1969 was a strange year. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a couple of races, the arms race (let’s see who can build more and better nuclear weapons) and the space race (to be first on the moon; we won, by the way.) The Jets beat the Colts in Super Bowl III—that’s right, III as in “3.” Led Zeppelin released their first studio album (on vinyl), Blind Faith played to 100,000 people in London’s Hyde Park. The Charlie Manson family murdered actress Sharon Tate on one night, then murdered Leno and Rosemary Labianca, Los Angeles business people, in their home the next night. Can you say “Helter Skelter?” And the next week was the Woodstock concert of (now) legend. Peace, brother! Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President, Moamar Khadaffi took over Libya, and Yasser Arafat became official leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israelis were fighting the Palestinians and almost everyone else in the region (sound familiar?); some of the Irish were still fighting some of the other Irish, and the Brits, too. And America was embroiled in the Vietnam War.
Ah, Vietnam. For my generation, Vietnam and Woodstock were the defining experiences. How’s that for confused? Enough contrast for you? In January 1969, I found myself in Vietnam. I had actually arrived in November 1967, but through dumb good luck I was given a temporary duty assignment that put me in Thailand, out of harm’s way (mostly). The Army assigned me to MACV-SOG; the acronym stands for Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, but we referred to ourselves as simply SOG. My initial job with SOG wasn’t too demanding. I was the commo (communications) guy at a SOG facility on a US Air Force base in northeast Thailand from December 1967 through December 1968. I transmitted and received teletype messages to and from SOG headquarters in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City for the revisionists in the crowd). Other guys in SOG had a harder time of it, though. That’s because the missions that SOG ran were the most dangerous missions of the war.
SOG fielded reconnaissance teams that ran recon patrols in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Although it did much more, to simplify things I’ll just say that most of the missions were to gather intelligence on a network of roads and trails that ran from North Vietnam south through Laos and Cambodia. The North Vietnamese used this area to move supplies and troops down from the north, and then infiltrate them into South Vietnam. The road/trail complex became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. SOG’s task was to sneak into the area and gather intelligence, sabotage facilities, capture prisoners, and other destructive activities.
For various political reasons (I won’t bore you with them here), the official story then was that the US had no troops in supposedly neutral Laos or Cambodia, and we were not in North Vietnam at all because that would smack of “invasion,” which we wanted to avoid (don’t ask me why, I never figured that part out). So, to further this fiction, the US would deny the existence of any US special operations personnel who entered these countries and were unfortunate enough to get caught. Or killed. The recon teams were comprised of 2 or 3 Special Forces men, and 4 to 8 southeast Asian mercenaries. The Americans led the missions and made all decisions; the mercenaries acted as body guards and sometimes interpreters. The American personnel on SOG recon teams wore no identification or dog tags, wore no uniform, or carried anything else that could identify him as an American. Some teams even wore the uniforms of the North Vietnamese Army, to give them a better chance of survival if they contacted the enemy.
SOG was very good at what it did. It was incredibly effective in making life difficult for the North Vietnamese Army in areas which the NVA regarded as sanctuaries. This fact was not lost on the NVA. After years of SOG operations in their backyard, the NVA learned how SOG operated and developed tactics to disrupt SOG missions. By 1969, the NVA had had 4 years to learn to counter SOG recon teams. Although at any given time SOG might have 50 men on the ground in its operational area, divided among 5 or 6 or 7 teams running separate targets, the NVA had 40,000 men and 10,000 anti-aircraft guns devoted just to running SOG teams to ground. The NVA also developed specialized commando units to track, fix, and destroy SOG teams. SOG recon teams had the unenviable distinction of having the highest per capita casualty rate of any US unit in Vietnam. The casualty rate exceeded 100%, meaning that for every SOG operator who escaped unscathed, there was another who was wounded twice. Or more. Even so, I recently learned that SOG’s kill ratio was something on the order of 150 to 1—for every SOG operator or mercenary lost, SOG eliminated 150 of the enemy. Running recon was dangerous.
And running recon was high adventure. During the year I served in the commo room in Thailand, I read the After Action Reports that the leaders of SOG teams filed with HQ immediately after a mission. I read of incredible skill in stealth, of razor thin close calls, of disasters, of heroic acts that are to this day unimaginable. And I was intrigued. Attracted. Hooked.
And vastly unqualified. I was no Special Forces trooper. I had never jumped out of an airplane, I had no specialized combat training, I was just a regular soldier trained in teletype communications that happened to get assigned to SOG because they needed guys to man the commo rooms at HQ and at the forward operating bases. But…I had a thirst for adventure, and absolutely no sense at all.
Tours of duty for people assigned to Vietnam during the war were for one year. Exactly 365 days after arrival in Vietnam, one’s tour of duty was up, meaning you got to go home (if, indeed, you survived those 365 days). For some reason, Vietnam was not generally considered a good assignment by the average soldier, especially if that soldier had been drafted into military service. Most guys did their tour, went home, and got out of the service just as quickly as possible. So, the military offered to cut a deal. If you voluntarily extended your tour of duty for six months, you were allowed an extra 30 days leave and free round-trip transportation to anywhere in the free world. So that’s what I did; I extended my tour for another six months, took 30 days leave to be home for Christmas in 1968, and returned to Vietnam. However, I put one condition on the terms of my extension. I wanted to be put on a recon team. And I was.
I don’t know if you can imagine how out of place I initially felt in Recon Company. Turd in a punchbowl comes to mind. I was frightened and intimidated, while feeling fortunate to be in the company of these incredibly brave and resourceful men, these warriors. Not being a Special Forces soldier, I expected to be marginalized, never to fit in or to be accepted. In fact, just the opposite happened, due in large part to meeting the right people. There were guys who welcomed me into their brotherhood, who offered friendship, who mentored me. One of those guys was Bill Brown.
William T. Brown was from La Habra, California, maybe 10 or 15 miles from my home. We hit it off right away. Bill had been stationed near Can Tho, down in the southern part of Vietnam, working with air boats in the delta and on the rivers. Bill was open and friendly, and had a great sense of humor, and he wasn’t above laughing at himself. He showed me the forefinger of his right hand, which was missing the fingertip. It turned out that Bill had dropped a round down a mortar tube, and the round got hung up. Bill grabbed the tube and moved it to a steeper angle, hoping the round would free itself and drop to the bottom. It did. Unfortunately for Bill, he had his fingertip just over the end of the tube so when the mortar fired, it flew from the tube and took Bill’s fingertip with it. Bill laughed when he told that story. He loved music, especially Creedence Clearwater Revival, and would sing along with the song Proud Mary. I can still see his wide smile, and hear him singing, “Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river…”
In January 69, Bill’s tour of duty was about to expire. Bill had a high regard for the Vietnamese people, and had, in fact, taken one for his wife. He left Can Tho, and brought his wife up to Danang, where I was stationed, to see whether the stories he had heard on the grapevine about SOG were true. They were, and he stayed. Bill was excited by the mission and the elite nature of the unit. If I recall the timeline correctly, Bill’s tour ended in February, and so did the term of his enlistment in the Army. He went home, leaving his wife behind, intending to get a paramilitary job with the CIA and return to his wife and Vietnam. He told me later that the Agency was interested in him, but the process simply took too long. Worried about his wife’s welfare, Bill re-enlisted in the Army, conditioned on an assignment to SOG at Danang. He was. I remember returning to camp from a mission in Laos, and hearing Proud Mary being played in one of the hootches we lived in. The door opened, and there was Billy, smiling and singing. Welcome back, brother!
In June 1969 I returned to the States, my extension having run its course. Even though I wasn’t a Special Forces soldier, I got reassigned to a non-airborne unit at Ft. Bragg, NC, to serve out the year remaining on my 4 yr enlistment. Ft. Bragg was/is home to Special Forces, and I ran into some of the guys from SOG. We hung out together on the weekends, having a good old time. I learned from guys returning from SOG that Bill had teamed up with Gunter Wald and Don Shue to form a recon team. Then in November, I got word that Bill’s team had been overrun on a mission and was nearly wiped out.
At least one of the mercenaries (and perhaps as many as four) had survived the attack, and evaded capture, eventually making their way back to our unit in Vietnam. (This is an incredible story of survival and courage in itself; they were 30 miles inside Laos and had to walk back home through country crawling with the enemy.) They related the story of the attack, reporting that Bill was last seen with a gunshot wound just below his ribcage, and that Gunter and Don suffered severe grenade shrapnel wounds. After HQ lost contact with the team, they tried to send in a rescue team, but the weather turned nasty and the choppers couldn’t get in for the next week. A search of the area turned up nothing but some remnants of Don’s web gear (load bearing gear).
Because their bodies weren’t found, the Dept. of Defense carried Bill, Gunter and Don on its rolls as Missing In Action. Most of us knew in our hearts they were dead. I never met anyone in SOG recon that would allow himself to be captured; death was a far better fate than that. But over the years, there was always that doubt. In the late 70s, DoD made a “presumptive finding of death.” But without bodies, many of us couldn’t help wondering. There were times I was haunted by the thought that Bill might still be alive, confined to some sort of living hell in Laos or North Vietnam, perhaps taken to Russia or China to be held forever. I was sick at heart, never knowing for sure what had happened to him and the others.
But a couple of years ago, a farmer on a Laotian hilltop found some bones, and did the right thing. He told somebody, and somehow word got back to the US organization that still searches for the remains of those we left behind in southeast Asia. A recovery team visited Laos and spoke with the farmer, and with North Vietnamese war veterans. One of the veterans remembered a battle he took part in, in that same area. A year later the recovery team revisited the area, and began to dig. They found what appeared to be 3 sets of human bones, two sets together and one set a few yards away. And among the bones, they found a Zippo lighter and a dog tag with Don Shue’s name on them. They took the remains to a forensic center in Hawaii. They eventually located relatives of all three men, conducted DNA analyses and positively identified Don, Bill and Gunter.
On September 26th, just a couple of weeks ago, Bill came home. The Army conducted a service for him, with full military honors, at Arlington National Cemetery. There were a handful of Bill’s relatives there, the family that remained after these four decades. Bill’s parents and siblings had passed away, without the closure they longed for. And there were a half-dozen of Bill’s former comrades. Bill’s grave is just one out of 300,000 at Arlington, But it’s the one that matters to me.
Welcome home, Billy. Rest in peace.
