Special Forces, Fort Bragg and the Green Berets in Vietnam

President John F. Kennedy with Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough during his visit to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 12 October 1961, when he reviewed the Special Forces and endorsed the green beret. Photo: Cecil W. Stoughton, White House, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vietnam War · People and units · North Carolina

Special Forces, Fort Bragg and the Green Berets in Vietnam

From McKellar’s Pond to the border camps: how a small corps of soldiers trained in North Carolina fought a different kind of war in Vietnam.

1952–1971Fort Bragg, N.C. · Nha Trang · Nam Dong · Lang Vei · Son Tây~13 min read

On 12 October 1961 President John F. Kennedy flew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to see the Army’s Special Forces. At McKellar’s Pond on the post, Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough, commander of the Special Warfare Center, showed him soldiers demonstrating guerrilla and counter-guerrilla skills, from small-boat landings to jet-pack flight. The soldiers wore the green beret, which the Army had until then discouraged. Kennedy endorsed it, and the Special Forces became the symbol of his administration’s interest in counterinsurgency, the fighting of guerrilla wars by training and leading local people.

Vietnam was where that idea was tested. Special Forces teams had been in South Vietnam as trainers since 1957. From 1961 they organised Montagnard tribesmen and other minorities into the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, and from 1964 the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), activated at Fort Bragg in 1961, ran it from Nha Trang. By the later 1960s its small teams of American sergeants and officers led tens of thousands of irregular soldiers from fortified camps along the borders with Laos and Cambodia. Other Special Forces soldiers served with the secret Studies and Observations Group in cross-border operations, and in November 1970 a force of Special Forces volunteers from Fort Bragg raided the prison camp at Son Tây, near Hanoi.

This page follows the Special Forces from Fort Bragg to Vietnam and back, and records the North Carolina men among them who received the Medal of Honor. North Carolina’s wider part in the war is told in Chapter 9, and the advisory years in Chapter 2.

Fort Bragg and the Special Warfare Center

The Army’s Special Forces were born at Fort Bragg. In April 1952 the Army established the Psychological Warfare Center there, and on 11 June 1952 activated the 10th Special Forces Group under Col. Aaron Bank, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services. The idea, drawn from the OSS and from the partisan wars of the Second World War, was to send small teams of highly trained soldiers behind enemy lines to raise and lead guerrillas. In December 1956 the centre became the Special Warfare Center. After Kennedy’s death it was renamed, in 1964, the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, the name it still bears as the Special Warfare Center and School.

Kennedy, convinced that the Cold War would be fought in “wars of national liberation” in the developing world, expanded the Special Forces. The 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was activated at Fort Bragg in 1961, and further groups followed in the next two years. Fort Bragg itself grew with the war: the post’s military population peaked at 57,840 in 1968, and more than 200,000 soldiers took basic training there between 1966 and 1970, according to NCpedia.

Advisers, 1957–1963

The first Special Forces teams went to South Vietnam in 1957, on temporary duty from the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa, to train the first South Vietnamese commando units at Nha Trang. Capt. Harry G. Cramer Jr., killed in a training accident near Nha Trang in October 1957, is often named as the first Special Forces soldier to die in Vietnam. Teams from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg followed on six-month tours.

The Civilian Irregular Defense Group began in late 1961 at Buôn Enao in Darlac Province, in the Central Highlands, as a program sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. A small Special Forces team helped Rhadé villagers fortify their village, armed them, and trained a strike force to defend the area. The idea spread quickly to other Montagnard villages, then to other minorities and to ethnic Cambodians and Catholics. In 1963, under Operation Switchback, control of the program passed from the CIA to the military command, MACV, and the camps shifted from village defence toward watching and blocking the infiltration routes along the borders.

Nam Dong: the first Medal of Honor

Before dawn on 6 July 1964 a Viet Cong force attacked the Special Forces camp at Nam Dong, west of Đà Nẵng, held by Detachment A-726 of the 7th Special Forces Group, a few Australian advisers and South Vietnamese and Nung troops. The fight lasted about five hours. The team commander, Capt. Roger H. C. Donlon, though wounded several times, directed the defence and moved from position to position under fire. Two Americans, one Australian and dozens of the camp’s defenders were killed; the camp held. Donlon’s was the first Medal of Honor of the Vietnam War, presented by President Johnson in December 1964.

The 5th Special Forces Group

The 5th Special Forces Group took over the mission in October 1964 and set up its headquarters at Nha Trang early in 1965. Its organisation reflected the work: small “A” detachments of 12 men, with a captain, a lieutenant and ten sergeants trained in weapons, demolitions, medicine, communications and intelligence, each advising a camp and its several hundred irregulars; “B” detachments controlling the camps in a region; “C” detachments in each of the four corps areas. From 1965 the group also formed Mobile Strike Forces, the “Mike Forces,” as reaction units, and long-range reconnaissance projects such as Delta, Omega and Sigma.

Special Forces medics, trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Sam Houston, ran village medical programs alongside the military work, and the teams built schools, wells and dispensaries. The relationship with the Montagnards was close and sometimes tense with the South Vietnamese government, which distrusted their autonomy movement; a Montagnard revolt in several camps in September 1964 was defused in part by Special Forces officers.

Lang Vei, 7 February 1968

The most famous battle fought by a Special Forces camp came during the siege of Khe Sanh. On the night of 6–7 February 1968 the North Vietnamese attacked the camp at Lang Vei, on Route 9 a few miles west of Khe Sanh, held by Detachment A-101 of Company C, 5th Special Forces Group, with Bru and other CIDG companies and a Laotian battalion nearby. For the first time in the war, the PAVN attacked with tanks, Soviet-built PT-76s. The camp was overrun; some Americans held out in the command bunker through the night and escaped the next day.

Sergeant First Class Eugene Ashley Jr., born in Wilmington, North Carolina, the team’s intelligence sergeant, organised and led five counter-attacks with Laotian and CIDG soldiers to reach the trapped men, calling air strikes onto the camp as he went. He was mortally wounded in the last of them. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously. The fight at Lang Vei is part of the story of Khe Sanh and the 26th Marines.

MACV-SOG and the secret war

The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), set up in January 1964, was a joint unconventional-warfare command whose existence was officially secret. Most of its ground teams were Special Forces soldiers on paper assigned to the 5th Group, leading small mixed teams of Montagnard, Nùng or Vietnamese soldiers into Laos and Cambodia to watch the Ho Chi Minh Trail, capture prisoners, plant sensors and call in air strikes. Losses were high. SSgt Franklin D. Miller, born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, received the Medal of Honor for 5 January 1970, when, leading a reconnaissance team in Kontum Province that was ambushed and most of whose men were wounded, he held off the attackers alone. Master Sgt. Roy P. Benavidez, whose Medal of Honor for rescuing a team near Lộc Ninh on 2 May 1968 was presented by President Reagan in 1981, served in the same secret war.

The Son Tây raid

On the night of 20–21 November 1970 a joint force under Air Force Brig. Gen. Leroy J. Manor landed at the prison camp at Son Tây, 23 miles west of Hanoi, to free American prisoners believed to be held there. The ground force of 56 Special Forces volunteers, most of them from Fort Bragg, was led by Col. Arthur D. “Bull” Simons; it had trained in secret at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The raid was carried out almost perfectly, with no Americans killed, but the prisoners had been moved months earlier. Its results were nonetheless real: the North Vietnamese concentrated the prisoners in Hỏa Lò, where conditions improved, as the Hanoi Hilton page describes.

The “Green Beret affair”

In July 1969 the commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, Col. Robert B. Rheault, and seven of his officers and sergeants were arrested by the Army and charged with murder and conspiracy in the killing of a Vietnamese man, Thái Khắc Chuyên, whom they suspected of being a double agent. The case raised hard legal questions about the authority of intelligence agencies, the duty to report, and the reach of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in covert operations. In late September 1969 the Secretary of the Army dropped the charges after the Central Intelligence Agency declined to make its officers available as witnesses on grounds of national security. Rheault retired; no one was tried. The case is still cited in discussions of accountability in secret operations.

Going home

As the war was handed over to the South Vietnamese, the CIDG camps were converted into Army of the Republic of Vietnam Ranger battalions in 1970–71, and in March 1971 the 5th Special Forces Group left Vietnam for Fort Bragg. Special Forces soldiers stayed on with SOG and as advisers until 1972–73. Many Montagnards who had fought with them were left behind; after 1975 some resisted the new government for years, and a community of Montagnard refugees, resettled with help from former Special Forces soldiers, has lived in and around Greensboro, Charlotte and Raleigh since the 1980s, among the largest outside Vietnam.

Fort Bragg and the wider war

Fort Bragg’s part in the war went beyond the Special Forces. Westmoreland himself commanded there in 1963, before going to Vietnam. After the Tet Offensive the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, was rushed from Fort Bragg to Vietnam in February 1968 and served there until December 1969. At neighbouring Pope Air Force Base, C-123s of the 464th Troop Carrier Wing flew the “Mule Train” airlift in South Vietnam from December 1961, the first conventional Air Force unit in action there. Fayetteville was also the scene of soldiers’ antiwar activity, including a GI coffeehouse and an underground newspaper, Bragg Briefs. The post was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023 and became Fort Bragg again in 2025, this time named for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a paratrooper of the Second World War.