What NVA Officers Wrote The First Time They Saw a LRRP Patrol

January 31, 1968. Long Binh Post, eleven kilometers northeast of Saigon. One in the morning. The 274th and 275th Viet Cong Regiments had moved into position around the largest American base in South Vietnam. Their orders, written by the 5th Division staff weeks earlier, were specific. The PAVN 84A Artillery Regiment would fire approximately one hundred 82-millimeter mortar rounds and ninety 122-millimeter rockets into the Plantation Compound, the II Field Force headquarters. The ground assault would launch only after the rocket barrage reached a numerical threshold. The orders did not anticipate a six-man American team lying in a rubber plantation several hundred meters north of the wire, in greasepaint, with a radio, watching the regiments assemble. Twenty-seven hours later, 527 PAVN and Viet Cong soldiers were dead. Forty-seven were prisoners. Eleven Americans had been killed across the entire complex. The Viet Cong regimental commander, captured in the fighting north of the town of Ho Nai, told his interrogators what his written orders had been and why those orders had failed. He had been given them without knowing about Company F. The unit the 5th Division staff could not account for had been operating in Vietnam for sixteen months. Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. Pronounced "Lurp." Six men. Sometimes twelve. Inserted by helicopter, often after the insertion ship and the chase ship performed four fake drops in succession to disguise the real one. Extracted by McGuire rig, long ropes hanging from a Huey, when no landing zone existed. Sustained in the field on freeze-dried rations because regular C-rations were too heavy. Equipped with the CAR-15 Colt Commando, the sawed-off M79 grenade launcher that fired forty-millimeter shells and sounded enough like a 60mm mortar to make the enemy believe a weapons platoon was on the ground, and sometimes captured AK-47s. Camouflage greasepaint on every inch of exposed skin. Black and green. The NVA and Viet Cong gave them a name. Men with painted faces. Major David Hackworth of the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, organized the first such platoon in November 1965. He called it Tiger Force. The mission was four words. Outguerrilla the guerrillas. By April 1966 the 1st Brigade of the 101st had a second platoon. The 1st Infantry Division, the 25th Infantry Division, and the 173rd Airborne Brigade had units of their own. On 8 July 1966, General William Westmoreland ordered every brigade and division in Vietnam to organize one. The lineage was not new. The French Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés had run similar units against the Viet Minh through 1953. Before that, Merrill's Marauders, the 5307th Composite Unit, had circled one hundred miles behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1944, captured the Myitkyina airfield, and inflicted casualties out of proportion to their size. The Vietnam LRRPs traced their lineage to the Marauders by direct designation. Training was concentrated at the MACV Recondo School in Nha Trang, run by the 5th Special Forces Group and opened in September 1966. The course began at sixty students a week and doubled by January 1967. A team out of Recondo carried an AN/PRC-25 radio, the team leader's map, an assistant team leader, an RTO and an assistant RTO, a scout, and a rear security man who walked backward to erase the team's tracks. Many teams attached a Kit Carson Scout, a former VC or NVA soldier who had defected through the Chieu Hoi program and now worked under a nickname because his family in the North could be punished if his real one became known. Some teams used Montagnard front scouts instead. The team leader was often an E-5 or E-6. Rank was not worn in the field. The Army never quite figured out where these units belonged on its organization chart.