[rwt_bkk]

Well interesting story. It is "possible" but maybe not probable. I don't say this from any personal knowledge because I left there in Aug 70. And one thing that SOG was very good at was compartemention of knowledge (at least on the American side). I do know that VERY few teams actually were in NVN proper. If we were it was usually just a few clicks in. That is based on the problems with NVN opns in general. One was the village defense oganization. They were a lot more organized than the trail area (villagers that is). If you read anything about the guys that were shot down you will see that they were on them within the hour. AA defense was a major problem too and usually for missions like this required the '53s for support. They were a big target and the AF didn't like losing them.
As you read in the History of Halo, formation flying and assembly techniques were the biggest problem. Most of the "sucessful" missions were singleton agent or very small team insertions (like the Earth Angel program), because they didn't have the same problems.

Another thing that SoG didn't do much of was the "ad hoc" mission. Something like this was planned and rehearsed. You can see from the History of Halo that a lot of prep time went into these jumps. Mostly because we were pioneering things without the benefit of SOPs or combat experience in these operations.

I do know that Col Larry Trapp and I had several conversations about American HALO inserts in NVN. (Due to some claims by a deranged Marine). He flat told me that no Americans were inserted by HALO in NVN period. He was Dep. Chief of Airborne Ops for SOG for 70-71. He was at SOG Hq for about 4 years and was one of the keepers of the Keys for many years. So I tend to believe him. I don't know if he was still there at the time, but his assignment after SOG was Pentagon Spec Ops so he was still in the loop.

I do believe that the "school" was no accident. If it was an accident it was damned convenient and served a great purpose. And by the way the Buffalo Hunter drones were tasked by SOG 20.

These are of course are just my observations, not facts and I am willing to be wrong on any point.

re: Triple canopy. Yes under it was pretty sparse for vegettation at the ground level, dark as hell too. Point was we were to jump at night in the tree tops from static linee. You can imagine the spread and the assembly problems. At night under triple canopy you can't even see your hand let alone someone 50 ft away. I remember one jump on an ftx, 3 men per door. Out of 2 C130 loads, only about 10 of us hit the LZ. Spent hours trying to find the rest of the guys that were stuck in the pine trees. You can try and imagine doing this with yards after 5 days of airborne training...!