https://www.sofmag.com/nva-general-t...alties-part-2/
I bought the book by John Stryker Meyer called "Across the Fence". About halfway through it now. I am familiar with SOG teams from other reading material like John Plaster's books. It is about MACV-SOG recon teams ("Spike Teams") running missions across the border into Laos and Cambodia.
In October of 1968 Spike Team Alabama ran a mission into Laos not far from the A Shau Valley. Unbeknown at the time they landed basically on top of an NVA division. Were looking for a regiment and found a division! It didn't go well as you might expect, 9 guys (3 Americans and 6 indigs) against a division. Something like 4 or 5 rescue aircraft were shot down and more heavily damaged, with 17 non-SOG personnel losing their lives in the process. It was so bad a "Bright Light" rescue mission was planned and then scrubbed due to the extremely heavy NVA resistance.
I am continually amazed at what those SOG guys did. Talk about "seat of your pants" missions! There were a number of teams over the years that simply "disappeared" in Laos and Cambodia. Inserted and then.....nothing, never heard from again. Ever. Scary as hell if you think about it. In 1968 alone they suffered a 100% casualty rate; every team member was either wounded (some more than once), killed, or missing. That is some no-joke shit right there for a military unit. They started recruiting from LRRP teams from regular Army units (doing similar missions but not "over the fence" and not with indigs) because the Special Forces School at Ft. Bragg wasn't able to crank out tabbed graduates fast enough to cover the casualty rates. They were able to attain a 500+:1 kill ratio, from doing it themselves or from the airstrikes supporting them.
You will be hard-pressed to find a unit in the U.S. military that suffered those levels of casualties and still killed so many enemy. Not to mention this was a sustained effort over the course of several years, not a one-time epic battle (which U.S. military history is replete with over the centuries).
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