Sog

Gene Hanratty has been a friend and colleague for 10 years now. He said this book was the best description of his role in the Vietnam War and that he knows a lot of the guys written about in this book. I'd like to learn more about what he went through in the war.

SOG was a very interesting book. Heartbreaking at times, but a good and important book. It helped shift some of my thoughts on the Vietnam War. SOG stands for Special Operations Group and highlights the role of a group of courageous men tasked with secret combat missions in South Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Most of the action centered around the Ho Chi Minh Trail that supplied the North Vietnamese Army with arms and supplies in South Vietnam. The trail ran through Laos (not widely known at the time).

This book covered a lot of the people involved, the combat missions, and the black propaganda/psychological warfare. The level of courage of these soldiers was quite astonishing, especially since they were usually outnumbered somewhere between 150 and 600 to 1. I knew nothing about SOG before reading this book, so this was very eye-opening.