MACV-SOG - Created in Vietnam still influences Special Forces today

As the US's involvement in Vietnam steadily grew with more conventional troops, so did it's secret war. To counter the Viet Cong's guerrilla campaign, supported by the North Vietnamese army (NVA), raging inside South Vietnam, the Pentagon established a highly secretive special operations organization in 1964.

The Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was tasked with taking the fight to the enemy regardless of where they were. Cross-border operations in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam—where US troops weren't supposed to be—became SOG's specialty.

Composed of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, Air Commandos, and their indigenous allies, SOG primarily conducted reconnaissance and direct action operations, such as ambushes, in South Vietnam and across the border.

Cross-border recon missions often led to epic gunfights, as the small SOG teams would be compromised and hunted down by devastatingly superior enemy forces. It was more common than not for a recon team to be extracted under fire and with their perimeter minutes, if not seconds, away from being overrun. "SOG operations hurt the NVA [and] impeded the shipment of supplies/soldiers south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail," John Stryker Meyer, a legendary SOG operator, told Insider. "There were also major intel coups. For example, Operation Tailwind, which saved the CIA in Thailand, produced troves of key NVA intel. 

There was also Bargewell, who found valuable intel on an NVA base camp despite having been shot in the chest," Meyer added, referring to Eldon Bargewell, who went on to be a renowned general and commander in the Army's Delta Force.

Just one day with SOG could produce a lifetime of stories. For Meyer, a veteran of two SOG deployments who has written about his hair-raising experiences, it was hard to pick the most notable moment. Despite a late-night and personal encounter with an NVA soldier in the field, Meyer's most memorable operation was when his recon team went against three NVA divisions — 30,000 men — Thanksgiving Day.

In the end, the US lost the war despite the herculean efforts of SOG and its contribution to the fight. "There were contributions that we never learned about. For example, we pulled off a few wiretaps [in the Ho Chi Minh Trail], but we never heard back from the CIA on results," Meyer said. "Getting honest answers from the Communists about SOG's impact is impossible, but you take a case like October 5, 1968, when Recon Team Alabama and its air assets were responsible for 9,000 enemy troops KIA or WIA—that had an impact on troops moving south."

As direct US involvement in the war shrank, SOG became less needed, and in 1972, it was deactivated. "Like anything else, politics interfered. Our command structure often had to fight to keep close air support units assigned to support SOG, such as the A-1 Skyraider support," Meyer said of why SOG wasn't kept after Vietnam.

But SOG alumni continued to serve, which would prove key for the future of US special-operations forces. Eight years after MACV-SOG was deactivated, the Pentagon was forced to create a similar organization. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was born after the failure to rescue the American hostages from Iran during Operation Eagle Claw.

Col. Charlie Beckwith, the founder of Delta Force and ground force commander during the mission, argued for a joint command that would bring together America's special operators. Beckwith had served in SOG and thus already had an idea of what such a command could look like, despite the enemy now being terrorists and not the NVA.

As a result, the Pentagon created US Special Operations Command, its subordinate service commands, and JSOC. JSOC contains the military's tier-one units and is considered a national strategic asset. Initially, Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, which were JSOC's counterterrorism direct-action units, were predominately manned with Vietnam veterans, several of whom had served in SOG.

Although the conditions under which JSOC was created were completely different from those in which SOG worked, they share lots of similarities. Both organizations are joint, meaning that their units came from across the military and not just from one service. Additionally, they focus on both covert and clandestine operations. They also share a close relationship with the intelligence community, often working directly for it, like on the Osama bin Laden raid, during which the SEAL Team 6 operators were nominally under CIA control.

There are divergences as well. A significant difference between the two organizations—and between the times in which they fought—is their relationship with risk. SOG leaders and operators didn't hesitate to take an extreme risk in their fight against the North Vietnamese. Indeed, several SOG operations could be considered suicidal.

Whether it was when a SOG team went after three NVA divisions or when a reinforced SOG company went deep into Laos to help the CIA, SOG operations were characterized by their high-risk level. That was reflected in SOG's 100% casualty rate, meaning every operator was either wounded, often multiple times, or killed.

Conversely, today there is a risk-averse culture, even in the most elite special-operations organizations. "You can't even enter the room if you carry a CONOP [concept of operations] similar to SOG's," a former Delta Force operator told Insider. "There is no way anyone would approve that today." "The SAR window plays a big part in that," the Delta operator said, referring to the military's requirement that troops — commandos or not — be within range of a search-and-rescue asset in case their mission goes south.

"But, to be fair, it's a very different environment. We aren't engaged in a major war like Vietnam, and our organizations are different. We're the national mission force. We can't afford the casualty rate these guys had." SOG operators agree with that view. "Every spec-ops operator I've met in recent years from today's conflicts all agree that many of the missions we ran would never be allowed today due to threat levels," Meyer added. In the end, policy limitations notwithstanding, JSOC is continuing SOG's special-operations legacy.

Article from The Business Insider

Former Special Forces medic to receive MOH for mission long kept secret

If he hadn’t wanted to avoid the Marine Corps so badly, retired Capt. Gary Michael ”Mike” Rose might never have been on the secret 1970 operation that earned him the military’s highest award for valor. On Sept. 11, 1970, a few minutes into the helicopter ride from his southeastern Vietnam base, then-Spc. Rose knew that they weren’t in Vietnam anymore. “You get on a helicopter and you fly for 45 minutes, an hour west — when you know by helicopter the border’s only five minutes away — you know you’re in Laos,” Rose told Army Times in an Aug. 28 phone interview. ”It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.” What followed was Operation Tailwind, a four-day battle in support of the Royal Lao Army, creating a diversion aimed at North Vietnamese Army troops.

But Rose didn’t know that at the time, he said, because the mission was classified, and it would remain that way until the late ‘90s. Most of what he knows about those days, he added, he learned after 1998, when a joint report by CNN and Time magazine — which was later discredited — discussed the operation publicly for the first time. Now, almost 50 years after the battle and nearly a decade since his unit’s actions were brought out of the dark, the White House announced Wednesday that Rose would receive the Medal of Honor in an Oct. 23 ceremony.

Southern California native Rose, then 20, walked into an Army recruiter’s office in early 1967, he said, with a particular goal. The draft board had been pulling numbers left and right in the Los Angeles area, sending pretty much all of those young men to the sea services, he recalled. “I was in the North Hollywood draft board region,” he said. ”I knew that they were drafting into the Marine Corps and the Navy, and those were not my two choices.” His father had been drafted into the Marines during World War II, he said, and ”he suggested that you don’t want to be a draftee in the Marine Corps.”

Rather than roll the dice, Rose decided to volunteer for the Army and head off to Fort Ord, California, to learn how to be a grunt. Thanks to high aptitude test scores, jump school and Special Forces training followed, and by October 1968, he was a Special Forces medic. He re-enlisted for the chance to pick where he wanted to go, settling on supporting the 46th Special Forces Company in Thailand, where they were training local soldiers and border police. I thought, ‘Thailand, that sounds like a pretty good, exotic place to go.’ Which, in my mind now, as I look back, was really good experience,” he said. “It made me better prepared for when I went to Vietnam.”

After a year, he called up his assignment coordinator — a woman known as Mrs. Alexander — and told her he was ready for Vietnam. She placed him with the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group, 5th Special Forces Group, based in Kontum. Rose earned his first Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with ”V” device during a June 1970 mission, but in general spent his time tending to local Vietnamese and providing back-up for others’ missions.

In mid-September, he got a second mission briefing. “In those days — and I’m sure it’s true today — you’re only told what you need to know to be able to prepare and go out and do your job on that mission,” he said. “So I was told that we were going to an area to create a diversion for another operation that was going on.” What he did realize, though, was that it was going to be ugly. “I noted that all the guys that I was going with, including [allied fighters from the indigenous Vietnamese] Montagnards, were loading up with a lot more ammunition than they normally did,” he said. “I’m fairly intelligent, and I deduced that if you normally go in with 200 rounds and you’re going in with four, something’s probably going to be up.”

Once they crossed the border, he said, he can vividly remember the popcorn-popping sound of rounds hitting the helicopter. According to the battle narrative, Rose and a company-sized element were dropped 70 kilometers into NVA-controlled Laos. Casualties came quickly. “One of the wounded was trapped outside the company defensive perimeter,” the narrative reads. “Sgt. Rose, engaging the enemy, rushed to get the wounded Soldier. Sgt. Rose rendered expert medical treatment and stabilized the wounded Soldier, and carried the man through the heavy gunfire back to the company defensive area.”

The company pushed deeper into Laos, and Rose treated each casualty along the way. “The fire becoming so intense, Sgt. Rose had to crawl from position to position to treat the wounded,” according to the narrative. ”As he moved, Sgt. Rose gave words of encouragement and directed the fires of the inexperienced and terrified Vietnamese and Montagnard troops.” He was first wounded on Sept. 12, day two. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded as he was dragging a wounded soldier, spraying shrapnel into his back and leg and crippling his foot. He used a stick as a crutch for the next two days.

“I suspect what was going through my head was trying to take care of the wounded,” Rose said. “We were just busy. I had two that were split from the hip to the knee, down to the femur. I made sure they were breathing, no shock, then stop the bleeding.” At one point, a medevac tried to land to take away the wounded, but enemy fire was so intense that it had to back off. But it quickly succumbed to damage, crashing a few miles away, where the crew were safely recovered. “I wasn’t frantic,” Rose said. “By the time I got there, I’d been three years in the Army, and I’d been trained, trained, trained, trained.”

With over half of the company wounded, Rose lashed together bamboo to make litters. “Despite his own painful and debilitating wounds, Sgt. Rose never took time to eat, rest, or care for his own wounds while caring for his fellow Soldiers,” the narrative said. On the last night, with the company surrounded, Rose dug trenches and moved from casualty to casualty to treat wounds. The next morning, they learned that 500 North Vietnamese were closing in on their position, and helicopters were on the way to extract them.

“The NVA, close on the heels of the company at the landing zone, causing even more casualties among the allied personnel,” the narrative reads. “Sgt. Rose moved under the intense enemy fire of the assaulting NVA, completely exposing himself, to retrieve the allied dead and wounded, and return them to the company defensive perimeter.” He boarded the last helicopter out, but before settling in for the trip home, treated the wounds of the helicopter’s Marine door gunner, who had taken fire during the extraction.

Minutes later, the helicopter crashed, smoking and leaking fuel. “Sgt. Rose, knowing the helicopter could explode at any moment, worked quickly while ignoring his own injuries, to pull wounded and unconscious men from the wreckage, saving lives,” according to the narrative. ”Moving the wounded and unconscious men a safe distance away from the smoldering wreckage, Sgt. Rose continued to professionally administer medical treatment to the injured personnel.”

A second helicopter came to retrieve them, but Rose doesn’t remember getting on it, he said. “When you sit down and you start talking about these things, you cause people to have little memories, vignettes, little visions,” Rose said. “The one thing that we’re all agreed upon is that starting with the crash, none of us were operating on all cylinders. It’s such a blur.” All told, according to the battle narrative, only three men died during the four-day onslaught.

Back to work. Rose’s memory picks up again back at Doc To, he said, where he grabbed a shower and a change of clothes before seeing a surgeon to get the shrapnel removed from his foot. Then he had some chow and a couple beers, took a picture for posterity, and debriefed with the group’s intelligence shop before sacking out. “I got up the next morning, put my uniform on and went back to the dispensary,” he said.

Soon after, he was meant to go to the field, but his platoon leader held him back. “I said, ‘Why, sir?” Rose recalled. “And he said, because you’re being put in for an award and we don’t want you in the field right now.” He didn’t know at the time, but he had been nominated for the Medal of Honor. It was downgraded to the Distinguished Service Cross, which he received in January 1971.

Three months later, he was back home and at the Army’s Spanish language school in Washington, D.C., preparing for a tour with 8th Special Forces Group in Panama. It was at that point, he said, that he decided to go to Officer Candidate School, because extending his contract with the Army would allow him to bring his new wife, Margaret, with him to Central America. Rose became an artillery officer in December 1972, where he spent the last 15 of his 20 years in the Army. After retiring in 1987, he moved on to the manufacturing industry, where he wrote manuals and designed training programs, settling in Huntsville, Alabama.

In the meantime, his time in Laos, which had been dubbed Operation Tailwind, became front page news. In 1998, a joint venture by CNN and Time described the mission as a raid on a Laotian village to kill American defectors holed up there, and alleged U.S. troops used sarin gas on civilians. The Defense Department pushed back on the claims and CNN retracted the story. But in the aftermath, soldiers who had been a part of the now-declassified mission began pushing for recognition of their brothers’ heroism.

In 2013, he said, Rose got a call from retired Col. Eugene McCarley, who’d been company commander back in 1971. He said a guy named Neil Thorne, who worked with veterans of the MACV-SOG, wanted to put in a packet to upgrade his DSC. “He worked on it for over four years,” Rose said. “Every time he would call for information, I would give it to him.” Last year, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter approved the award, and Rep. Mo Brooks, R-South Carolina, and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, wrote Rose’s name into the National Defense Authorization Act, waiving the requirement that the Medal of Honor be awarded within five years of the designated action. It was the same piece of legislation that opened the door to the Medal of Honor for former Spec. Jim McCloughan, who received his award on July 31, more than 48 years after the fact.

On Aug. 3, Rose finally got his own call. Rose picked up the phone that afternoon to a voice that asked him to hold for the president of the United States. “Margaret tells me I immediately came to attention, my feet at a 40-degree angle, my fist curled to my palm. My thumbs went along the seam of my trousers,” he said. ”And she said the only thing that was missing was a uniform and being in a formation some place.”

Rose has asked that not only his fellow MACV-SOG veterans be included in his ceremony, but that the White House reaches out to the Marines and Air Force personnel who supported the mission, particularly the A-1E Skyraider and AH-1 Cobra pilots who were there. “To me, this medal is a collective medal, and it honors all those men who fought. A lot of them were injured and killed in that operation,” he said. “It represents the fact that North Vietnamese Army troops were tied up along the Ho Chi Minh Trail because of what we were doing in Laos and Cambodia.” “I’m confident, without those 50,000 troops down in the south, that the names on that [Vietnam memorial] wall – instead of being 58,000 might be 100,000 or more,” he added.

Article from the Army Times

Green Beret Legend Jon Cavaiani Passes

Sergeant Major Jon R. Cavaiani, Medal of Honor recipient, passed away Tuesday, July 29, 2014 in Stanford, California at age 70.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award given to those who acted with uncommon, selfless courage, by President Gerald Ford on December 12, 1974.

Born August 2, 1943 in Royston, U.K. Cavaiani's parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. He became a naturalized citizen in 1968 shortly before he joined the Army where he served with the 5th Special Forces Group. While defending a secret radio site deep in enemy territory from an enemy attack, he rallied his platoon and fought until helicopters were called to remove the soldiers. He voluntarily stayed on the ground with a recovered machine-gun and covered their withdrawal before being captured and serving 23 months in a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp. He was released after the war. He retired from the Army after 31 years in 1990 at the rank of Sergeant Major.

Staff Sergeant Cavaiani's official Medal of Honor citation reads:

S/Sgt. Cavaiani distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in action in the Republic of Vietnam on 4 and 5 June 1971 while serving as a platoon leader to a security platoon providing security for an isolated radio relay site located within enemy-held territory. On the morning of 4 June 1971, the entire camp came under an intense barrage of enemy small arms, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenade and mortar fire from a superior size enemy force. S/Sgt. Cavaiani acted with complete disregard for his personal safety as he repeatedly exposed himself to heavy enemy fire in order to move about the camp's perimeter directing the platoon's fire and rallying the platoon in a desperate fight for survival. S/Sgt. Cavaiani also returned heavy suppressive fire upon the assaulting enemy force during this period with a variety of weapons. When the entire platoon was to be evacuated, S/Sgt. Cavaiani unhesitatingly volunteered to remain on the ground and direct the helicopters into the landing zone. S/Sgt. Cavaiani was able to direct the first 3 helicopters in evacuating a major portion of the platoon. Due to intense increase in enemy fire, S/Sgt. Cavaiani was forced to remain at the camp overnight where he calmly directed the remaining platoon members in strengthening their defenses. On the morning of 5 June, a heavy ground fog restricted visibility. The superior size enemy force launched a major ground attack in an attempt to completely annihilate the remaining small force. The enemy force advanced in 2 ranks, first firing a heavy volume of small arms automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade fire while the second rank continuously threw a steady barrage of hand grenades at the beleaguered force. S/Sgt. Cavaiani returned a heavy barrage of small arms and hand grenade fire on the assaulting enemy force but was unable to slow them down. He ordered the remaining platoon members to attempt to escape while he provided them with cover fire. With 1 last courageous exertion, S/Sgt. Cavaiani recovered a machine gun, stood up, completely exposing himself to the heavy enemy fire directed at him, and began firing the machine gun in a sweeping motion along the 2 ranks of advancing enemy soldiers. Through S/Sgt. Cavaiani's valiant efforts with complete disregard for his safety, the majority of the remaining platoon members were able to escape. While inflicting severe losses on the advancing enemy force, S/Sgt. Cavaiani was wounded numerous times. S/Sgt. Cavaiani's conspicuous gallantry, extraordinary heroism and intrepidity at the risk of his life, above and beyond the call of duty, were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army.

Jon Cavaiani, SGM (ret), Army Special Forces will be missed.

SOG in Vietnam - Last Stand of Recon Team Kansas

From an article posted on Vet2.Tripod titled - Last Stand of Recon Team Kansas

The once bustling Khe Sanh Marine Base in South Vietnam's extreme northwest had been a ghost town for more than three years by the summer of 1971. It was, however, used briefly that February to support the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. After that bloody debacle, they abandoned not just Khe Sanh, but the entire region, yielding immense areas to the NVA. Almost overnight, the North began extending the Ho Chi Minh Trail highways into South Vietnam.

In late July 1971, U.S. intelligence began tracking a large enemy force shifting across the DMZ a dozen miles east of Khe Sanh, threatening the coastal cities of Hue, Danang and Phu Bai where the last sizeable American ground units were based.

It was essential to learn what was happening near Khe Sanh, a mission assigned to a shadowy organization called "SOG." Created to conduct covert missions deep behind enemy lines in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, the top- secret Studies and Observations Group had shifted most of its operations in-country in 1971 to cover the continuing U.S. withdrawal.

From among its clandestine assembly of Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and USAF Air Commandos, the Khe Sanh mission eventually became a prisoner-snatch assigned to Recon Team Kansas, an 11-man Special Forces-led element, which included eight Montagnard tribesmen.

But how do you grab a prisoner in the midst of 10,000 or more NVA? Headed by an easygoing, lanky Midwesterner, 1st Lt. Loren Hagen, along with Sergeants Tony Andersen and Bruce Berg, the RT Kansas men (see picture at right) had brainstormed through several scenarios until settling upon the best option: They would land conspicuously on an abandoned firebase -- which obviously would draw some sort of NVA reaction -- put up a short fight, then extract by helicopter.

Except half of Hagen's men would stay hidden on the hill. When the NVA sent a squad up to see if the Americans had left behind sensors or bombing beacons -- as SOG teams often did -- the hidden men would ambush the NVA, seize a prisoner and come out.

In case a serious fight developed, Lt. Hagen reinforced his team with three more Green Beret volunteers, Staff Sgt. Oran Bingham and Sergeants Bill Queen and William Rimondi, eight Montagnard tribesmen and six U.S. Special Forces troops -- a total of 14 men.

Landing at last light on Aug. 6, 1971, Lt. Hagen surveyed the scrub brush and bomb craters below them and split his defense into three elements to cover three slopes. Immediately they went to work restoring the old firebase's two dilapidated bunkers and shallow trenches. The enemy must have seen them land, and Hagen reckoned to be ready.

Foreboding Night

It was well after dark when the SOG men noticed campfires on two facing ridgelines: unusual because the NVA normally masked itself. By midnight, enemy probers were at the base of the hill, firing provocatively from the north, south, east and west.

At 1 a.m., a USAF AC-130 Spectre gunship arrived, walking 40mm and 20mm fire around the hill nearly all night. Never once did the team fire their weapons, staying blanketed in darkness. Then at 3 a.m., the SOG men heard trucks and tailgates dropping. This was odd, very odd.

Beneath the hill, dismounting NVA soldiers formed up into platoons and companies, which their leaders marched through the darkness to their assigned attack positions, to wait for dawn. Just before sunrise it became forebodingly quiet. Then Lt. Hagen heard more trucks arriving.

Fifty miles away at a coastal airbase, a USAF forward air controller (FAC) and a flight of helicopters was lifting away for the false extraction; they would be above RT Kansas in 30 minutes.

Encircled by the NVA

As darkness gave way to light, Lt. Hagen detected glimpses of NVA on one slope; then on another slope pith helmets appeared, bobbing in the fog. When his men reported NVA on the third slope, too, Hagen realized the hill was completely encircled by NVA -- but that would require a whole regiment, at least a thousand men.

The NVA regimental commander understood he had to dispatch the Americans quickly. They'd inadvertently landed almost within sight of the Hanoi High Command's most critical new venture, the first six-inch fuel pipeline laid across the DMZ.

It would be absolutely essential in a few months when entire tank battalions rolled through there for the war's largest offensive. Already the 304th NVA Division was massing there. Moreover, a regiment of the 308th Division was preparing for the 1972 Easter Offensive.

A fourth battalion moved into place; then, concealed in the ground fog, a fifth battalion arrived. Later, SOG's commander, Col. John Sadler, would learn an entire regiment had stormed the hill, supported by a second regiment. It was a mass assault by approximately 2,000 enemy infantrymen.

As the clearing ground fog disclosed that terrible truth, Lt. Hagen had no time for inspiring words, just serious soldier work; in those final moments he repositioned weapons while his men readied grenades and stacked magazines. The Catholic Montagnards made the sign of the cross. Then the NVA came.

Four KIA in Four Minutes

A well-aimed RPG rocket smashed into Bruce Berg's bunker, collapsing it and signaling the attack -- fire went from nothing to 10,000 rounds per second. Andersen could see dozens of NVA rushing in lines up his slope, meeting them with his M-60 machine gun.

Hagen hollered that he was going to check Berg. And then he ran directly into a ferocious maelstrom, bullets ricocheting and slamming the earth in front of, behind, and beneath his dashing feet. He made it a dozen yards when fire from the other slope cut him down, killing him.

Then Klaus Bingham left a bunker to reposition a claymore and a bullet struck him in the head, apparently killing him. One Montagnard in a trench below Andersen fired several bursts then jumped up to pull back and fell into Andersen's lap, dead. Four men had died in less than four minutes. It was up to Andersen, now the senior man.

Small arms fire rattled closer on all sides and grenades lobbed up from below the hillcrest where waves of NVA were scurrying behind small rises and rolling from bomb crater to bomb crater. Andersen dashed over the hill to look for Hagen, but couldn't see him anywhere -- just 100 khaki-clad NVA almost at the top.

He fired one M-60 belt at NVA advancing up his own slope, then sped to the other approach and ran belt after belt on the 100 assaulting enemy. By then, grenades started coming from behind him as NVA closed in from his rear. Just a dozen yards away, beyond the curvature of the hill, enemy heads popped up, cracked a few shots, then dropped back down.

Still a dozen minutes away, the approaching Cobra gunships went to full throttle, leaving the slower Hueys behind.

Meanwhile, RT Kansas had just run out of hand grenades when a North Vietnamese grenade exploded beside Andersen's M-60, rendering it useless. He spun his CAR-15 off his back and kept shooting, then he tossed back another grenade, but it went off in front of him, nearly blinding him, yet he kept shooting. More shrapnel tore into him, then an AK round slammed through his webgear and lodged in his elbow, knocking him down. He stumbled back to his knees and kept firing.

The perimeter was pinched almost in half when Andersen grabbed his last two living Montagnards, circled below the nearest NVA and somehow managed to reach the survivors on the opposite side. He found Bingham, started to lift him, and saw he, too, was dead from a head wound. All around him he heard, "zzssss, zzssss, zzssss," as bullets flashed past his ears.

Last Stand

He dragged Bingham back to where Bill Queen lay, wounded. Only Rimondi wasn't yet hit and still fired furiously. Andersen put them in a back-to-back circle just off the hilltop where they would make their last stand. AK bullets had destroyed their team radio, another slug had shot Andersen's little survival radio out of his hand, so Rimondi tossed him another survival radio -- their last.

Now the NVA were streaming, rolling over the crest like a tidal wave, their rattling AKs blending together into one never-ending burst. Andersen's men were firing not at NVA, but at hands wielding AKs over parapets and around bunkers. There was no place left to fall back. Andersen was shooting NVA little farther away than the length of his CAR-15 muzzle. The time it took to speed-change a magazine meant life or death.

From the air it looked like an ant mound, with moving figures everywhere. Cobra lead rolled in and sprinkled 20mm cannon shells around the surviving SOG men, and at last fighters arrived, adding napalm and Vulcan cannons to the melee. Then at last the assault ebbed, turned, and the NVA fled for cover, just as the Hueys arrived.

Though wounded repeatedly, Andersen crawled out to fire his CAR-15 to cover the landing Hueys. With Rimondi's help, Andersen dragged as many teammates' bodies as he could to the first Huey, then helped the wounded Queen and others aboard the second.

Allied KIA Count: 64%

In one hellacious half-hour, nine of Recon Team Kansas' 14 men had been lost.

Lt. Hagen had died, along with Bingham; Berg was presumed dead; six Montagnards had died. Rimondi and Queen both suffered multiple frag wounds, Andersen had been struck by both small arms fire and shrapnel, and their other Montagnards, too, all had been wounded.

"It's amazing that any of us came through it with the amount of incoming that we were getting," Tony Andersen says today, 25 years later. He attributes their survival to his deceased team leader, Lt. Loren Hagen. "He epitomized what a Special Forces officer should be -- attentive to detail, a lot of rehearsals, followed through on things," he explains. "We were ready. I think that was probably the only thing that kept us from being totally overrun. Everybody was alert and knew what was happening and was waiting."

As for Hagen's bravery, dashing into a wall of AK fire to try to save Bruce Berg, that didn't surprise Andersen, either. "Lt. Hagen was that kind of officer. He was a good man."

Against the loss of most of his teammates, Andersen learned, the USAF counted 185 NVA dead on that hill -- little RT Kansas had killed half a battalion and probably wounded twice that many NVA. But that gives Andersen little satisfaction compared to the loss of most of his team.

Perhaps Andersen's most difficult duty was carrying the bodies of his six Montagnard teammates -- his "family" he called them -- to their home village.

"As soon as they saw us driving up in the truck, they knew. Wailing and moaning started, and all the grieving." The villagers gathered in a circle around the headman's stilted longhouse. "Through one of the interpreters I tried to explain how proud we were of them, what good fighters they were, that they had died for a good cause."

That would be borne out a few months later when the intelligence generated by RT Kansas' spirited defense helped U.S. analysts read enemy intentions, enabling American airpower to counter the NVA's Easter Offensive.

And though details of this incredible fight would remain classified for decades, enough was disclosed that 1st Lt. Loren Hagen's family was presented the U.S. Army's final Vietnam War Medal of Honor. Tony Andersen, who held together what remained of RT Kansas through those final mass assaults, received the Distinguished Service Cross. Queen, Rimondi, Berg and Bingham were awarded Silver Stars.

And now, today, with full disclosure, we can appreciate the significance of their noble stand.

None More Beautiful

Most of the readers of this site, other Special Forces sites and history will recognize the name, COL Martha Raye, known as "Colonel Maggie". If not, go to this site to be educated. A finer women never lived....a more beautiful woman, both inside and out, may not have existed either,.....