Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (7 page)

As the stability of Vietnam cracked, then disintegrated over the next eighteen months, the role of U.S. Special Forces assumed increasing importance. Their number and variety flourished like exotic jungle plants. They included Green Berets of 5th Special Forces Group Vietnam (2,000 men training civilian irregulars in a multitude of camps, running offensive operations from 1961 to 1971)
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and the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), a mixed team, operating from 1964 to 1972. SOG was a rival of the Green Berets, with which it fought turf wars for resources. It was invented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as an offensive cross-border raiding force and, some suspected, a Trojan Horse to take over many CIA functions. It included men from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which also had teams deployed elsewhere. There were also South Vietnamese Special Forces trained by the U.S.; the Army Security Agency, military arm of the signals intelligence National Security Agency; local mercenaries including ethnic Chinese tribesmen and Koreans; and Special Forces airmen and sailors including Navy SEALs.

This all-singing/all-dancing, bells-and-whistles lineup could be justified by the peculiar nature of the war, or rather the two wars being fought over the same soil. As Henry Kissinger glumly noted, after defeat in 1975, Vietnam “was both a revolutionary war fought at knife point during the night within the villages; it was also a main force war in which technology [including tanks, artillery and air power] could make a difference.”
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It was a war for territory which Vietnamese communists came to dominate on the ground in spite of America’s air superiority. It was a civil war in the south and a guerrilla war everywhere else. It was a very complicated, confusing struggle meant to halt a “domino principle,” through which, viewed from Washington, one anti-communist regime after another would fall to America’s enemies if every one was not kept upright.

It was a conflict that required agile thinking as well as action. The Special Forces process was propelled enthusiastically forward by President Kennedy, who saw these unconventional warriors as the ideal tool for counterinsurgency. The U.S. Navy SEALs owed their foundation in 1962 to support from Kennedy, a wartime torpedo boat hero. In large areas of Vietnam such as the Mekong Delta, and elsewhere during the flood season, the SEALs became a riverine commando force. But in general, U.S. Special Forces were defined at that time by the job they were asked to do rather than by what they did best. The Green Berets learned quickly how to acquire, adapt, and exploit the uses of non-violent aid to the civilian community. Winning friends became an equal option alongside killing the enemy, though not by SOG. Theoretically, the Green Berets were in Vietnam as trainers and guests of the Diem government. Theoretically, South Vietnamese soldiers were in charge of operations. But when the shooting started, the South Vietnamese handed over command and control to their American Special Forces mentors, at the last moment. In Afghanistan, the local National Army sometimes behaved the same way.

In late 1961, the U.S. Mission in Saigon assigned Special Forces teams to train irregulars drawn from minority groups including the Montagnards to defend their own villages. It was a momentous decision that started very modestly in the strategic Central Highlands. In February 1962, after protracted negotiations with tribal leaders, the first team started work in the village of Buon Enao. Crucially, it included a Special Forces medical sergeant. Medicare, plus the right to carry and bear arms, were major inducements to persuade the aboriginals to cooperate. They had been disarmed by the Diem regime in Saigon in the late 1950s. Now their arms—crossbows and spears—were restored to them. Soon they were being trained to use the M15 Armalite rifle, approved because it was “compatible with the small stature, body configuration and light weight of the Vietnamese soldier.”
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The villages were fortified and defended by civilian volunteers along lines developed by the British in Malaya. Weapons and pay were supplied outside the usual military accounting system, direct to Special Forces personnel and then filtered through local village headmen and tribal leaders. This unusual arrangement was described euphemistically by the Brits as “porter money,” that is, funds originally used “to pay locals who were employed as porters to help carry the regiment’s heavy equipment through the jungle.”
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(This revelation, if true, sheds a curious light on the legendary ability of the SAS to march through the jungle for many days without external support.) The system of unaccountable direct payment to friendly irregulars through Special Forces was open to fraud and, in the British case, was the subject of repeated internal enquiries. In Vietnam, formal accountability was replaced by “quick-reacting supply and procurement procedures.”

In 1962, control of what was now known as the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) program was transferred from the diplomats in Saigon—the U.S. Mission—to a new entity, U.S. Army Special Forces (Provisional) Vietnam. On the ground, training and—by default—leadership was the work of Army Green Beret teams. By December 1963, “Special Forces detachments, working through counterpart Vietnamese Special Forces units, had trained and armed 18,000 men as strike force troops and 43,376 as hamlet militia, the new name for village defenders.”
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The choice of “hamlet” was perhaps unfortunate, given the ambivalence of many village defenders about the Saigon government. As these statistics suggest, the village defense program had now mutated into an offensive entity, and another, the Trailwatchers, that was used as a tripwire to defend the northern border from incursions from Vietcong penetration.

“The Special Forces also helped train paramilitary forces in the ‘fighting fathers’ program, wherein resistance to insurgent activity centered on Catholic parish priests and a number of priests under the program made the arming and training of their parishioners possible …By the end of 1964 the Montagnard program was no longer an area development project in the original sense of the term.”
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The concept of the militant priest would have been entirely acceptable to the Catholic laity, a minority in Buddhist-dominated Vietnam. Communism, a materialist creed, was anti-Christian. The U.S. president was a practicing Catholic and the Vietnamese president, Diem, was a militant Catholic who persecuted Buddhists. Irish Catholics would have understood. In their folklore, the legendary Father O’Flynn, in the tradition of muscular Christianity, lifted the lazy ones on with the stick.

The self-defense program had started as a successful Green Beret experiment at Buon Enao village in the Central Highlands. Once it was handed over to Vietnamese soldiers in 1963 it broke down, a pattern that was to be repeated. Defenders were sent away for “indoctrination,” leaving settlements undefended, and pay agreements were not honored. The Vietnamese government attempted to reclaim weapons issued to the Montagnards. Ethnic Vietnamese Special Forces sometimes refused to take part in combat patrols with the “savages” because they had few trained leaders. At the same time, the Vietnamese “refused to allow leadership training in the camps.”
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Other reasons why transfers to Vietnamese control failed were summarized by the Green Berets as “mutual suspicion and hostility between the Rhade [tribesmen] and Vietnamese province and district officials; overly generous distribution by U.S. agencies of weapons and ammunition to tribesmen whose reaction to government-enforced repossession of some of the weapons was understandably hostile; apparent disregard on the part of the Vietnam government for the interests, desires, and sensitivities of the Montagnards; inadequate Vietnamese government administrative and logistical support; and, finally, failure of the U.S. authorities to anticipate these difficulties and avoid them.”

In September 1964, Montagnard resentment exploded in an armed uprising. At five defended village camps, sixty-four CIDG militiamen disarmed and detained their U.S. Special Forces advisers and declared a rebellion against Saigon. At another center, irregulars belonging to a mobile strike force killed fifteen Vietnamese team leaders, then seventeen members of a “Popular Forces” group, militia absorbed into the regular South Vietnam army. In a third location, eleven Vietnamese SF soldiers were killed. Over the following year, American Special Forces brokered a better deal for the Montagnards, but the use of local surrogates to fight—a form of conflict-franchise—was always a delicate process that often left regular, conventional American forces to bear the brunt of the war.

The defended camps were themselves coming under increasingly heavy, concerted attack by Vietcong guerrillas and regular North Vietnam Army troops, assisted by militiamen who had switched allegiance, providing the attackers with precise plans of the camps. This left the American Special Forces advisers frighteningly exposed. Weaknesses exploited by the VC included the camps’ isolation after nightfall. There was no reinforcement before daybreak. And as civilians in areas around the camps became intimidated by the VC, the enemy were able, with impunity, to preserve the element of surprise until large attacking forces were at the gates. The camps were now being overrun, though in some cases, such as Nam Dong, U.S. Special Forces and Nung tribesmen held their ground in spite of a heavy mortar barrage that destroyed key defensive positions including the camp radio post, followed by repeated ground assaults by hundreds of VC.

In July 1965 a team of four U.S. Special Forces Green Berets and a Vietnamese Regional Forces company holding Camp Bong Son was hit. The commander, Captain (later Major) Paris D. Davis, reported: “We had just finished a successful raid on a Viet Cong Regimental Headquarters, killing upwards of one hundred of the enemy. The raid had started shortly after midnight. We had four Americans and the 883rd Vietnamese Regional Force Company participating in the raid. After the raid was completed, the first platoon of the 883rd company broke and started to run just about the same time I gave the signal to pull in the security guarding the river bank. I went after the lead platoon, MSG Billy Waugh was with the second platoon, SSG David Morgan was with the third platoon, and SP4 Brown was with the fourth platoon.

“It was just beginning to get light (dawn) when I caught up to the first platoon and got them organized, and we were hit by automatic machine gun fire. It was up front and the main body of the platoon was hit by the machine gun. I was hit in the hand by a fragment from a hand grenade. About the time I started moving the platoon back to the main body, I heard firing and saw a wounded friendly VN soldier running from the direction of the firing. He told me that the remainder of the 883rd company was under attack. I moved the platoon I had back towards the main body. When I reached the company, the enemy had it pinned down in an open field with automatic weapons and mortar fire.

“I immediately ordered the platoon I had to return the fire, but they did not. Only a few men fired. I started firing at the enemy, moving up and down the line, encouraging the 883rd company to return the fire. We started to receive fire from the right flank. I ran down to where the firing was and found five Viet Cong coming over the trench line. I killed all five, and then I heard firing from the left flank. I ran down there and saw about six Viet Cong moving toward our position. I threw a grenade and killed four of them. My M16 jammed, so I shot one with my pistol and hit the other with my M16 again and again until he was dead.

“MSG Waugh started to yell that he had been shot in the foot. I ran to the middle of the open field and tried to get MSG Waugh, but the Viet Cong automatic fire was too intense, and I had to move back to safety. By this time SSG Morgan, who was at the edge of the open field, came to. He had been knocked out by a VC mortar round. He told me that he was receiving sniper fire. I spotted the sniper, and shot him in his camouflaged man-hole. I crawled over and dropped a grenade in the hole killing two additional Viet Cong.

“I was able at this time to make contact with the FAC [forward air controller] CPT Bronson and SGT Ronald Dies. CPT Bronson diverted a flight of 105’s and had them drop their bombs on the enemy’s position. I ran out and pulled SSG Morgan to safety. He was slightly wounded, and I treated him for shock. The enemy again tried to overrun our position. I picked up a machine gun and started firing. I saw four or five of the enemy drop and the remaining ones break and run. I then set up the 60mm mortar, dropped about five or six mortars down the tube, and ran out and tried to get MSG Waugh. SSG Morgan was partially recovered and placing machine gun fire into the enemy position. I ran out and tried to pick up MSG Waugh, who had by now been wounded four times in his right foot. I tried to pick him up, but I was unable to do so. I was shot slightly in the back of my leg as I ran for cover.

“By this time CPT Bronson had gotten a flight of F4’s. They started to drop bombs on the enemy. I ran out again, and this time was shot in the wrist but I was able to pick up MSG Waugh and carried him fireman style, in a hail of automatic weapon fire, to safety. I called for a MEDEVAC for MSG Waugh. When the MEDEVAC came, I carried MSG Waugh about 200 yards up over a hill. As I put MSG Waugh on the helicopter, SFC Reinburg got off the ship and ran down to where the 883rd company was located. He was shot through the chest almost immediately. I ran to where he was and gave him first aid. With SSG Morgan’s help, I pulled him to safety.

“The enemy again tried to overrun our position. I picked up the nearest weapon and started to fire. I was also throwing grenades. I killed about six or seven. I was then ordered to take the troops I had and leave. I informed the colonel in the C&C ship that I had one wounded American and one American I didn’t know the status of. I informed the colonel that I would not leave until I got all the Americans out. SFC Reinburg was MEDEVACed out. The fighting continued until mid-afternoon. We could not get the company we had to fight. The enemy tried to overrun our position two more times. We finally got reinforcements, and with them I was able to go out and get SP4 Brown who lay out in the middle of the field some fourteen hours from the start until the close of the battle.”
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