Briefing
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army’s most secretive unit may have been the Studies and Observations Group (SOG). This unit captured enemy prisoners for interrogation, rescued American POWs, and conducted reconnaissance missions in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It also ran teams of clandestine agents and conducted psychological operations. The leader of this group in the mid-1960s was a legendary Army officer, Donald Blackburn, a man who in 1942 had refused to surrender at Bataan and had gone on to raise a 22,000-man army of Filipinos to fight the Japanese. Author Mike Guardia will describe Blackburn’s colorful life, how his SOG mapped out the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and how, after his return to Washington, he was the architect of the famous Son Tay Prison Raid, the largest POW rescue mission of the war.