Appelton went to Ban Me Thuot to join Waugh, then serving as Sergeant Major for SOG’s Command and Control South (CCS), which was responsible for cross border missions into Cambodia. For Hill and Henson, that meant desk slots at the Liaison Service – the South Vietnamese counterpart to Op 35 – where they assisted with an assortment of administrative duties. Once in country, Shungel’s three parachutists were shunted off to temporary assignments until OP 35 was granted formal approval to begin a HALO program. Of the three, only Hill had a previous SOG tour the others had yet to run recon missions. The last, Melvin Hill, had been Shungel’s HALO instructor. The second, Tony Appelton, had also amassed a considerable number of freefalls. The first, Ray Henson, was an experienced HALO jumper who had been on the US Army’s demonstration team. A freefall enthusiast after receiving HALO training during his prior posting at Fort Bragg, Shungel that summer brought over a trio of skydivers to quietly flesh out Waugh’s concept. Billy recalls that Colonel Shungel literally put his military career at stake in order to get MACV to accept the concept of a HALO mission by selected SOG personnel. Since February 1970, Shungel had taken over as commander of SOG’s Ground Studies Group, known as OP 35, which was responsible for reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia and the DMZ. While taking up the HALO idea, Waugh found a firm ally in Colonel Dan Shungel, the Special Forces officer perhaps best known for his role in the battle at Lang Vei near Khe Sanh in January, 1968. More specifically, Waugh had a High-Altitude Low-Opening (HALO) freefall jump in mind. He raised the possibility of using parachutes to gain entry into the hottest real estate the Ho Chi Minh Trail had to offer. One suggestion came from William “Billy” Waugh, a SOG Sergeant Major known for his daring and usually unorthodox schemes. In response, SOG had groped for new methods of running the North Vietnamese gauntlet. So heavy was the flack that enemy gunners had made several map grid squares all but impossible for helicopter insertions. Nowhere was this truer than along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where Command and Control North (CCN) - the Danang-based SOG reconnaissance and exploitation forces responsible for all of eastern Laos and the DMZ - faced thick North Vietnamese patrols and unprecedented amounts of anti-aircraft fire during infiltration and exfiltration. military’s twilight in Vietnam, they were getting worse. Running cross-border operations was always extremely dangerous, but by early 1970, the beginning of the U.S. A SOG Bright Light rescue team later recovered the bodies. ![]() team members were killed during a running firefight and the rest were eventually extracted. On 9 January 1970, another Recon team in the same area bumped into an enemy force near the end of an eight day mission. They called for an extraction and were pulled out under heavy fire. ![]() The next day, the same team walked into Laos from South Vietnam, only to run into another North Vietnamese force. ![]() Enemy gunners were waiting, and shot them off both their primary and alternate landing zones. On the last day of 1969, a reconnaissance team from the top-secret Studies and Observations Group (SOG) was inserted by helicopter into a North Vietnamese staging ground in northeastern Cambodia known as Base Area 702. For the Special Forces Association Chapter I-XVIII
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