Vietnam’s Secret Commandos Remain Lonely Comrades

They volunteered for many reasons. Patriotism. Loneliness. Boredom.

But they stayed for different ones. The thrill of living an inch from death. The camaraderie of belonging to a clandestine war machine. The inability to live a normal life.

Somewhere along the Ho Chi Minh trail, something in these secret soldiers crossed over. They hadn’t quite “gone native” and entered a foreign culture. But they were gone, nonetheless. To them, no one else in the Vietnam War had seen what they’d seen, done what they’d done, killed like they’d killed.

An estimated 10,000 servicemen volunteered for Special Operations covert missions. They were trained saboteurs and adrenaline junkies who slipped behind enemy lines to kidnap combatants, wiretap communication lines and ambush North Vietnamese Army platoons.

Thirty years later, at a tired hotel in downtown Las Vegas, a security guard stands outside the annual reunion of the Special Operations Assn. Behind the door are 600 ex-warriors trapped in time.

Some are old men now--shrunken, graying grandfathers still struggling to fit in a world they don’t much like. Others pump iron, jump out of planes, bag impalas in Tanzania and wear jeans so tight you could read the date on a quarter in their back pocket.

Beneath a lot of bravado and a lot of bitterness are isolated and suspicious men. The best years of their lives occurred a generation ago.

“Basically, we trust only each other,” said Tommy Daniels, a retired Army major who pulled two Special Operations tours, mostly in South Vietnam. He’s never had a flashback, never had a nightmare and was never afraid in Southeast Asia, he says matter-of-factly.

These men play it close to the vest. They don’t like telling civilians about their pasts. Many can’t even explain it to their wives.

If you weren’t there, you don’t know.

So last month, as they have for more than two decades, they assembled to tell war story upon war story in a garish ballroom where cigarette smoke hung like cloud cover and the bar opened well before noon.

Many belonged to SOG, a top-secret Special Operations program obtusely named the Studies and Observations Group. Their members included Green Berets, Air Force Air Commandos and Navy SEALs. With money funneled by the CIA, they recruited mercenaries from indigenous Southeast Asian tribes, including the fierce but backward Montagnard hill people.

Theirs was an unpopular war, one that shredded the social fabric of this country. Most Americans had never even heard of the former French colony called Vietnam. Though the Cold War was thawing, fear was not. Many believed communists could rule the world by toppling country after country--the so-called domino theory.

Military officials saw South Vietnam, a third-world jungle on the opposite side of the planet, as the newest teetering tile. The Vietnamese Army was overrunning its newly independent southern neighbor. Communism also was seeping into nearby Laos and Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese were expert guerrillas and attacked not only from home, but from secret bases in Cambodia and Laos, where a 1962 treaty banned foreign soldiers.

So SOG men, leading small teams of indigenous tribesmen, slipped across borders and delighted in tormenting the enemy in its own backyard.

They waged unconventional war, just like their armed foes. And they loved playing head games. One favorite was tucking fake letters from home into the uniforms of dead enemy soldiers. The notes were worn and well creased, as if read countless times, and told of food shortages and dwindling supplies. The war, it appeared, was on the verge of being lost.

Another SOG trick was “surfing,” broadcasting veiled propaganda just a hair away on the radio dial from a real North Vietnamese station, making listeners think they’d tuned to regular programming.

Each Special Operations soldier recalls the missions in his own way, some in anger; many with raucous, gallows humor; others with heart-stopping flatness, like the veteran in Las Vegas who told of leading a unit of mercenaries. One was an addict. “The third time he showed up whacked, we hung him. No more drug problem.”

It is spoken with blunt sincerity, but the story’s veracity is impossible to prove. It would never have been written down. And military records for these secret maneuvers were sketchy--if they were kept at all.

There are walls of braggadocio and bitterness surrounding many of these men. But, away from their war buddies, the facades can crumble.

Out tumbles a quiet and heartfelt chronicle of who has committed suicide, who has died of cancer and who is teetering on the edge.

At the reunion, Daniels sat behind a table selling native bracelets made by the Montagnards. He still returns to Southeast Asia to help villagers dig wells and begin small businesses.

He landed in Vietnam in 1967, a retired general’s son, a bored young man who wanted to see history.

“You didn’t have time to be afraid,” Daniels said. “You couldn’t show fear. You’re trying to convince people to kill other people and they might die themselves.”

How did he escape nightmares and flashbacks and fear?

“A counselor once said to me, ‘You’ve just got some really unusual defense mechanisms.’ ”

But he does not block his affection for the tribespeople he left behind.

When the U.S. officially pulled out of Southeast Asia, the Montagnards were forced to fend for themselves, much like the Hmong villagers in northern Laos who secretly fought for the CIA. Thousands of both were killed by invading communists.

Daniels now wants to move to Cambodia. His plans include breeding explosive-sniffing dogs in a country where the world’s highest number of land mines has already maimed two generations.

“I live in the present,” Daniels says. But the past is close.

“With us it just seems like yesterday, but it was 30-something years ago.”

Bob Donoghue doesn’t forget either. Nor does he turn his back on the Bru tribesmen he trained and lived with during the war.

From his home in Springfield, Mass., he helps run the Cedar Point Foundation, which delivers medical supplies to Vietnamese villagers.

Now a cop, Donoghue pays for his trips by working overtime.

Beer in hand, encircled by old cronies, Donoghue is all bluster and crude jokes. Behind glasses, his eyes dart from face to face, as if looking for confirmation that he is one of the boys.

But later, in a corner of the reunion ballroom, he tells of enlisting fresh out of high school, of hitting Vietnam in 1965, of eventually entering the Army Special Forces, and then SOG, after being trained as a weapons specialist.

He can dismantle and reassemble almost anything, he says, from an AK-47 to an Uzi. His behind-the-lines missions included “counting trucks and enemy units” for military intelligence.

He doesn’t pretend he wasn’t scared witless.

“It still screws me up thinking about it 30 years later,” he said. “There were 500,000 troops in Vietnam but there were just a handful of us. People don’t understand what we did.”

His eyes mist and he looks away. “It helps to talk about it, but these guys are the only ones who can really understand,” he says. “There’s not a day that goes by that the word Vietnam doesn’t come up in my house. And it drives my wife crazy.”

When he came home in 1968, he was skin and bones. He had endured malaria and had been wounded in a grenade attack. He was dogged by memories of steaming jungles where cascading sweat saturates fatigues and fuels anger and fear.

“I was 22,” Donoghue said. “All my friends were running around driving cars and chasing girls, and I was out in the jungle running around getting shot at and killing people.”

Back in America, “I said the proper thing to do was just forget about it. But I couldn’t.”

So he joined the reserves. In 1997 he finally resigned from the Special Forces National Guard, but only because he was seriously injured when a downdraft during a parachute drop slammed him to earth.

It was a rude awakening to middle age.

“Most of us thought we were infallible,” he said.

It takes a certain soldier to believe that.

For years, the government denied SOG’s existence. Only recently has its paperwork been declassified--what remains, anyway. Some records had already been destroyed.

Not long ago, government officials conceded that SOG’s military history was deliberately withheld from the Pentagon Papers, Washington’s chronicle of the Vietnam War.

SOG soldiers suffered greatly. Some years, its casualty rate was 100%, according to those left. Robert McNamara, Defense secretary at the time, wrote in his 1995 memoir that SOG’s early missions--dropping South Vietnamese spies behind enemy lines--were “essentially worthless.”

“Most of the South Vietnamese agents sent into North Vietnam were either captured or killed,” McNamara wrote. “One might well ask, ‘If so, then why were the operations continued?’ The answer is that the South Vietnamese government saw them as a relatively low-cost means of harassing North Vietnam . . . .”

Such statements are part of the reason for the old soldiers’ palpable distrust of the government. They also don’t care for the media.

Their animosity was scorching during a reunion panel about last year’s Operation Tailwind report by CNN and Time magazine.

It asserted that SOG illegally used sarin gas against villagers and its own men during a Laos mission called Operation Tailwind. The story was retracted amid vehement military denials and allegations of shoddy reporting. A flurry of libel suits and countersuits followed.

“Right now, the only thing that mass America knows about SOG is that we’re the people who used sarin gas,” seethed retired Maj. John Plaster, who wrote “SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam.”

One of the men’s biggest beefs with the Pentagon is a belief that U.S. prisoners of war and those missing in action were overlooked because the presence of American soldiers in Laos violated an international treaty. Seventy-six Special Operations soldiers who served in Laos remain unaccounted for, according the Defense Department.

Official efforts to locate them and others missing in Southeast Asia didn’t begin until 1988, when the Department of Defense POW and Missing Personnel office began visiting U.S. military crash sites after obtaining the host country’s permission.

“I’m not saying that what was done in the past was bad or good,” said the office’s Lucien Edmonds. “I wasn’t even there. But we are doing everything we can to account for these unaccounted for.”

Plaster estimates that 2,000 SOG men served in Vietnam. At least 300 were killed, he said. Nearly all were wounded.

A man who completed 15 missions was mocking fate, Plaster wrote in his book. “Twenty, and it was hard to explain why he was still alive.”

Plaster pulled 22.

Some couldn’t quit. Ordinary life was too boring. “The more missions you accumulated, the harder it was to stop,” he said.

Downstairs from the reunion, in a quiet coffee shop off the casino floor, Plaster tried to explain the men upstairs. And himself.

“They are the best people I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. “There’s not many people in this life who would genuinely give their life for yours.

“The only respect we had was from each other. We were never recognized.”