THE LEGACY OF THE LRPS
 By John P.
Brackin
How a
Vietnam-era Recon Outfit Influenced Modern Special Ops
When the
action started in Afghanistan, back in the fall of 2001, I immediately
noticed the similarities between the Special Operations outfits, as they
were being depicted in the press, and the Army’s LRP and Ranger
outfits of the Vietnam War. At the time, I was working on a book with a
Vietnam-era Ranger, and the missions I’d heard him describe—as well
as those of his peers—sounded extremely familiar when compared to the
ones being depicted in the news.
Both outfits worked in small teams,
operating independently on the ground in remote, forward positions; and
they both utilized the stealthy capacity of those teams to coordinate
air strikes on hostile, mobile targets. There’s no doubt, of course,
that the Special Ops outfits of today owe their success to a number of
different influences—the Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, etc.—but
somewhere among them must surely be included the LRPs and Rangers of the
Vietnam War.
VIETNAM
RECON
In Vietnam,
early reconnaissance outfits were hindered dramatically by the dense, jungle landscapes. The jeep-oriented units, like the 17th
Cavalry with the 173d Airborne Brigade, were unable to penetrate remote
areas in the Central Highlands, and aerial reconnaissance was constantly
being hampered by the dense mesh of tree limbs that concealed the trails
and base camps below.
In response, the Army created small teams
of reconnaissance-gatherers to perform the basic, and remote,
reconnaissance work. These new outfits were dubbed LRRP units—an
acronym for long-range reconnaissance patrol, later shortened to LRP—and
they operated on foot, in groups small enough to avoid detection. Each
team was comprised of six volunteers, and they ran a rotating schedule
of missions, with the objective always being to seek out and find the
enemy.
A typical LRP mission included an aerial
insertion, usually by chopper, followed by three or four days of
trail-watching and a possible, final-day ambush on unsuspecting enemy
forces. Missions differed dramatically—in terms of duration, purpose,
contact, difficulty, etc.—but the general blueprint was usually the
same: a six-man team, operating independently in the field, gathering
intelligence and observing the enemy’s conduct.
Bill Shanahan, a member of the 74th
Infantry (LRP) and later N Co. Ranger—as well as my coauthor for the
book Stealth Patrol (Da Capo Press, 2003)—joined the LRPs in 1968 and quickly
observed the value in running in such small teams: “When I got to the
Lurps, I’d see VC daily, in groups of five or six, and I might see
fifteen groups a day like that.”
That was in stark contrast to his service
with the rifle company, in which he’d scarcely seen any VC at
all—though they’d no doubt seen him, as they often employed their
own small-team tactics to snipe at the company. The VC had learned to
adapt their tactics to the terrain, and in a sense, that’s what the
LRP units did as well.
Again, according to Shanahan, the LRP teams
learned to “be quieter than them, slip around, beat them at their own
game. You never had any lines over there, like they’re dug in over
there on the edge of that mountain over there and we’re gonna try to
take that mountain. Instead, they were everywhere. If you didn’t let
them act normal, you were never gonna see them, not unless they wanted
you to.”
The concept of stealth was a watershed
development for Vietnam, and the commanders began to exploit it for all
it was worth. No longer content with simple information-gathering, they
began to assign the teams with more offensive-minded objectives:
hunter-killer missions, trail ambushes, prisoner snatches, artillery
strikes, hospital raids, etc.—and as the teams developed, they carried
them out to great effect.
Ultimately the LRP experiment was
considered so successful that the Army tied the various LRP companies
from across the country into a single, common organization, which was
awarded the storied moniker of Ranger—the 75th Infantry
Rangers. According to Shelby Stanton’s Rangers at War, the
change was authorized by General William Westmoreland himself and went
into effect at the beginning of 1969.
In the span of Ranger history, this
period—directly following the LRP outfits—is fairly unique. As a
direct product of the LRP companies, the Rangers simply continued the
same small-team ethic that the LRRP and LRP teams had pioneered. In
fact, for many who participated as both LRPs and Rangers, the two were
virtually indistinguishable. They continued running missions with the
same identical teams, in the same hostile terrain. Only the names were
different.
TODAY'S
SPECIAL OPS
Today, our Special Ops outfits have evolved to their most advanced stage
in history. They’re led by a single command in Tampa, Fla., known as
the U.S. Special Operations Command, and in the
wake of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, they’ve seen their profile
go from quite low to extremely high—with many mainstream publications,
like USA Today and Time magazine, running features on
their success.
But within the more broadened scope of
today’s operations, we can still find the influence of the Vietnam-era
LRPs and Rangers. Most obviously, of course, are today’s Army Rangers
themselves. Comprised of three combat-ready battalions, today’s
Rangers owe a great deal to their Vietnam-era forebears, including their
roots and their lineage. Not to mention their name—the 75th
Ranger Regiment.
According to Ranger instructor Lieutenant
Colonel Erick Hutchings, speaking in a recent television special on The
History Channel, entitled Silent Heroes: LRRPs, “It’s
important for our young Rangers serving today to realize the techniques
we learned from the Vietnam-era LRPs and Rangers.”
Today’s Rangers actually serve more of a
light infantry role than their Vietnam-era predecessors, but another
group, known by the acronym LRS—short for long-range
surveillance—serves an almost identical role as the LRP and Ranger
units of the Vietnam War. The LRS units operate in teams of six—just
exactly as the LRPs did—providing a human element to complement
today’s advanced technologies.
Again, according to LTC Hutchings: “Our
LRS units, our current LRS units, are the most direct descendent from
the Vietnam-era LRPs. We have these organizations in every light
division and every corps, and they are the human eyes and ears that go
out.”
Most profoundly perhaps, the legacy of the
LRPs can still be seen in the very fabric and philosophy of our modern
special ops. Many of the men who served with the LRPs went on to serve
with subsequent special ops outfits, like Delta Force, SOG, CCN, CCC,
etc., and when they did, they applied the lessons they’d learned with
the LRPs to those new arenas.
According to one such soldier, a former
Ranger and 15-year veteran of Delta Force, “We were able to take all
those lessons learned and the ambiguity of the situations, much like
you’ve got fighting terrorism today, and apply some of those same
methodologies. … What we brought to the table was the idea that
there wasn’t a conventional frontline. It was kind of, Get in their
own backyard and take it to them in their own way, in their own
neighborhood.”
That same basic concept—of infiltrating
the enemy’s territory, his perceived safe haven, and initiating
contact at a time of the team’s choosing—remains at the heart of
modern special ops. In the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the
special ops outfits infiltrated deep into the respective countries and
leveraged their basic strategic superiority to overwhelm the enemy.
For
many in the press, this seemed like a wholly new construction, something
novel and untried. But for the LRP and Ranger veterans of the Vietnam
War, it must’ve seemed like old hat. To them, the new guys weren’t
using new tactics at all, but rather updated versions of old
techniques—the same techniques that they’d pioneered, some
thirty-plus years earlier, in the jungles of Vietnam.
© 2003 John P. Brackin
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