

aftermath. Records classified for

decades. Families told nothing. Wives

who never knew where their husbands had

actually been.

The nightmares weren't metaphor. They

were the job.

Master Sergeant Robert Howard ran

missions across the fence for 13 months.

In that time, he was nominated for the

Medal of Honor three separate times.

The first two nominations were

downgraded because the actions took

place in countries the United States was

not at war with and the paperwork could

not be declassified.

He received the medal once. He was

wounded 14 times. He remains the most

decorated American soldier of the

Vietnam War and most Americans have

never heard his name. Sergeant

Firstclass Jerry Shrivever was

different.

The NVA called him Mad Dog on their

propaganda broadcasts and put a bounty

on his head. He carried a sword off

shotgun and a CR15

and ran into firefights other men ran

out of. On April 24th, 1969, his team

was inserted into Cambodia to assault a

suspected COSVN headquarters.

surrounded almost immediately, told over

the radio his position was hopeless,

Shrivever's reply became SG legend.

I've got him right where I want him. I'm

going to attack.

He was never seen again. His body was

never recovered. One of the men who

earned the Distinguished Service Cross

with MACVS

was Pat Watkins. He sat down with Mike

Glover, himself, a former Green Beret,

and talked about what those missions

actually looked like from inside a recon

team.

>> Anyhow, I, you know, I ran to Fred who I

knew, and he was running missions. He

had a team there and he'd been in

country for a while. And I says, "What

the hell?" And he says, "Uh," he says,

"I ran one mission in there." He said,

"Don't get in trouble. Don't get in

trouble cuz you're not going to get

support.

So we went, we're all in one Huey going

in and we flew right over a village.

Right over a damn village. I look out

the door and all these NBA soldiers

looking up at us. I went [ __ ] So we hit

the ground and God, they couldn't get us

off the helicopter fast enough. So they

hit the ground and you have to give a

team. Okay, we had cover above us which

is an O2, you know, uh, pack.

>> Numbers tell the rest. SOG personnel

earned 10 medals of honor, 81

distinguished service crosses, and

hundreds of silver stars for a unit that

on paper did not exist.

The presidential unit citation for SOG

was finally awarded in 2001, three

decades after the war ended.

Many of the men who earned it were

already dead. The medals came late. For

some, they came postuously.

For others, they came to widows who had

spent 30 years not knowing where their

husbands actually died.

S OG was disbanded on April 30th, 1972.

The records were sealed. The men

scattered back into special forces

detachments, into civilian life, into

silence.

They went home to families who didn't

know where they'd been. They went to

bars where no one could understand the

stories they couldn't tell.

Some of them never spoke of it again.

Some of them couldn't stop seeing it.

But the tactics they had paid for in

blood did not disappear. Small team

direct action behind enemy lines,

crossber reconnaissance, unconventional

warfare against state protected

sanctuaries.

Every American Special Operations Unit

that came after Delta Force, the modern

75th Ranger Regiment, the Joint Special

Operations Command, traces its

operational DNA back to lessons learned

in Laos and Cambodia by men who weren't

supposed to be there. Declassification

began in the 1980s. Then came the books,

then the memoirs,

then the slow, partial public

acknowledgement of what these men had

actually done. And here was the final

paradox.

S OG was the most tactically successful

American unit of the entire Vietnam War

by almost any metric. Kill ratios,

intelligence produced, missions

completed.

And it changed nothing about the

outcome. The trail kept running. The

supplies kept moving. Saigon fell in

April 1975.

The men who survived carried the war

home with them in a way few other

veterans did because they couldn't even

tell their families what they had done.

They fought a war that wasn't supposed

to be happening in countries we weren't

supposed to be in for a cause that

didn't survive them. And for 30 years,

the country they fought for pretended

they had never existed at all.

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