Book Review: SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam By Major John L. Plaster

Most action movies are boring once you’ve read SOG.

Predator. Rambo. Pick your favorite. All of them feel staged, padded, and dishonest after you read what Major John L. Plaster and MACV-SOG actually did in Vietnam. Not because Hollywood lacks explosions, but because it lacks consequences. SOG has nothing but consequences.

I was not prepared for this book to be as gripping as it is. I already own Plaster’s The Ultimate Sniper, a clear and factual manual, but nothing in that book hinted at just how good a storyteller he is.

SOG reads like one insane movie script after another, except nobody yells “cut,” nobody resets the scene, and most missions end with men dead, missing, or barely extracted under fire. Plaster does not write like a historian looking back from a safe distance.

He writes like a man dumping after-action reports that stayed classified for 25 years because the government pretended the unit never existed.

MACV-SOG burned through men at a rate no modern unit would tolerate. Recon teams went into Laos and Cambodia knowing the odds were stacked against them. Small teams. Deep penetration. No artillery. No QRF (quick reaction force). Often no CAS (close air support) until the very end. When things went bad, they went catastrophic.

Plaster makes that reality clear without melodrama. Teams compromised by tracker dogs. Ambushes by battalion-sized NVA elements. Helicopters shot up on extraction. Men fighting 360 degrees with CAR-15s, sawed-off M79 grenade launchers, and whatever ammo they could grab. Entire teams wiped out. Not hypotheticals. Not metaphors. Names and missions.

That is where civilian reviews miss the point.

The New York Times calls this book “a worthy act of historical rescue.” That is polite, bloodless language for something that was neither polite nor bloodless. SOG does not rescue history. It exposes how far real war sits from the stories civilians are comfortable reading.

This book isn’t impressive because it is dramatic. It is impressive because it is restrained. Plaster does not sell himself as invincible. He documents fear, confusion, mistakes, and the simple reality that courage often meant doing the mission anyway, knowing the casualty odds were ugly.

What makes SOG hit harder than fiction is that the men did not get to choose their ending. No heroic music. No slow-motion victory. Sometimes the mission succeeded, and the team came back. Sometimes nobody came back. Sometimes the men you thought were safe died, and the ones you were sure would not make it somehow survived.

For veterans, SOG rings true because it does not explain itself to civilians. It does not soften language. It assumes the reader can handle the idea that elite service sometimes means being expendable. For non-veterans, it should be uncomfortable. If it is not, they missed the point.