Dale Hanson

And that was hard.

You had to be a senior NCO, but we were going to let this small group of us do it.

It was 37 of us.

But then the proviso at the end of it, he says, at the end of this,

All of you people, all graduates, are going to be sent directly to Vietnam to SOG.

And 85% of you will be dead in three months.

So the first thing I did is I went back and said, well, how many do you have to start with if every three months, 85% die?

And it's over 4,000.

So the odds of living a year in SOG back then was one in 4,000.

Assuming he wasn't just trying to scare us, but it seems fairly accurate in the sense that of my class, most of them were killed.

Yeah.

And it was a super good class.

Intelligence and spies and all this kind of thing.

It even had safe cracking.

I mean, all that part.

You could be James Bond coming out of this thing as well as a commando.

And so at the end of it all, we got our leave, flew off to Vietnam, and landed up in the Trang, the headquarters of Special Forces.

And CC North, Command and Control, it went by several names.

Command and Control, it went by SOG, Special Ops, it went by Studies and Observation Group, and it seems to me there was a couple others too.

Euphemism, they kept changing the names, you know.