I was also MACV-SOG. The reason none of us got the medals we deserved was the simple fact that our government adamantly denied what we were doing and where we were doing it. A few of us were decorated by the South Vietnamese government, but we have never been permitted to wear or claim those medals - and when the MACV-SOG mission was finally declassified that government no longer existed to contest it.
Walton worked out of CCC (Command and Control Central). I flew out of CCS (South) There was also a CCN. From those three locations, small recce teams were inserted deep into bad guy country where they gathered intel on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and performed other devious activities before being extracted after as long as a week. By the time I flew that mission, we were no longer using American assets on those teams. We used Vietnamese, Montagnard, Cambodian, and mercenary Chinese teams. Helicopter assets were Vietnamese H-34 King Bees for team insert/extract and US Special Ops UH-1N Green Hornets for cover. We FACs flew unmarked O-2s as command ships. We FACs were in control of all operations, using interpreters to communicate with the ground teams.
Most of our teams went "hot" at some point most often during extraction. Just finding the team in that terrain was the first hurdle, then attempting to recover them under enemy fire. We lost as many as one third of the teams, in fact. Many simply were never heard from again. And some of them we heard die.
