MACV-SOG & A $20 Million Raid

We’re in the countdown to the October 7 release of Jack Carr’s Cry Havoc.

Just before the Tet Offensive changes the dynamic in Vietnam, before President Johnson announces he will not run for reelection, before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, as riots and protests rage across the nation, a spy ship, the USS Pueblo, is captured by communist forces off the coast of North Korea. The crew thought they had destroyed everything of intelligence value. They were wrong.

As a KGB “illegal” elicits information from a high-ranking CIA official, and teams of special operators infiltrating into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam disappear without a trace, an ambitious Soviet advisor launches an ingenious plan with consequences that reach far beyond the battlefields of Southeast Asia, one that will forever alter the world balance of power.

Tom Reece, a SEAL operator attached to the highly classified and shadowy MACV-SOG is about to be thrust into a bloody battle to discover the truth.

From the Kremlin to the White House, from the streets of Saigon to the rugged A Shau Valley, along the paths of Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the secret war in Laos, Navy SEAL Tom Reece has an official mission assigned by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group, but it’s his unofficial mission that might get him killed.

Ace warrior John Stryker Meyer offers a primer on MACV-SOG, the shadow war outfit that ran recon and interdiction operations “across the fence” in denied areas like Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. This was the deadliest kind of irregular warfare, with roots that run deep in Frontier Partisan history, right back to the kind of deep penetration operations conducted by Kenton”s Boys and Captain Sam Brady’s Rangers on the Ohio Valley Frontier.

 

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One of the most successful raids in during the American Civil War was conducted in by Confederate Cherokee cavalry in cooperation with a contingent of Texans. The Second Battle of Cabin Creek occurred in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) on September 19, 1864.

The Confederates, led by Cherokee Brig. General Stand Watie and Texans under the command of Brig. General Richard Gano, hit a Federal supply train in the wee hours, routing the Union troops and capturing 130 wagons loaded with all kinds of supplies, along with 740 mules. The value was estimated at $1 million — which translates to roughly $75 million in 2025 dollars. That is a big score.

The victory and the supplies it garnered kept Watie in the field until June 1865; he was the last Confederate field officer to surrender. The raid, however, had no strategic impact on the course of the war.

In a notorious incident before the battle, the Cherokees and Texans fell upon a contingent of Union hay-cutters — Black troopers from a Kansas outfit — and nearly wiped them out. There were accusations that the Confederates killed many of the Black troopers after they had surrendered.

Steven Warren, who wrote a book on the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, dug up a pic of a fine hunting shirt of the type worn by Cherokee fighters during the Civil War. It’s a thing of beauty and an item of Continuity & Persistence. Such hunting shirts were common frontier attire (though not always so fine) for a century.