Joined:
May 2023
Posts:
774
EE: 0% (0)
WI, USA
Posted: Yesterday 10:13:34 AM EDT
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I was lucky enough to spend 3 college summers apprenticed to a (former) MACV-SOG army ranger with an engineering/demolitions specialization in the early 2000s. He was a big guy, so here, I'll call him Mt like a mountain. (I haven't talked with his family since he passed, and I don't want to overstep.) I had known Mt was Army/special forces in Vietnam as he was a family friend for some time. During the years I knew him, he had made references and told me some stories, the details of which largely avoided the more grisly details. At that time I had minimal interest in the military and military history, so I lacked context for many details, but the emotional impact was there. Only after Mt's death did I realize that starting with his Army/special forces training as a baseline, details in different stories repeatedly and independently added up to only one likely explanation: he served in MACV-SOG/CCN, and he had kept many key details quiet for most or all of his life. Other details he shared with those he felt comfortable talking with. I worked with Mt while he was quietly serving the world in his post-war life, a man who took all the combat engineering knowledge that the army taught him for war, and brought it home to eventually live a life as a protector of the next generation (as a father and a ranger at a BSA camp), of nature, and of an ancient sacred Native American mound. I recently found out Mt died last year when I tried to contact him to refresh my memory regarding hijinks of a particular hilariously incompetent group of volunteers when I was writing down some stories from those summers. Now, I am trying to write down more about him and his effect on me and my family, and those around him, as I saw and knew him. It will be about lessons and the comedy of working beside one of the most competent men of a generation while surrounded by oblivious not-for-profit bureaucracy, teenage camp staff, poorly behaved children, and civilian incompetence. It isn't focused on the war or his service, as many of those details he took with him, but I hope to weave in as much as I can. If there's enough there, I'll try to do something with what I all write down. As I looked back at the skills I learned from Mt (plumbing, welding, electrical work, landscaping, lumber jacking, masonry, rough carpentry, roofing project planning and more), I started remembering greater lessons (situational awareness, risk mitigation, human nature, dealing with bureaucracy, avoiding unnecessary conflicts, turning parties in conflict against each other to achieve our goals without either's interference ,and identifying who is in charge vs. who knows what's going on), I began to realize that my former boss's modus operandi and many lessons he taught me were not coming from a bitter, disillusioned Vietnam veteran with an admitted healthy dose of PTS, but rather from the point of view of one of the most elite operators and hyper-competent combat engineers his generation produced -- or any generation, for that matter -- who couldn't help but view this world of volunteers, campers, camp staff, and a detached front office with the same strategic analysis he learned in the military. Our day-to-day decisions on how we and with whom we interacted, how we set up our work site and shop environments and even how we chose routes and timing moving through camp -- all those routines and behaviors had more than an occasional air of tactical decision making, viewed in retrospect. Easy quick examples include adjusting a our garbage pickup route and times to avoid campers based on what camper group movements for the week, or to maneuvering me to jobs in camp locations where visiting council executives who were above me in the chain of command wouldn't go, denying them opportunity to assign me their pet-peeve random time-wasting tasks. He knew the terrain, trails, and roads well enough that the lines of sight at any location were ingrained in his memory, including compensating for seasonal changes. We often took routes to get a view of other areas on our way to a project site. Less surprisingly, he had the locations of all the buried utility lines (water, electrical, telecom), including defunct/abandoned lines memorized ... in a camp that was nearly a century old with dozens of buildings. How did I conclude he was MACV-SOG if he never explicitly told me? I've seen Mt's purple hearts, silver star, and various other ribbons and medals. Out of high school, he an athletic scholarship to UW, but when he became MLB prospect and was drafted into a farm team, he gave up his school career to try and play pro ball thus giving up his academic scholarship, and then he was drafted by the military. After boot camp he took all the education he could, focusing on engineering. During his work through those classes, he was selected for special forces training aiming him to become a combat engineer/demolitions. When Mt deployed to Vietnam, on paper he was listed as an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. In practice he was attached to a variety of units, both US and local, depending on his missions. In our limited conversations about his experiences, he described how, after a short time there, he developed a strong preference for solo mission execution, frequently leaving his less stealthy attached units behind in (relatively) safe locations while he completed missions, not wanting to jeopardize extra lives for no good reason. He talked about turning in his dog tags before missions. He talked about being in places the US officially were not. The silver star came when he rescued downed airmen behind enemy lines, and his superiors told him military politics capped the award at a silver star. I know he did solo recon along the Ho Chi Minh trail on many missions and handled covert demolitions missions. But the detail that stuck with me the most was this: after a particularly bloody period of firefights, Mt decided he had all the killing and death he could take at the time and needed to get his head back in the game. At whatever base he was at, he went to the quartermaster, requisitioned supplies for a bit over two weeks with the casual explanation he was doing recon and disappeared into the jungle toward enemy territory. Nobody questioned him or tried to stop him. His superiors, upon realizing he left without orders of any type, sent no one after him. He took a "vacation from the killing" by doing a couple weeks of solo recon on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When he returned with intel, he treated it like coming back from any recon mission, his only explanation to his superiors being that he needed a break from the death. And then things went on as normal. At the end of his first tour, Mt was able to negotiate signing for a second tour to ensure that a younger brother, whom he believed wasn't capable of handling the Vietnam experience, could avoid the draft and service. When Mt returned from the war, he dealt with the rejection common then from society for Vietnam vets. But here's the part that hits me the hardest: many of those who served MACV-SOG like my former boss lived in a world between worlds: they were neither grunts nor officers. Their experiences at home didn't align with officers, nor with most drafted personnel. If coming home to a world that didn't fully accept them was a waking nightmare for the average Vietnam vet, coming home for many MACV-SOG operators had to have been a new form of solitary hell. I learned more from working with one hiding-in-plain-sight MACV-SOG veteran for 3 summers than I learned from any professor, teacher, supervisor, boss, or minister. They say not to meet your heroes, but I had never had a hero until I met and worked with Mt. Here's to some of the most hyper-competent men this country ever produced, those who served in MACV-SOG, but especially the quiet ones: the many that disappeared beyond the lines whose stories we cannot hear, those left out in the cold in their own country after they returned, and those who quietly slid into peaceful, quiet jobs in an attempt to find normal lives upon their return. If any of you guys still out there happen to be reading this, here's to you, too. 
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I'm not lazy, I just really enjoy doing nothing.
Joined:
Mar 2019
Posts:
15316
EE: 100% (17)
USA
| That's a good story, but doesn't exactly add up to what is known about MACV-SOG operations. |
DeltaElite777: It's not enough to just para bellum. If you really vis pacem, you gotta convince any potential troublemaker that not only can you push their shit in Genghis Khan-style, but you will.
The things they did, with what they had, and with the moles among...incredible. 
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I'm glad the man had a good influence on you and I'm sorry for your loss. That said, I'm no expert but it sounds like you're using a healthy dose of frog DNA to get to the macv sog conclusion. And his stories of being an engineer that preferred leaving his slow guys behind to go complete missions on his own, whatever that means, doesn't sound true to me. I'll admit that before I joined the army, I completely believed a guy I worked with at a call center back in 06 that regaled me with stories of his recent exploits "in the sandbox" and how he was a sniper that, among other adventures, got stuck on a roof by himself and took 3 ak rounds to the stomach because he wasn't wearing his plates because they slowed him down and killed the guy with his knife. Looking back it's clear that at best he was a shit bird soldier that never really saw actual combat, but it's more likely he never even served. But with no other frame of reference, it all sounded perfectly credible to me. And I thought he was super cool. Which was likely the point. |
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