Read Part 10 HERE For the time being, things went on as normal however with Detachment K providing airborne support for a presidential Special Forces capabilities demonstration. On October 26th of 1979, President Park and KCIA director Kim were having dinner at the Blue House when a heated political discussion broke out about the protests […]

Read Part 9 Here American Special Forces would be providing direct action and strategic reconnaissance support to the Korean Special Forces during the war, however, they would not be sending infiltrators into North Korea. Instead, they would be aiding and assisting their partner forces. The Americans perceived “the war as being initiated by the North. Our biggest […]

Read Part 8 HERE Without a parent command, Randall and his team sergeant could determine how the Det could best serve Korean Special Forces and the U.S. military presence on the peninsula. They also deployed to Australia, Hawaii, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan to support other military exercises. Much like Detachment A in […]

Read Part 7 Here As a Confucian society, one of the problems that many in the South Korean military faced was, and continues to persist, that they are not free thinkers. Their Special Forces are task organized like 12-man American Special Forces teams but their mission is more direct action than unconventional warfare. This makes […]

Read Part 6 HERE In January, a 31-man commando team belonging to Unit 124 crossed the DMZ into South Korea. When the team was soon compromised by a couple of farmers, an intense debate began as to whether or not they should be killed. Amazingly, the North Koreans decided to propagandize the farmers with communist […]

Read Part 5 Here In order to understand North Korean thinking, it must be stated that they have a guerrilla mindset derived from state-sponsored propaganda about the Kim family. Kim Il-sung positioned himself as an anti-Japanese guerrilla who served in a sniper unit, killing the oppressors of the Korean people—a claim that is historically dubious […]

Read Part 4 Here Another major task for the Det was de-conflicting training exercises between the Koreans and the American military. In the 1960s, the North Koreans would send teams south across the DMZ or by boat to wage brutal terror campaigns against the South Korean people, often wiping out villages and murdering entire families. […]

Read Part 3 HERE At that time, abject poverty was not limited to outlying coastal islands. The Korean War had wrecked the entire peninsula so badly that many thought Korea would never recover. Split at the 38th parallel, North Korea had inherited an industrial base, but South Korea was rural and agrarian, its agricultural production […]

Read Part One HERE With Soviet forces racing south through Manchuria and into northern Korea, General MacArthur had to scrounge together American units quickly and get them to Korea. The agreement hashed out with the Russians was that the Soviets would accept the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and America would accept their […]

“It was silk everywhere and it was just marvelous to see,” Sergeant Paul Redgate said, describing 4th Ranger Company’s combat jump at Musan-Ni. In was March of 1951, the coldest winter that anyone could remember in Korea. Some American units were decimated by the freezing temperatures alone. Exiting the C-119 airplane, Redgate parachuted to the […]

In response to the recent allegations made by three Navy SEAL whistleblowers to CBS News and information provided to SOFREP by our own sources, many readers chimed in to opine that the US military had been issuing amphetamines to boost the performance of soldiers in combat.  We had never found any reputable sources who could […]

Near the end of September, the brass asked Schaff if he’d mind becoming the One-One, or assistant team leader. The brass wanted to put an overweight Special Forces sergeant from Germany who had a previous tour of duty with a Green Beret A-Team, but no experience in Laos, in the One-Zero slot simply because he […]