The general idea was he joined because he thought he was going to be drafted anyways. While he was in he went for any and all training he could and went airborne. When he got to Nam he was in a line company for a while and he said it scared him to death because they were a huge lumbering, noisy beast. So he joined, or was sort of volunteered, for the LRRPs. They started as recon but as the war moved on they realized they could get some serious body counts by being kill teams with helicopter gunship back up. They would roam around and find someone to attack or ambush and hopefully survive by calling in gunships. Very hairy shit that.

He has some great stories. Like the Captain, who had no fear at all, he had to follow because he carried the radio. The 105mm booby trap he set off. The time they were chased until dark by a huge mass of Men. Great stories. If you are so inclined you could skip to the parts where he gets to Vietnam but I enjoyed his whole story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdUpzpIjJLg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q88wSZAWtgE

To a degree, I think that the real story of history is never, ever recorded–Mostly because those that do, do not write, and those that write, do not do. It’s a rare man who is engaged in things, and who has the temperament to analyze, record, and preserve the facts of a situation or an organization.

I think that we’ve missed out on an entire discipline, akin to anthropology, one that addresses things like organization and “how things are done”. There are some academics who study these things, but there’s no overall appreciation for the realities that go on around us, even down at the lowest, most simplistic levels.

And, because we don’t study these things, we’re not very good at them, and we don’t have a proper framework to evaluate things. It’s all informal “folk-wisdom” and “common sense”, which is so damn rare as to be something which really should be classified as a legitimate super-power.

I have had the same conversation with Kirk on several forums about the lessons in mine proofed vehicles in Africa vs, the stubborn ignorance of same in the west. SIGH….

SOG missions most of which betrayed by a South Vietnamese officer who worked for the NVA. Gave away a lot. Even when success rate of SOG missions poor the operations continued. A poor way to do things.

They had to. The extensive use of tear gas (CN) in both powder and gas form necessitated them having them on hand. The agents were used mainly in tunnel warfare, and the guys on missions where they were going into VC or NVA base camp areas had to be prepared to deal with interdicting those, which meant… Protective masks. There were two main ways they’d do it, one of which was a powder that would get dumped into the tunnels, and the other would be either grenades thrown in ventilation shafts or, on some occasions, pumped in using special gasoline-powered combustors for the same form of CN they’d use in confidence training in gas chambers. You’d find the tunnel network’s ventilation shafts, and then pump the stuff in until the VC or NVA came out. Which was why the tunnels came with sumps, water chambers, and all sorts of other interesting features.

There’s a Rand Report out there that details all the sophisticated crap the enemy was doing with the tunnels, and some of it was just… Nuts. The poor bastards who had to do tunnel rat duty were some really brave and unfortunate souls.