All of us met these requirements, but there was still a special aptitude test, the recruiter explained.Ĭould I be a Green Beret? The Green Berets were gods. To be considered for Special Forces, the recruiter explained, you had to be a qualified paratrooper, with an intelligence test score high enough to attend officer candidate school, and meet the Army’s highest physical fitness standard. Unlike any other job in the Army-such as an infantryman or military policeman-you could not enlist to be a Green Beret. My neighborhood buddies had had enough training-I was the only one of them to go with twenty-five other Airborne students to listen to the Special Forces sergeant. Afterward, he addressed us anyone interested in volunteering for Special Forces could meet with him that evening. He just stood there, watching our company while we underwent morning exercises. One morning, in our final week of Jump School, a rugged figure in a green beret appeared. Descending gracefully onto the Fort Benning drop zone among those billowing canopies, I forgot about all the harrassment and physical agony. Then we got our great payoff-we jumped from airplanes, just like the World War II paratroopers we’d grown up admiring. We expected none.Īll that running and calisthenics later enabled us Camp Crockett graduates to skate through Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia, while most Airborne trainees struggled and one quarter washed out.
Our trainers, themselves Vietnam Airborne veterans, cut no slack. Soon we found ourselves running five miles each morning in heavy jump boots, followed by hours of physical exercise. In addition to lots of instruction on patrolling, weapons, and small unit tactics, we underwent tough physical training. There, in a cluster of Quonset huts called Camp Crockett, we trained to be Airborne-Infantrymen, bound for Vietnam and elite units, such as the 173rd Airborne Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, and the 1st Air Cavalry. Along with several gung ho classmates, I followed the latter course, enlisting for Airborne-Infantry-paratroopers.Īfter Basic Training that sweltering summer at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, we were shipped to the pine forests of Fort Gordon, Georgia. In blue-collar, northeast Minneapolis, it was assumed that you served your country the only question was whether you waited to be drafted for two years, or enlisted for three, choosing what you wanted to do. Like many young men graduating high school in 1967, I went directly into the Army, much as our father’s generation had done during World War II. In the “gripping” ( Publishers Weekly) Secret Commandos, John Plaster vividly describes these unique warriors who gave everything fighting for their country-and for each other. This is the dramatic, page-turning true story of that team’s dedication, sacrifice, and constant fight for survival. Ten entire teams disappeared and another fourteen were annihilated. Although their chief mission was disrupting the main North Vietnamese supply route into South Vietnam, SOG commandos also rescued downed helicopter pilots and fellow soldiers, and infiltrated deep into Laos and Cambodia to identify bombing targets, conduct ambushes, mine roads, and capture North Vietnamese soldiers for intelligence purposes.Īlways outnumbered, they matched wits in the most dangerous environments with an unrelenting foe that hunted them with trackers and dogs. Short for “Studies and Operations Group,” it was a secret operations force in Vietnam, the most highly decorated unit in the war. Plaster recalls his remarkable covert activities as a member of a special operations team during the Vietnam War in a “comprehensive, informative, and often exciting…account of an important part of the overall Vietnam tragedy” ( The New York Times).īefore there were Navy SEALs, there was SOG.