Book Review

The 20th SOS Green Hornets USAF Vietnam War Volume 1
By Jim Burns, Ron Winkles, Charles Svoboda, Jason B. Collins
Published by Barnes & Noble Press, 12/15/2024
228 pages
Available for purchase in hardbound or paperback

By How Miller

Jason Collins has put together several books, including the Pucker Factor series, his powerful collection of action stories about MACV SOG, the super-secret group that ran operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Many of the stories are first-person accounts.

Almost all of MACV SOG’s missions included a strong component of air assets. Small, slow propeller-driven FAC planes did pre-mission area reconnaissance, communicated, and organized the other assets, such as Hueys and other unarmed “slicks” for infiltration and exfiltration, and a variety of armed aircraft, from helicopter gunships to propeller-driven “Spads” and jet-powered attack planes. The FACs, called “Covey,” each carried a very experienced Green Beret with them to help communicate with the teams on the ground. And there was constant coverage by a high-flying C130 for longer-range communications, Moonbeam by night and Hillsboro by day.

Although an ideal recon mission would involve insertion in the enemy’s area of operations, finding actionable intelligence, and getting back out without being detected, it very often did not go that way. When a team was discovered and came into enemy contact, they were often outnumbered by tens or hundreds to one. That’s when the whole array of assets got into the action. If a team could not be quickly extracted, then the enemy would need to be held at bay by those gunships. That kept everybody very busy. Once the team was extracted, then the gunships would let loose with everything they had at the enemy.

Needless to say, we could not have done our job without the very brave airmen who had our backs, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.

This book is a history of one of those collections of brave men who were the Air Force’s only Huey Helicopter unit whose full-time job was to support SOG, along with some search and rescue-type missions. The 20th SOS Green Hornets flew out of both Vietnam and Thailand. Jason starts with selections from then Top-Secret Project CHECO reports (Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations); one is dated 4 December 1968. They detailed the unit’s history, operations, and lessons learned. You can read a section from 1967–1969 in this issue of the Sentinel, beginning on the page following this review.

There are details on weapons and tactics used, followed by a couple of pictorial histories of 20th airmen. Jason has also allowed us to share one of the stories about an airman who found himself stuck on the ground with a SOG team led by legendary Jerry “Mad Dog” Shriver, called “Bird Down in Cambodia.” You will find it beginning on page 11. It is good to see the tale told from an airman’s perspective. Jerry and his dog Klaus show up elsewhere in the book too.

There is an account, typically with news clippings and photos of each man of the 20th SOS that was killed in action.

The one-time commander of CCS, who passed a year ago, LTC Fred Lindsey, wrote “Secret Green Beret Commandos in Cambodia,” detailing much of the action there. Often the only records were the award citations that typically gave the action’s location as “deep in enemy-controlled territory,” as most of the records were ordered destroyed before SOG shut down in 1972. There is a large section of this book that utilizes Fred’s information.

This is a tribute to brave men who are usually only mentioned when a SOG team got in trouble and regularly saved Green Beret asses. Jason does a very good job in honoring them in an entertaining way.