Warriors In Their Own Words | First Person War Stories · Evergreen Podcasts | The Honor Project

SOG Covert Task Force in Vietnam: From the Archive

·1 hr 10 min·2 clips

A Laos insert turned back when the team saw bunkers, elephant grass, and 11 bullet holes.

SOG carried an innocuous cover name. It was a covert joint-service task force that ran reconnaissance and guerrilla sabotage behind enemy lines. The six-man teams worked mostly in Cambodia and Laos, and they were built from American soldiers and specially recruited indigenous mountain natives from Southeast Asia. J.D. Bath was a SOG communications specialist. He begins with his year at the Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg, then his move to E Company, 3rd of the 7th, and then on to Vietnam. From there he went through 5th Group in Da Nang, then Cam Duc, then Khon Tum and Phu Bai, where he ended up on Team Nevada working as a commoman. The teams in Khon Tum were named after states, and he worked for a master sergeant named Reno. The whole setup has a hard, operational feel, built from call signs, posts, and whatever place the unit had to move to next. Bath's memory then turns to a descent that goes wrong fast. He comes down through tree limbs, gets thrown sideways, slapped in the face, and knocked back into free fall before finally getting his bearings. He ends up laid back around a tree under all his equipment, tries to check the dark with a little night device, and sees no lights and nobody moving toward him. He can hear a dog barking way off, so he starts cutting away suspension lines and other gear in the dark. He realizes he has cut a commo cable. Because he has been on wiretaps and knows those lines are heavily monitored, the mistake lands right away as serious. The enemy may know he is there now. A second problem follows. He finds the high-standard silence .22 pistol that had come loose from a bungee system on his reserve, and because his brain is still addled, he first takes it for an enemy gun pointed at him. The CAR-15 is still tied to him, which only makes the scene feel more trapped and tangled. The account stays inside that physical confusion instead of pulling back for commentary, and that keeps the danger immediate. By the end, the operation is not framed as a clean success. It is framed as getting out under the conditions that existed. The speaker says there had to be at least 100 NVA coming down that trail, and that the team was so close to them it is amazing they did not take heavier casualties. The story closes on that narrow margin, with survival described matter-of-factly rather than celebrated. The result is a first-person war narrative that lives in the mechanics of movement, the noise of equipment, and the speed at which a bad landing can turn into a much bigger problem.

As heard by us

A covert-war story built from gear, terrain, and field-level detail.

The episode presents SOG as a very deadly covert joint service task force and stays close to J.D. Bath, a communications specialist, as it moves through the practical side of the operation: team names, training, comms work, gear, and the hard geography of moving quietly behind…

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Why you'd press play

You want a covert SOG account from the man on comms.

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