![]() The typical combat load was 13 magazines-one in the gun and 12 more in pouches-for some 468 rounds. Initially, SOG’s primary weapon was the 9 mm Luger Karl Gustav Model 1945 submachine gun, nicknamed the “Swedish K.” Obtained through the Central Intelligence Agency, these untraceable guns sported a pale green enamel finish, a side-folding stock and a 36-round magazine. Thus, SOG’s armory stocked many foreign firearms with which a team leader armed his men according to how he saw fit to accomplish each mission. ![]() To support this deniability, recon teams were required to go “sterile”-meaning no ID or dog tags, unmarked or non-U.S. Since Hanoi insisted it had no troops in “neutral” Laos or Cambodia, the United States, too, denied that SOG operations were underway. These SOG recon teams, usually four to six natives led by two or three American Green Berets, roamed deep behind enemy lines, searching out-sometimes attacking-North Vietnamese truck parks, ammunition dumps, storage sites, truck convoys, command centers and the base camps where enemy units refit between battles in South Vietnam. Army Special Forces-led reconnaissance missions along the enemy’s Ho Chi Minh Trail road network in Laos, into his sanctuaries in Cambodia, and sometimes into North Vietnam, itself. Behind that innocuous name, MACV-SOG ran top-secret, covert operations across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, especially U.S. ![]() military unit ever fielded such an array of weaponry as did the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group. The Air Force pilots at Da Nang gave her a cigarette lighter with the inscription, “The Last of the Great Broads.” It seems appropriate that her third career would be as an author who immortalized these pilots and their courage under fire in her timeless novel, Doom Pussy.It’s unlikely that any other U.S. Of course, Elaine eventually ended up in Vietnam and earning the Doom Pussy Patch. Contemporary reports from a couple of generations ago on her career as a journalist focused as much on Shepard's made-for-television face and figure as on her reporting - "Elaine, blonde and calm, moves like Marilyn Monroe, talks like Ava Gardner and writes like Ernie Pyle," wrote one critic. Later, she changed directions and became a reporter. studios, where she shared the screen with actors such as Clark Gable. Her first life involved being a contract actress for R.K.O. She has chronicled her exploits and those of the pilots she flew with reverence in this novel.Įlaine Shepard’s story embodies the essence of the “Renaissance Woman.” She lived a full and amazing life, or should I say three lives. She flew into combat on a Huey slick with Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Honour. On the patch was a cat with an eye patch eating an airplane, and in Vietnamese were the words “Trong miệng của con mèo của định mạng” and literally translated means, “I have flown into the jaws of the cat of death.” Most American fliers just said, “I have seen the Doom Pussy.” This was another one of those amazing stories about a woman that competes with distinction in what was then considered a man’s world, journalism. Elaine Shepard wrote Doom Pussy in 1967 and explained in her introduction that only the pilots who flew on missions at night to North Vietnam were entitled to wear the Doom Pussy patch on their left shoulders.
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