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Mike Drop

MAC-V SOG in Vietnam: Silent Movement, Supply Route Ambushes, and the Night FOB 4 Was Overrun | Ep. 289 | Pt. 2

Mike Drop

Mike Ritland

News, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Politics

4.96.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2026

⏱️ 97 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Vietnam War veteran and former MACV-SOG operator Travis Mills shares raw, firsthand accounts from his time with the elite Studies and Observations Group. He details the extreme challenges of small-team reconnaissance insertions deep into enemy territory, the silent movement techniques essential for survival against overwhelming odds, high-risk missions blocking North Vietnamese supply routes, a harrowing first recon extraction under fire using McGuire rigs, and his intense personal experience surviving the devastating sapper attack on FOB 4 at Marble Mountain on August 23, 1968. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.6

Usually only two Americans would go to the field at a time. Sometimes you'd take all three, but most of the time you would only take two.

0:40.8

And then you would normally a team would you'd take six people, two Americans, four in

0:49.0

gauge.

0:50.4

And the reason for that is that can be put in and taken out with one helicopter.

0:57.8

Because by the time you go in, you land two helicopters in a spot,

1:02.0

and there's not that many spots to land in the middle of the jungle over in Laos.

1:08.0

Everybody in 10 miles knows where you're at.

1:10.7

Yeah, yeah.

1:11.4

So, and we had techniques to try to camouflage while we were putting in.

1:18.2

But with that, only six people, you could get them in and out on just one helicopter.

1:35.9

And we had techniques to confuse that now if you had a special mission like if you had a wiretap mission and you had to take in wiretap

1:43.0

equipment and and all kinds of other things,

1:46.6

you might, you might take in more people and you may have to go in with two helicopters.

1:54.6

Yeah. But what you would do in a situation like that is you would pick an LZ probably

2:00.7

quite a bit further away from the

2:04.9

area where you were going to put the wiretap in than you normally would if

2:09.9

you were just putting in a team so that you could spend possibly two days to

...

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