| Submit your comments on this article |
| Southeast Asia |
| Guns, Guts, and Glory on the Sơn Tây Raid |
| 2025-11-04 |
| By Warren Gray [SOFREP] On a moonlit run into North Vietnam on November 21, 1970, Bull Simons and 56 Green Berets hit Son Tay with surgical violence, found the cells empty, and left the nearby Secondary School littered with bodies that looked a lot more like Chinese advisors than local NVA, a truth the official record preferred to bury. The most dangerous, complex, and sensitive, large-scale effort of the Vietnam War was Operation Kingpin, the clandestine, Special Forces raid on the Sơn Tây prison camp early on Saturday morning, November 21, 1970, at Sơn Tây, North Vietnam, just 23 miles northwest of the capital city of Hanoi. The official purpose of the raid was to rescue an estimated 61 American prisoners of war (POWs), and a massive Joint Contingency Task Group (JCTG) of 219 men from the U.S. Army and Air Force was assembled. An initial planning phase, Operation Ivory Coast, began on August 8, 1970, at a secret CIA training facility at Eglin Air Force Base’s Duke Field in Florida. Aside from the prison camp itself, however, there was a “Secondary School” located about 500 yards to the south, believed to be some type of military barracks, housing an estimated 50 to 200 extra soldiers. These two objectives were both located very near the 12th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, with up to 12,000 troops stationed within five miles, so the raid would have to be executed very quickly, before substantial reinforcements could arrive. A complicating factor was the presence of approximately 50,000 communist Chinese troops in North Vietnam since 1968, 2,000 of whom were later listed as combat casualties, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping confessed in 1980 that, “Do you know the amount of help we gave to the Vietnamese in those years? 20 billion dollars!” According to former U.S. officials, ex-Special Forces officers, the Washington Post, and after-action reports from the mission itself, the Secondary School was believed to be staffed by Chinese Special Forces advisors and air defense troops. The darker side of the story was that several of our elite, MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group, more appropriately known as the “Special Operations Group”) secret reconnaissance teams (RTs) sent into Laos beginning in mid-1969 were compromised and wiped out to the last man, because the Chinese had broken our radio codes and sent special, “Headhunter” teams to kill them. Top-Secret, intelligence reporting allegedly traced these teams back to a military compound near Sơn Tây, the infamous “Secondary School,” because it had once served as an actual, civilian schoolhouse. If any of this information was true, it was extremely sensitive, since the targeted killing of American troops by anyone except North Vietnamese troops was quite illegal under all of the rules of international warfare. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Woodrow 2025-11-04 19:24 |