“We Lost Contact” — What Happened To MACV-SOG Teams In Laos

[00:00:00]The last radio transmission came at 9:47 in the morning. Three words broken by static, then nothing. The operator at the forward relay station kept the frequency open. He adjusted the equipment. He called back on the emergency channel. He tried the backup frequency. He went through every protocol that the system provided for a team that had stopped responding. And every protocol produced the same result.

[00:00:23]Silence. The team on the other end of that radio had been inserted 22 hours earlier into an operational area in Laos. Six men, two Americans, four indigenous personnel. They had made their scheduled check-ins through the first night. They had reported their position. They had reported the sounds of NVA movement in the grid squares around them. And then at 9:47 in the morning, three words broken by static.

[00:00:48]And then nothing. What happened in the hours and days and decades that followed? The search operations, the classified files that took decades to partially open, and the families who waited for answers that the system that had sent those men into the jungle was structurally incapable of providing is the story of what it meant when M. Vogg lost contact with a team in Laos. It meant we may never know. For some teams, we still do not. By the end of this video, you will understand what those three words meant in the operational reality of the SOG program. You will understand the specific man at the center of this story. The most legendary operator the program produced. The man the NVA feared by name, whose last transmission is still recorded in the files as unresolved after 55 years. You will understand what the search operations found and what they did not find, and why the gap between those two things has never been closed. and you will understand why the families of the men who never came back were not simply waiting for news. They were waiting inside a system that had been designed from the beginning to be able to say nothing. If you are new here, this channel covers the military history that the official record leaves in the margins, the operations that were real and costly and that the classification system kept from the people who had the most right to know. Subscribe now. New video every 2 days. Now, back to the radio. Back to the silence. Back to the man whose name the NBA knew before they knew almost any other Americans. His name was Jerry Michael Shrivever. His call sign was Mad Dog. The name was not ironic. It was not a joke constructed at his expense. It was an assessment, a single word compression of the specific quality of operational aggression that Shrivever brought to crossber work that made him in the estimation of the men who served alongside him and the men who commanded him and eventually the men who were sent to find him. Unlike any other operator the SOG program had produced, he was small, 5'7, 140 lb. He looked in photographs like a man who worked outdoors and stayed lean by habit. Not the physical presence the word soldier typically conjures, not the size the word warrior implies. He carried a Swedish K submachine gun and a German Shepherd he called Klouse that he had trained to work off leash in the jungle. He wore when he was not in the field the particular expression of a man who was somewhere else in his mind even when he was standing in front of you. He was somewhere else most of the time. The somewhere else was Laos. Shrivever had arrived in Vietnam in 1966 assigned to command and control central the SOG headquarters at Contaged Crossber operations into the La Oceanian panhandle and Cambodia. He ran his first recon mission and immediately demonstrated the quality that would define everything that followed. the ability to function at the level of peak performance in conditions designed to prevent any kind of functional performance at all. He thrived in the denied areas. Over 3 years of crossber operations, he accumulated a mission record that his peers described in terms usually reserved for historical figures rather than men currently alive and active. He had run more missions than almost anyone. He had been compromised and had fought his way out. He had been in contact so sustained that the mathematics of survival had ceased to be a predictive tool and had become simply the record of what had already happened.

[00:04:05]He had never been captured. He had never been stopped. He had returned from every mission he had entered until the morning of April 24th, 1969. The operation targeted base area 353, a concentration of NVA infrastructure near the Cambodian border that American intelligence had identified as a significant logistics and command node. Heavily held, actively patrolled, defended by units that had been in place long enough to know the terrain with the intimacy of home.

[00:04:33]Shrivever took the mission. He had been told what the operational area held. He had processed the afteraction reports when teams came back and the silence when they did not. He understood with the precision that only 3 years of direct experience produces exactly what base area 353 was. He signed the paperwork. He loaded the helicopter. He went. The NVA had developed by 1969 a specifically targeted response to SOG crossber operations. The units assigned to find and destroy recon teams, tracker units in American intelligence terminology, operated in the base areas with a single mission, locate inserted teams, and pursue them to destruction.

[00:05:12]They were not conventional infantry units redirected to a secondary task.

[00:05:17]They were specialists, men who understood the patterns of movement that small recon teams used, who knew the likely extraction points, who could read the small disturbances a six-man team left in terrain they had been operating in for years. They were hunting Shrivever's team from the moment the helicopters crossed the border. This was the context that the intelligence briefings described in language that was accurate and that nonetheless failed to convey the specific reality of what it meant to be on the ground inside it. The briefings said, "The area is heavily held. The NVA will respond aggressively to any insertion. What the briefings could not say, what no briefing could say, because it could only be understood through experience was what it felt like to be six men in jungle that 4,000 soldiers called home moving through terrain that those soldiers knew and you did not. Toward a radio schedule that required you to stay in place long enough to transmit and then move before that position was compromised. Every man on the team understood this. They had all been briefed. Most of them had been in the operational areas before.

[00:06:17]Understanding the situation and being in the situation were different things. The insertion on April 24th was not clean.

[00:06:24]The helicopters came under fire immediately, not the suppressive fire of a patrol that happened to be near the landing zone. The coordinated volume fire of a prepared defensive position.

[00:06:34]The NVA had been watching. The insertion of the team had been anticipated. And the response was not the response of a force that had been surprised, but of a force that had been ready. The team hit the ground in contact. Shrivever moved the team off the landing zone under fire. He established a defensive position in the treeine. He made radio contact with the relay aircraft overhead and reported the situation. The team was in contact. The landing zone was compromised. They needed fire support and extraction planning to begin immediately. Fire support came. The A1 Skyraiders that provided close air support for SOG operations rolled in on the NVA positions around the landing zone. For a period measured in minutes, the suppression created conditions under which the team might have moved toward a secondary extraction point. The team moved. For the next 2 hours, the radio traffic between Shrivever's team and the relay aircraft overhead had the specific signature of a team that was fighting hard and still coherent. still a team, still functioning, still led by a man who knew what he was doing and was doing it. Then the radio traffic changed. The last transmission clearly from Shrivever described the team's position as overrun. In Sogg radio usage, overrun had a specific meaning. It did not mean the position had been abandoned. It meant the contact was at the position that the distance between the team and the NVA had collapsed completely. And then at 9:47 in the morning, three words broken by static and then nothing. A bright light team was assembled and launched within the hour. A bright light was not a routine extraction. It was a combat operation in its own right.

[00:08:08]Inserting into an area actively hostile, looking for men whose last known position was approximate and whose current status was unknown. The bright light found the landing zone. It found the physical signatures of a sustained firefight, spent casings, blood, the specific disorder that close quarters combat leaves on a piece of ground. It found indications that the team had moved. It did not find the team. A second bright light launched the following day. Search and rescue aircraft covered the operational area for hours. Ground elements moved through the grid squares around the last known position. They found nothing. A third attempt was authorized the following morning. By that point, the operational calculus had shifted in the specific way it shifts when a search produces nothing. From rescue to recovery, from finding men who might be alive to finding evidence that could answer the question of what had happened to them.

[00:08:58]The bright light teams that went in on day three were looking for the same things they had been looking for on day one. They found the same result. The NVA by this point had saturated the operational area with additional forces.

[00:09:11]The grid squares around base area 353 were no longer just defended. They were actively contested in the specific way that terrain becomes contested when an enemy forces identified it as the sight of something it does not want found. The helicopters supporting the search took fire on every approach. Two aircraft sustained damage. One crew was wounded.

[00:09:31]The search was suspended. This is the operational reality that the phrase we lost contacts and does not convey. The search did not stop because the men who conducted it lacked the will to continue. It stopped because continuing required the expenditure of additional aircraft and additional lives in a search that the evidence on the ground had already begun to suggest would not produce the result that would justify the cost. The men making that calculation were not indifferent to what it meant. They were doing what commanders do when the operational situation produces a choice between two outcomes that are both wrong. They chose the one that did not add to the list.

[00:10:07]Jerry Shrivever was listed as missing in action. The date of loss recorded as April 24th, 1969. The location recorded as base area 353. Coordinates classified. The circumstances recorded as last radio contact at approximately 0947 hours. Team reported overrun.

[00:10:27]Subsequent search and rescue operations produced no confirmed information regarding status of personnel. That entry has never been upgraded.

[00:10:35]Shrivever's case is still open. He would be 79 years old. The families of men who went missing on SOG operations in Laos occupied a specific and extraordinarily painful position in the accounting system. The system had been designed for conventional military losses. Men who went missing in large operations in places where American forces were officially present, whose families could be told something meaningful about what had happened. SOG losses in Laos did not fit the system. The missions had not officially happened. The locations were classified. The operational details could not be shared without disclosing program specifics the intelligence community was not willing to release.

[00:11:13]The families were told their husband or son had been lost in Southeast Asia. The specific country, Laos, was withheld.

[00:11:19]The nature of the mission was withheld.

[00:11:21]The circumstances of the loss were withheld. A family receiving that notification had a name, a date, a photograph. They did not have a location they could point to on a map. They did not have the specific grounding detail that the human need to mourn requires.

[00:11:36]The knowledge of where and how and what happened at the end. The specific cruelty of this was not intentional. The people who designed the classification system were not indifferent to what it would mean for the families of the missing. They had made a calculation that the operational requirements of the program outweighed the cost imposed on the families of the men who did not return. The calculation was made by people who would not pay the cost. The families paid it regardless. The wives who received the notifications that their husband had been lost in Southeast Asia in circumstances that could not be disclosed in a location that could not be named were left to grieve without the specific knowledge that grief requires.

[00:12:13]They could not tell their children where their father had been. They could not explain to other family members what had happened. They were told to say as little as possible. They were handed a silence and instructed to maintain it.

[00:12:24]Some of them maintained it for decades.

[00:12:27]Some of them pushed against it, hired investigators, connected with veteran networks, lobbyed congressional offices, wrote letters to agencies whose existence they had only recently learned of. Some of them found through those efforts fragments of information that the official system had not provided.

[00:12:43]Fragments, never the complete picture, never the answer to the specific question that the open case held open.

[00:12:49]Where is he? What happened? Is there anything left to find? Dorothy Shrivever, Jerry's mother, waited for 20 years before any information about her son's service became available through the declassification process. She waited with the particular quality of not knowing that is different from grief because grief requires the acknowledgement of loss and the system had not acknowledged loss. It had acknowledged only absence. He was missing, not dead, missing with all the implications of that word still open.

[00:13:17]The possibility that missing was not permanent had been diminishing for 55 years. The mathematics of human survival under those conditions do not support it in any practical sense. Postwar testimony from former NVA soldiers and Le Oceanian sources collected by American investigators in the 1980s and 1990s produced accounts that were fragmentaryary, inconsistent, and impossible to fully verify. Some suggested that members of SOG teams lost in Laos had been captured and survived into the postwar period. whether any specifically concerned Shrivever was never established. One Zero Billy War, who had run crossber missions alongside Shrivever and spent the post-war decades pursuing answers about the missing, described the specific weight that the open cases produced. He said carrying the knowledge of what had happened to the men who did not come back was its own thing, not guilt. He was precise about that, not guilt, something else, the knowledge of incompleteness, the specific discomfort of a story without an ending. of men who had gone into the jungle and the jungle had not given them back and the accounting process had done what it could and the answer was still not the answer that the families needed.

[00:14:26]He said he thought about Shrivever, not the mad dog of the legend, the specific person he had known, small 140, the German Shepherd, the Swedish K, the expression of a man who was somewhere else even when he was standing in front of you. He said he thought about where that man was. He said he did not know. Nobody knew. The men who had known Shrivever, who had run missions alongside him, who had watched him take the assignments that other operators assessed as beyond the acceptable edge of survivable risk, and watched him return from them, carried a specific kind of knowledge about his disappearance that the official record could not capture. They knew what the operational area was. They knew what overrun meant in that context. They knew what the terrain did to men who were separated from their team and their radio in the grid squares around base area 353. And they knew that Shrivever, if anyone could have found a way to survive in those grid squares, was the man who could have done it. That knowledge was not comfort. It was its own weight. The possibility that the most capable operator they had known might have survived in circumstances that would have killed almost anyone else was a possibility that the open case kept alive for years. It was a possibility that diminished with each decade and that never fully disappeared because the case remained open because the file remained open because the physical evidence that would have closed it had not been found. War said once in an interview that was recorded but rarely cited that the hardest thing about carrying the knowledge of what had happened to the missing was not the weight of it. It was the specific quality of incompleteness. The knowledge that you knew what the operational area was and you knew what the silence meant.

[00:16:01]And you also knew because the case was open and the file was open that you did not know everything that the jungle had kept something that the accounting was not finished. He said he would keep working on it until he could not work anymore. He meant it. He kept working on it. The defense PMEA accounting agency carries in its current records the names of men from SOG operations in Laos who have not been accounted for. Remains have been recovered in some cases. DNA analysis has produced identifications.

[00:16:30]cases have been closed not because the questions were fully answered, but because the physical evidence was sufficient to change the administrative status from missing to accounted for.

[00:16:40]Some cases were not closed. Some of the men who had been in places that did not appear on any unclassified map left no physical trace that the recovery operations conducted decades later in terrain that had not become more hospitable to them could find. The joint recovery operations that began in the 1980s, the result of slowly normalizing relations with Vietnam and the political pressure of the PMIA movement produced results that were partial and painful and better than nothing. Teams of American and Vietnamese investigators traveled to areas where SOG teams had been reported lost. They interviewed witnesses. They conducted forensic surveys of sites identified through testimony or documentary evidence. They recovered remains in some cases. Some of those remains were identifiable. The DNA analysis that became available in the 1990s allowed cases to be closed that would otherwise have remained open indefinitely. Men who had been listed as missing for 20 or 30 years were accounted for. Their families received the specific grounding confirmation that the years of absence had not provided not good news, the accounting of loss, but accountable, finishable, a thing that could be mourned because it was finally known. Other recoveries produced remains that the forensic process could not work with. The jungle does not preserve everything. Decades of tropical climate, of monsoon and heat, and the slow work of decomposition in soil that does not hold the way that drier climates hold had reduced what was there to less than what the analysis required.

[00:18:08]The teams documented what they found.

[00:18:10]They filed the reports. The cases remained open. For the families of those men, the recovery operations represented something complicated. hope that had been long abandoned, briefly reactivated and then not fully resolved. The knowledge that the effort was real and serious and ongoing. The knowledge that the effort was not enough. Somewhere in the records of the Defense PMEA accounting agency, there is a file with Jerry Shrivever's name on it. It contains the transmission logs and the search and rescue reports and the testimony and the forensic findings and all the information that five decades of accounting have assembled. The file is still open. The gap is still there. This is not a Vietnam story. This is a story about what institutions owe the people they send to do the things that cannot be acknowledged about the debt that classification creates and what it means to owe that debt to a family waiting in a country that is not allowed to tell them where their person went. The debt is real. The payment has been partial.

[00:19:06]Three words broken by static. Then silence. Then 55 years of trying to fill the silence with the truth of what happened to the men who went into the jungle and did not come back. Some of the truth has been found. Some of it is still in the jungle. If this is the kind of history that matters to you, subscribe now. Hit the bell. New video every 2 days. The next video is about Larry Mayfield, a bright light pilot.

[00:19:29]April 1969, the same week Shrivever disappeared. He flew into base area 3533 times in 4 days to pull out men who might already be dead. On the third approach, his helicopter was shot out of the sky. What he did next, with no aircraft, no radio, and NVA closing from every direction, nobody was ready for that. video is next.