SOG by John L. Plaster

Author:John L. Plaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Then three days after that, RT Idaho inserted not 5 miles from there. That afternoon One-Zero Glen Lane and One-One Robert Owen had a brief conversation with Covey, explaining they couldn’t talk because NVA were all around them. It was the last anyone ever heard from RT Idaho.

RT Oregon went in to search for Idaho and found a place where concussion grenades had exploded; Lane and Owen probably were incapacitated and captured by NVA counter-recon specialists. A large NVA force hit RT Oregon and, with every member of the team wounded, they narrowly escaped.

RT Idaho’s loss was the last event in Colonel Singlaub’s two-year tour as Chief SOG; his final contribution, he believed, was ensuring he had a suitable replacement. One night, Singlaub phoned an old UCLA classmate in Germany with the 8th Division to announce proudly, “Steve, I’ve nominated you to take my place.” On the other end, Colonel Steve Cavanaugh asked, “Where?”

“Why, SOG!”

Cavanaugh paused, then asked, “What’s SOG?”

Singlaub’s choice was a wise one. As a young paratroop officer in World War II, Steve Cavanaugh had made two combat jumps with the 11th Airborne Division, fighting the Japanese in New Guinea and the Philippines. His second jump was on a North Luzon drop zone secured by Don “Headhunter” Blackburn’s guerrillas.

Cavanaugh had served a 1961 Vietnam tour as the country’s senior U.S. Army training officer, then had run the Special Warfare Development Branch at Fort Bragg’s JFK Center. He went on to command the Germany-based 10th Special Forces Group, then, being groomed for higher command, he was appointed 8th Division chief of staff. And now the boy who’d dreamed of being a professional soldier would head his country’s largest and most secret special operations organization since the OSS.

Cavanaugh arrived at SOG’s new Saigon headquarters, a converted hotel on Rue Pasteur, the old MACV headquarters Westmoreland vacated when he moved to a new Tan Son Nhut complex. While offering useful advice, Singlaub issued a warning about that damned patch: A few SOG men had scribbled a design on a cocktail napkin and had it run off at a local tailor shop. It featured a Green Beret skull in a yellow shell burst with Air Force wings and a Navy and Marine anchor. It compromised the whole operation, complained Singlaub. “Look at the thing! It’s no ‘Studies and Observations’ patch!” Cavanaugh found the patches a lost cause, though he insisted that men visiting Saigon wear sterile uniforms.

Despite his lofty position, Cavanaugh was always supportive, almost a fatherly figure and a real listener, respected by the recon men, whose advice he often sought.

That summer of 1968, under Chief SOG Cavanaugh, SOG refocused its operations across the border and tapered off in-country missions except in the Ashau Valley, which remained a SOG haunt.

Situated beyond a barrier of imposing mountains that masked it from coastal enclaves 40 miles away at Phu Bai and Danang, the Ashau Valley stretched 25 miles northwest to southeast on the Laotian frontier. Two miles wide in places, the

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