Vietnam Missions

Discover the untold story of MACV-SOG, the most elite and secretive special operations unit of the Vietnam War, in this gripping historical account that uncovers missions shrouded in secrecy, courage, and controversy. From the dense jungles of Vietnam to the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail, Shadows in the Jungle plunges you into the clandestine world of America’s Studies and Observations Group (SOG). These were the warriors who fought a hidden war—executing daring cross-border missions, deep reconnaissance, and high-risk sabotage operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. With ...

In 1968, George Lanigan leaves the University of Maryland and sets off on the journey of his life. He volunteers to serve his country in the Vietnam War and enlists in the army where he becomes an elite Special Forces advisor in a top-secret program. The United States is clandestinely training the Cambodian Army, Forces Armees Nationales Khmeres, and Lanigan is at the heart of the mission. In this personal memoir, LTC George R. Lanigan, USA (Retired), adapts his forty-year-old letters and correspondence to his parents into an emotionally compelling and suspenseful narrative that relates his...

This book tells the story of the Teams operating out of FOB2 Kontum, near the tri-border area, in 1968-69. From recon missions over the fence to the heroic, and sometimes fatal efforts undertaken to try and rescue missing SOG members, the events are told through the words of the men themselves, supported by previously unreleased official documents.

Rescue in the Valley of the Tigers tells the exciting true story of a life-saving mission mounted by a small group of daring young Americans determined to give the gift of freedom to inhabitants of a remote mountain village. Deep within enemy territory, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army had held and used the villagers as slaves for more than eight years. The story exemplifies the characteristically American traits of resourcefulness, integrity and courage that demonstrate the true nature of those who represented our country on the Vietnam battlefield.

The colonel is worth more alive than they are. Command doesn't say that. The math does. Cambodia, 1967. A facility fourteen kilometers across the border that the United States officially does not know about. A Chinese signals intelligence station three months from intercepting every American tactical radio transmission in the Central Highlands. And one man who can explain it all — Colonel Dao Vinh Loc, guarded by a hundred and thirty NVA regulars in a valley the team's intelligence sergeant marks on the overlay in red block letters: KILL BOX. Captain Decker and Recon Team Massai get the ...

This is the incredible true story of a brave military unit in Vietnam that risked everything to rescue an outnumbered troop under heavy fire-and the 39-year odyssey to recognize their bravery.

The mission was a lie. The extraction was a trap. The only way out is forty kilometers of jungle no map will admit exists. Laos, March 1969. Staff Sergeant Cal Rourke has signed a lot of paperwork in fourteen months of running recon for MACV-SOG. Only one form keeps him awake — the death certificate of a scout he left behind on a burning LZ. So when a civilian liaison officer hands him a seven-day reconnaissance tasking across the border, Rourke takes it. Routine target. Priority extraction. Clean edges. Then his team walks into a burned village that isn't on any map, with cooked-off ...

The true story of the U.S. Army’s 240th Assault Helicopter Company and a Green Beret Staff Sergeant's heroic mission to rescue a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War, from New York Times bestselling author Eric Blehm. On May 2, 1968, a twelve-man Special...

Eight years ago, Thomas Cord made the only call he could make. He waited forty-five seconds at the extraction point in Laos, listening to static where Ray Decker's voice should have been. Then the helicopter lifted, and Cord spent the next eight years certain that his decision had killed his best man. He was wrong. When a Laotian refugee surfaces with a detailed description of an American prisoner in a limestone complex north of Ban Nakai Neua — including a scar on his right hand that only four men on earth would recognize — Cord stops being certain about anything. Now it's 1980. Cord ...

From the #1 Amazon bestselling author of Shadows in the Jungle: MACV-SOG's Secret War in Vietnam, a new entry in the Those Who Served series. "The knock usually came after midnight, when villages were at their quietest and the boundary between public life and private fear was thinnest. In a settlement outside Da Nang in 1969, a schoolteacher named Tran Van Loc was taken from his home by men who did not wear standard uniforms. Some were South Vietnamese officials. One was American. They carried a list, and his name appeared on it. Whether that name had been placed there on the basis of ...

Six hours after the team crossed the fence, their own grid called the airstrike down on them. March 1971. A MACV-SOG recon team slips into the Laotian panhandle under total radio silence. Six hours later, American ordnance lands on the exact coordinates they were assigned — coordinates only their own command could have known. Master Sergeant Colton Harlan walks out. Most of his men don't. The official story is friendly fire. Harlan knows it was an execution. Working off a single intercepted transmission and a list of seven names, Harlan and his Montagnard partner Minh begin pulling a ...

Is Lynn Dai Bouchet a Vietcong spy, as his CIA boss claims, or does she truly love him? When Army sniper Duff Coleridge is recruited to assist the Vietnamese Special Police, he little realizes how much of his soul he will sacrifice. Recruited by a rogue American advisor, Duff finds the moral lines he has learned back in Melody Hill are blurred in the glare of the enigmatic Vietnam War. His CIA boss sells arms on the black market while delivering arbitrary and ruthless ‘justice’ to the local populace. When Duff meets and falls in love with a Vietnamese woman, Lynn Dai Bouchet, he must ...

“A GRIPPING CLASSIC. Exhaustively researched, The Hunter Killers puts you directly into a Wild Weasel fighter cockpit during the Vietnam War. Dan Hampton lets you feel it for yourself as no one else could.”--Colonel LEO THORSNESS, Wild Weasel pilot and Medal of Honor recipient At the height...

Nineteen days from going home. One night over the Trail. And somewhere on the ridge below, a man with a missile is counting the seconds of their orbit. February 1971. While Lam Son 719 burns on the ground, the AC-130 gunships of the 16th Special Operations Squadron own the night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Major Coltrane has flown 211 missions in the left-bank orbit, the slow circle that turns a cargo plane into the deadliest truck killer in Southeast Asia. He knows the geometry cold. He knows his crew better. What he doesn't know is that intelligence got it wrong. The threat marked with a ...

The 1972 Easter Offensive was a four-prong attack into South Vietnam. An Loc astride Highway 13 from Cambodia to Saigon was a strategic target from the North Vietnamese Army. A handful of US Army Advisors were determined to deny this prize to the North Vietnamese Army that came at them in the form of three divisions. Rallying the South Vietnamese defenders, they would curtail all attempts to seize this strategically important town. The Battle of An Loc presents the actions of the battle in the sequence they occurred and credits those that fought there. The conversations are what would have ...

As a UH-1C gunship platoon leader and pilot in Vietnam, I can highly recommend Roger’s book. Primarily because while dozens of books have been written by pilots who flew in Vietnam, few have been written by crew chiefs who were as critical to mission success as the pilots and whose duties were not only varied but arguably more interesting.

A Soldier’s Life That Crosses Decades, Wars, And Impossible Decisions Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1954, Edward Zobrist never imagined his fifty-year military and corporate career would take him from the jungles of Vietnam to Cold War operations, from the Fall of Saigon to Iraq’s post-war reconstruction. Crossing Lines is not just another war memoir — it’s a rare, true story of military leadership, personal sacrifice, and courage during some of the most defining moments in modern American history. Inside This Powerful Vietnam War Biography, You’ll Experience: Decades of global ...

Echoes Above the Jungle: A Pilot’s Journey Through Vietnam is a gripping, haunting memoir that pulls readers into the cockpit of a Chinook helicopter, revealing the harrowing, adrenaline-fueled life of a combat pilot during one of America’s most brutal wars. For David "D.J." Collier, the Vietnam War was a world unto itself—a landscape of dense jungles, winding rivers, and silent mountains that became both ally and enemy. With raw authenticity and razor-sharp detail, Collier recounts the missions that pushed him to the edge: extracting troops under heavy fire, navigating impossible ...

During the Vietnam War, far from the halls of Congress, snooping reporters, loving family members, and conventional US military forces in South Vietnam, a deadly, top-secret war was conducted for eight years across the fence in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam by small Green Beret-led reconnaissance teams.

For this mission, they’ll risk their lives. For each other, they’ll risk their hearts. Buddy Rider's little Cessna spotter aircraft was shot down twice over the jungles of Vietnam, and ten years later he’s flying crop dusters for a living while tinkering with an old WWII transport aircraft. He avoids the painful memories of the war, the bad times, and the loss of friends, until a young woman comes to his aircraft hangar in search of him. Elizabeth Anderson is a lay nun dedicated to aiding the helpless, and her immediate task is to rescue fellow missionaries and orphans trapped in war-...