War in the Shadows

MAAG are a group of American military advisers sent to other countries to assist in the training of conventional armed forces and facilitate military aid, most famously in the Vietnam War.

There were no other units in Vietnam like the LRRPs. In fact, you probably had to go back to the American Revolution and the Civil War to find small units fighting a guerrilla war in enemy territory. There were some people who figured out right away that to fight this enemy we needed to put small, highly mobile reaction forces on the ground. To this end Colonel David Hackworth helped organize two volunteer platoons that they called Tiger Forces. These patrols consist of specially trained personnel capable of performing reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition within the dispatching unit's area of interest. Their goals: Track em, find em, and kill em. There were only thirteen independently operating LRRP (later Ranger) units in the whole country. There was no central command and control structure; they were only responsible to whatever command issued their orders.

The Phoenix Program was designed to identify and neutralize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had neutralized 81,740 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters, of whom between 26,000 and 41,000 were killed. The Studies and Observation Group was the largest project of its kind and its personnel were engaged in all aspects of the war. It had its critics, military and civilian, who felt its people were "undisciplined, wild-eyed Army Special Forces people who believed that the whole of Southeast Asia could be conquered by a handful of Green Berets.

This is the story of the last years of American involvement in Vietnam, 1973-1975, and the fall of Saigon. This episode also includes a detailed account of the little known Operation Lam Son 719.