The TERRIFYING First Days Every Vietnam MACV-SOG Recruit Faced
A man steps off a helicopter at a forward base in South Vietnam. He is airborne qualified. He has passed the Special Forces Qualification Course. He is very often a seasoned non-commissioned officer who has already served a tour in country. And he has volunteered three separate times to stand on this particular patch of red dirt.
Inside a week, he will be carrying the radio at the back of the formation, taking orders from a sergeant who outranks nobody, and learning how to move through jungle from teenagers he technically commands. So, how does the most selective unit in Vietnam end up taking its best men and putting them at the bottom? Start with the word almost every video on the subject gets wrong.
Recruit. The Studies and Observations Group never had recruits. There was no intake of raw men. No basic training pipeline. No recruiting office. The United States Army’s own published history of the unit is direct about the mechanism. Personnel were volunteers, and personnel could leave without prejudice. By the time an American walked through the gate, he had already volunteered for Airborne School.
He had volunteered again for Special Forces and survived the qualification course. He had usually volunteered a third time for Vietnam, and then volunteered a fourth time for an assignment nobody would describe to him. Some of these men had a decade in uniform. Some wore the stripes of a master sergeant.
This was not an organization that built soldiers from nothing. It took finished ones, and then told them that almost none of what they had earned was going to count. One more piece of housekeeping before we go further. The letters do not stand for Special Operations Group. The cover name was Studies and Observations Group, chosen precisely because it sounded like a research office full of clerks.
Getting there was strange by design. Men processed through Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters at Nha Trang. And a first-person account published by a veterans organization describes what that felt like from the inside. The classified unit was, in that account, vacuuming up most of the new personnel arriving in country.
And it was described to arriving soldiers only as a top-secret organization operating in locations nobody would name. The secrecy went inward as well as outward. Even soldiers assigned to Fifth Group Headquarters, the very cover the unit hid behind, were generally not told what the organization in their own building actually did.
What a new man got instead was a letter code on his orders. That code told the personnel clerk which of three detachments he was bound for, Northern, Central, or Southern, which in practice meant Da Nang, Kontum, or Ban Me Thuot. One veteran, Ed Wolcoff, has described the route on the record. Coded orders, out-processing at Fort Bragg, a stop at Nha Trang, then a flight to Kontum on the unit’s own aircraft.
He could still walk away. The Army history is explicit that a man could leave without prejudice, and men did. What nobody has ever published is a reliable number for how many. So, anyone quoting you a washout percentage for this unit is quoting something that does not exist in the record. Saigon came first for many of them.
The transient facility was Camp Goodman, and it is worth correcting the geography here because it gets repeated wrong constantly. Camp Goodman sat Camp Le Van Duyet in District 10 of Saigon, not in Cholon. The unit’s actual headquarters was somewhere far less dramatic than the mythology suggests, a three-story former apartment building at 137 Pasteur Street, a building that had housed an American University Advisory Group in the 1950s.
Then came the briefing that changed how a man understood his own job. The operations were classified top secret, limited distribution, no foreign nationals. The government of the United States did not simply keep them quiet. It denied that the organization existed at all. Incoming men signed a secrecy agreement that is commonly described as running 20 years.
Their travel documents identified them as belonging to some innocuous element with a forgettable name. Work through what that means. If he were captured on the wrong side of a border, there was no mechanism by which his own government could acknowledge where he had been sent or why. And then, having absorbed all of that, he was handed the radio.
The team structure is laid out plainly in the Army’s own unit history. The team leader was the 1-0. His assistant was the 1-1. The radio operator was the 1-2. The indigenous members of the team carried their own numbering, 0-1, 0-2, and onward. A newly arrived American went in at the bottom of that ladder.
Not because he was thought stupid, and not because anybody doubted his qualification course, because on this particular ground, the currency was time across the border, and he had none of it. John Stryker Meyer landed in Vietnam in April of 1968 and reached forward operating base one at Phu Bai the following month.
His account of what happened next is worth hearing in his own voice. >> So with Spider, he got Don Wolken who had some experience in country. We built the team. Spider was the 1-0 team leader. Don was the 1-1 assistant team leader. >> [clears throat] >> I was brought on as the 1-2, the radio operator. And uh >> He is describing the moment the ladder was explained to him >> >> and note what he does not mention.
Rank. It simply is not part of the sentence. >> >> An honesty note because this channel would rather flag a wobble than paper over it. The Army’s own history hedges here describing American assistant team leaders and radio operators as 1-1s or 1-2s. A United States Army War College paper by Kent Bolster calls the radio slot the 1-3.
Usage varied by base and by year and anyone telling you there was one fixed vocabulary is smoothing something that was never smooth. Now, was this really about rank or is that just a good story? Bolster’s War College paper is the strongest place to check because it was built on roughly 40 interviews with named veterans of the unit.
Its finding is blunt. The most experienced soldiers led regardless of rank. Bolster quotes a staff sergeant named Bill Krempa on recon team Florida describing his own arrival. On his first team, the 1-0 was a sergeant one full grade below him and Krempa says the rank simply did not matter on the teams. He adds that on other teams young non-commissioned officers ran reconnaissance with commissioned officers working as their number two.
Read that again. Lieutenants taking direction from sergeants in a combat zone as normal practice. It applied to arriving officers, too. Travis Mills, writing his own account for the Special Forces Association, came in as a lieutenant and served as a 1-1 before he was trusted with a team. Climbing took work, and it took witnesses.
Veteran David Hayworth has written that a man needed at least five missions as a 1-1 before he was considered. That most had closer to 10, and that somebody had to recommend him. An academic review of Nick Brokhausen’s memoir notes the arithmetic underneath all of it. Team leaders averaged roughly 4 months in the role.
4 months. That was the average tenure at the top of the ladder the new man had just been placed at the bottom of. There is one more group of teachers in this story, and popular accounts almost always sentimentalize them or leave them out. An American recon team was mostly not American. The Army’s history gives the standard composition as two or three Americans alongside six to nine indigenous soldiers, Montagnard tribesmen, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Vietnamese.
Many of them had been running these missions long before the new arrival showed up. And the new arrival’s survival depended on their judgment about ground he could not read. If work like this is useful to you, subscribing genuinely helps because digging through war college papers and declassified manuals takes a while, and this channel would rather do that than repeat the internet back at you.
Myers’ rebuilt team included an interpreter named Heap who spoke four or five languages, and who, by Myers’ own description, used to improve his English. The team also had a Vietnamese counterpart to the American team leader. I want to be careful not to make that warmer than it was. When Meyer’s team was rebuilt after heavy losses, three of the new indigenous men hired onto it were 15 years old.
He repeats the number twice in his own telling, as though he still cannot quite believe it. These men were paid on a different scale from the Americans beside them. They took disproportionate casualties, and what happened to many of them after the war is not comfortable reading. So, the humbling was real, and it ran in more than one direction.
What followed was weeks of being taken apart and rebuilt. The declassified 1970 combat reconnaissance manual >> >> and the first-hand accounts line up closely. Immediate action drills, dry and then live, rappelling from a tower, then from helicopters, extraction by rope, endless repetition of what to do in the first 4 seconds of contact.
Meyer describes his own team walking outside the base, working the trails near the village, >> >> running contingency drills, then putting thousands of rounds down range. They rehearsed helicopter loading so precisely that specific men went to specific windows, so the aircraft could put fire out of both sides.
From late 1968, there was also a formal school at Camp Long Thanh, established by Travis Mills after he was wounded in the overrun of Forward Operating Base 4, an attack in which 16 Special Forces soldiers were killed, and some accounts say 17. It remains the heaviest single-day loss in Special Forces history, which kills another myth.
No new man was inserted across a border alone, and nobody went over on his first day. First missions were often chosen to be dull on purpose. Myers’ first three were sensor emplacement tasks with almost no shooting and he calls them boring himself. The system worked right up until somebody overrode it. In October of 1968, a specialist named Lynn Black was the radio operator on Spike Team Alabama.
Black was no novice. He had served with the 173rd Airborne and had real combat behind him. The man appointed to lead the team, by Myers’ account, got the job because he held more rank than Black, not because he had fought this enemy more. That team was destroyed. Myers is the source for that framing and he served in the same unit at the same time.
So, treat it as a participant’s account rather than a document. But, it is the exception that explains the rule. When the unit let experience lead, men came home. When somebody reached for the rank chart instead, everyone in the recon companies learned the names, which leaves the numbers and this is where the internet does its worst work.
You have almost certainly heard that this unit suffered a casualty rate above 100%. Major John Plaster, who served there, explains what that figure actually is. During 1968, losses exceeded 100% because each man in recon or reaction platoon was killed, wounded or missing and so were some of their replacements.
It counts wounds against a very small denominator. HistoryNet puts the same year plainly. Every recon man was wounded at least once and about half were killed. Half is a devastating number and it is also not 100%. The difference matters if you care about being accurate. On Scale, The National Interest reports that of roughly 20,000 Green Berets who served in Vietnam, about 2,000 served in this unit with only four to 600 running reconnaissance at any one time.
Plaster puts cross-border losses at around 300 Green Berets, 57 of them missing. Two more corrections. The washout figures quoted online almost always belong to the Recon school at Nha Trang, where reporting from Vietnam Gear indicates more than 5,600 men attended and roughly 3,500 graduated.
Genuinely hard school and a completely different school. And the suicide pill. There is no evidence recon men here were routinely issued cyanide capsules. The International Spy Museum’s historian, Vince Houghton, has been asked directly whether the hollow cyanide tooth ever existed. >> >> And his answer is a flat no.
As for the idea that these men were gagged for life >> >> under threat of prosecution, the agreements expired. That is exactly why the memoirs this script relies on exist. So, what did a new man actually go through in his first days? He arrived carrying more training than almost anyone in uniform, signed away 20 years of silence, was handed a radio, put behind men younger and lower rank than himself, and told to watch how a teenage Montagnard soldier read a trail.
And then, months later, on a mission in the A Shau Valley, Meyer grabbed his assistant team leader as the man slipped toward a punji pit and said the thing that sums up this whole story better than any statistic. Get back here. I am not ready to be the 1-1 yet. I am just the radio operator here. Every source in this script is named and linked below, including the Army’s own unit history and the War College paper, both free to read.
Subscribe if you want the next one.
The TERRIFYING First Days Every Vietnam MACV-SOG Recruit Faced
A man steps off a helicopter at a forward base in South Vietnam. He is airborne qualified. He has passed the Special Forces Qualification Course. He is very often a seasoned non-commissioned officer who has already served a tour in country. And he has volunteered three separate times to stand on this particular patch of red dirt.
Inside a week, he will be carrying the radio at the back of the formation, taking orders from a sergeant who outranks nobody, and learning how to move through jungle from teenagers he technically commands. So, how does the most selective unit in Vietnam end up taking its best men and putting them at the bottom? Start with the word almost every video on the subject gets wrong.
Recruit. The Studies and Observations Group never had recruits. There was no intake of raw men. No basic training pipeline. No recruiting office. The United States Army’s own published history of the unit is direct about the mechanism. Personnel were volunteers, and personnel could leave without prejudice. By the time an American walked through the gate, he had already volunteered for Airborne School.
He had volunteered again for Special Forces and survived the qualification course. He had usually volunteered a third time for Vietnam, and then volunteered a fourth time for an assignment nobody would describe to him. Some of these men had a decade in uniform. Some wore the stripes of a master sergeant.
This was not an organization that built soldiers from nothing. It took finished ones, and then told them that almost none of what they had earned was going to count. One more piece of housekeeping before we go further. The letters do not stand for Special Operations Group. The cover name was Studies and Observations Group, chosen precisely because it sounded like a research office full of clerks.
Getting there was strange by design. Men processed through Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters at Nha Trang. And a first-person account published by a veterans organization describes what that felt like from the inside. The classified unit was, in that account, vacuuming up most of the new personnel arriving in country.
And it was described to arriving soldiers only as a top-secret organization operating in locations nobody would name. The secrecy went inward as well as outward. Even soldiers assigned to Fifth Group Headquarters, the very cover the unit hid behind, were generally not told what the organization in their own building actually did.
What a new man got instead was a letter code on his orders. That code told the personnel clerk which of three detachments he was bound for, Northern, Central, or Southern, which in practice meant Da Nang, Kontum, or Ban Me Thuot. One veteran, Ed Wolcoff, has described the route on the record. Coded orders, out-processing at Fort Bragg, a stop at Nha Trang, then a flight to Kontum on the unit’s own aircraft.
He could still walk away. The Army history is explicit that a man could leave without prejudice, and men did. What nobody has ever published is a reliable number for how many. So, anyone quoting you a washout percentage for this unit is quoting something that does not exist in the record. Saigon came first for many of them.
The transient facility was Camp Goodman, and it is worth correcting the geography here because it gets repeated wrong constantly. Camp Goodman sat Camp Le Van Duyet in District 10 of Saigon, not in Cholon. The unit’s actual headquarters was somewhere far less dramatic than the mythology suggests, a three-story former apartment building at 137 Pasteur Street, a building that had housed an American University Advisory Group in the 1950s.
Then came the briefing that changed how a man understood his own job. The operations were classified top secret, limited distribution, no foreign nationals. The government of the United States did not simply keep them quiet. It denied that the organization existed at all. Incoming men signed a secrecy agreement that is commonly described as running 20 years.
Their travel documents identified them as belonging to some innocuous element with a forgettable name. Work through what that means. If he were captured on the wrong side of a border, there was no mechanism by which his own government could acknowledge where he had been sent or why. And then, having absorbed all of that, he was handed the radio.
The team structure is laid out plainly in the Army’s own unit history. The team leader was the 1-0. His assistant was the 1-1. The radio operator was the 1-2. The indigenous members of the team carried their own numbering, 0-1, 0-2, and onward. A newly arrived American went in at the bottom of that ladder.
Not because he was thought stupid, and not because anybody doubted his qualification course, because on this particular ground, the currency was time across the border, and he had none of it. John Stryker Meyer landed in Vietnam in April of 1968 and reached forward operating base one at Phu Bai the following month.
His account of what happened next is worth hearing in his own voice. >> So with Spider, he got Don Wolken who had some experience in country. We built the team. Spider was the 1-0 team leader. Don was the 1-1 assistant team leader. >> [clears throat] >> I was brought on as the 1-2, the radio operator. And uh >> He is describing the moment the ladder was explained to him >> >> and note what he does not mention.
Rank. It simply is not part of the sentence. >> >> An honesty note because this channel would rather flag a wobble than paper over it. The Army’s own history hedges here describing American assistant team leaders and radio operators as 1-1s or 1-2s. A United States Army War College paper by Kent Bolster calls the radio slot the 1-3.
Usage varied by base and by year and anyone telling you there was one fixed vocabulary is smoothing something that was never smooth. Now, was this really about rank or is that just a good story? Bolster’s War College paper is the strongest place to check because it was built on roughly 40 interviews with named veterans of the unit.
Its finding is blunt. The most experienced soldiers led regardless of rank. Bolster quotes a staff sergeant named Bill Krempa on recon team Florida describing his own arrival. On his first team, the 1-0 was a sergeant one full grade below him and Krempa says the rank simply did not matter on the teams. He adds that on other teams young non-commissioned officers ran reconnaissance with commissioned officers working as their number two.
Read that again. Lieutenants taking direction from sergeants in a combat zone as normal practice. It applied to arriving officers, too. Travis Mills, writing his own account for the Special Forces Association, came in as a lieutenant and served as a 1-1 before he was trusted with a team. Climbing took work, and it took witnesses.
Veteran David Hayworth has written that a man needed at least five missions as a 1-1 before he was considered. That most had closer to 10, and that somebody had to recommend him. An academic review of Nick Brokhausen’s memoir notes the arithmetic underneath all of it. Team leaders averaged roughly 4 months in the role.
4 months. That was the average tenure at the top of the ladder the new man had just been placed at the bottom of. There is one more group of teachers in this story, and popular accounts almost always sentimentalize them or leave them out. An American recon team was mostly not American. The Army’s history gives the standard composition as two or three Americans alongside six to nine indigenous soldiers, Montagnard tribesmen, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Vietnamese.
Many of them had been running these missions long before the new arrival showed up. And the new arrival’s survival depended on their judgment about ground he could not read. If work like this is useful to you, subscribing genuinely helps because digging through war college papers and declassified manuals takes a while, and this channel would rather do that than repeat the internet back at you.
Myers’ rebuilt team included an interpreter named Heap who spoke four or five languages, and who, by Myers’ own description, used to improve his English. The team also had a Vietnamese counterpart to the American team leader. I want to be careful not to make that warmer than it was. When Meyer’s team was rebuilt after heavy losses, three of the new indigenous men hired onto it were 15 years old.
He repeats the number twice in his own telling, as though he still cannot quite believe it. These men were paid on a different scale from the Americans beside them. They took disproportionate casualties, and what happened to many of them after the war is not comfortable reading. So, the humbling was real, and it ran in more than one direction.
What followed was weeks of being taken apart and rebuilt. The declassified 1970 combat reconnaissance manual >> >> and the first-hand accounts line up closely. Immediate action drills, dry and then live, rappelling from a tower, then from helicopters, extraction by rope, endless repetition of what to do in the first 4 seconds of contact.
Meyer describes his own team walking outside the base, working the trails near the village, >> >> running contingency drills, then putting thousands of rounds down range. They rehearsed helicopter loading so precisely that specific men went to specific windows, so the aircraft could put fire out of both sides.
From late 1968, there was also a formal school at Camp Long Thanh, established by Travis Mills after he was wounded in the overrun of Forward Operating Base 4, an attack in which 16 Special Forces soldiers were killed, and some accounts say 17. It remains the heaviest single-day loss in Special Forces history, which kills another myth.
No new man was inserted across a border alone, and nobody went over on his first day. First missions were often chosen to be dull on purpose. Myers’ first three were sensor emplacement tasks with almost no shooting and he calls them boring himself. The system worked right up until somebody overrode it. In October of 1968, a specialist named Lynn Black was the radio operator on Spike Team Alabama.
Black was no novice. He had served with the 173rd Airborne and had real combat behind him. The man appointed to lead the team, by Myers’ account, got the job because he held more rank than Black, not because he had fought this enemy more. That team was destroyed. Myers is the source for that framing and he served in the same unit at the same time.
So, treat it as a participant’s account rather than a document. But, it is the exception that explains the rule. When the unit let experience lead, men came home. When somebody reached for the rank chart instead, everyone in the recon companies learned the names, which leaves the numbers and this is where the internet does its worst work.
You have almost certainly heard that this unit suffered a casualty rate above 100%. Major John Plaster, who served there, explains what that figure actually is. During 1968, losses exceeded 100% because each man in recon or reaction platoon was killed, wounded or missing and so were some of their replacements.
It counts wounds against a very small denominator. HistoryNet puts the same year plainly. Every recon man was wounded at least once and about half were killed. Half is a devastating number and it is also not 100%. The difference matters if you care about being accurate. On Scale, The National Interest reports that of roughly 20,000 Green Berets who served in Vietnam, about 2,000 served in this unit with only four to 600 running reconnaissance at any one time.
Plaster puts cross-border losses at around 300 Green Berets, 57 of them missing. Two more corrections. The washout figures quoted online almost always belong to the Recon school at Nha Trang, where reporting from Vietnam Gear indicates more than 5,600 men attended and roughly 3,500 graduated.
Genuinely hard school and a completely different school. And the suicide pill. There is no evidence recon men here were routinely issued cyanide capsules. The International Spy Museum’s historian, Vince Houghton, has been asked directly whether the hollow cyanide tooth ever existed. >> >> And his answer is a flat no.
As for the idea that these men were gagged for life >> >> under threat of prosecution, the agreements expired. That is exactly why the memoirs this script relies on exist. So, what did a new man actually go through in his first days? He arrived carrying more training than almost anyone in uniform, signed away 20 years of silence, was handed a radio, put behind men younger and lower rank than himself, and told to watch how a teenage Montagnard soldier read a trail.
And then, months later, on a mission in the A Shau Valley, Meyer grabbed his assistant team leader as the man slipped toward a punji pit and said the thing that sums up this whole story better than any statistic. Get back here. I am not ready to be the 1-1 yet. I am just the radio operator here. Every source in this script is named and linked below, including the Army’s own unit history and the War College paper, both free to read.
Subscribe if you want the next one.
