TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

War in the Provinces
Small Wars Manual, which was clear and direct. You were
meant to understand it. In I­Corps, particularly, there was a
secret layer. Of it you were intended to understand
nothing. It was always opaque, always indirect.
The biggest secret was the Studies and Observations
Group (SOG) (with aliases in abundance) which was the
largest (19k) single combat unit in Vietnam. DaNang was
thick with them. You may have seen their name on a TAOR
map, stuck out toward West Vietnam, but if you saw them,
you never knew. They’d lie. Did anyone think the army
units outside the wire at Khe Sanh in Lang Vai were kindly
fellows out helping the missionaries with downtrodden
Nung and Bru tribesmen? If you didn’t, you spotted the
lie.
When Henry the K wanted to re­arrange the political
landscape in Vietnam, he often had to do it with the lights
out. An entirely secret war. That meant a lot of pushing and
shoving got left to a variety of regular sounding units with
irregular missions. Province Reconnaissance units come to
mind, and at least we saw them. The big dog in the secret
war, however, was SOG, and while we saw them, we didn’t
know it. SOG reached far into “West Vietnam” as well s
north. Way north. Hanoi’s reference to “pirates” wasn’t
their typical jargon, it was SOG’s navy, nightly chewing up
Hanoi’s coastal supply­shipping.
The other half was left to Air. “Air war,” meant more
than yelling into the radio: You’re cleared hot. What
happened north of the DMZ was, understandably, a single,
rolling campaign – going on, and on, and on. Missions over
Hanoi, however, compared in few ways to Marine close­air
support. To characterize it all as the Air War fails to convey
the difficulty and dangers of real close air­support – the
Marine fixed­wing variety or, say, CH­46’s extracting a
recon team off some remote mountaintop in the middle of
the night, or hauling arty rounds into Khe Sanh, or pulling
Pete out of the jungle, or – worst of all – sitting in a downed
CH­46 in the A Shau Valley with Bill McBride, prayerfully
asking for something more in defense than his six men.
Air war could mean a lot of different things, but
thankfully for us it always meant Marines overhead. (And
vice­versa.)
***
The one place confusion stood aside was the War at Sea.
You can view all of it that actually mattered by looking at
Yankee Station through a straw.
***
There were a lot of moving parts – lots of obscure layers – to
the events of ‘67. Look back and it sure might seem that
lieutenants of Company C saw a far different war than that
which was reflected by battle streamers on unit colors. The
accompanying words on unit citations were truthful, but
dry, colorless. Reality had color: blood­red.
Even with a lieutenant’s view – bottom up and fuzzy
– what you could trust, then and now, was who you lined up
alongside. You didn’t always need to see past that. On that
we were very lucky.
Blessed, even.
A‐9