Category Archives: Library

John Stryker "Tilt" Meyer’s 2003 book, "Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam," is actually more about fighting in Laos and Cambodia than it is about Vietnam. It’s a quick read at 246 pages. It’s also an intense one. One professional reviewer called his combat narratives "pure grain alcohol," and they certainly are spare and to the point, without a lot of moralizing, agonizing, or whatever. If the hair doesn’t stand up on the back of your neck, you might want to check your pulse.

Like most Vietnam combat veterans I had heard of MACV SOG, Meyer’s secret SF unit, but wasn’t really aware of what they did (other than recon), or how or why. His book tells me, but still leaves me wondering what the value of it was, other than helping fighter-bombers and gunships find large concentrations of the North Vietnamese Army to destroy in the Laos and Cambodian sanctuaries. Maybe that was reason enough. Their death’s head insignia, which I saw years after the war in an order of battle, was off-putting. It reminded me of the Nazi SS. But they certainly brought plenty of death to the enemy, rather than the civilians that the SS specialized in killing.

One still wonders about the usefulness of it all. Many of the missions Meyer describes went bad almost immediately, as the "spike" teams (not "strike" teams, as some writers mistakenly term it) were unwittingly inserted into concentrations of the enemy, making recon impossible. Yet when it worked, it worked well. Meyer describes tapping into NVA telephone lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail–in some spots up to four lanes wide–and recording the conversations for later analysis. They took a lot of photographs of camps and equipment, even once overheard a Russian speaker on an enemy radio frequency, and often tried to capture enemy soldiers for interrogation, but apparently never succeeded at that. The parts about Meyer having to defend the Vietnamese members of his teams from ill-treatment by ignorant American Marines and soldiers reminds me of similar problems when I was a MACV adviser to South Vietnamese militia. The Marines in our AO were always shooting us up.

You get the impression from the book that Meyer isn’t telling all he knows, about MACV SOG or himself. Indeed, a second book apparently is in the works, like this one, also based on interviews with other SOG troops, as well as his own experiences. I’ll look forward to reading that one, too. Get your copy of "Across The Fence" here. There are two others books about it there, an older one and a new one just out.