Nick Brokhausen
Nick Brokhausen served with MACV-SOG — the Military Assistance Command Vietnam's top-secret special operations group — running recon missions deep into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. His two memoirs, We Few and Whispers in the Tall Grass, are among the most recently published and most operationally honest accounts of cross-border SOG operations. Brokhausen writes without the institutional filter that shapes many Vietnam memoirs: the missions, the casualties, the institutional absurdities, and the genuine professional pride of men who were very good at one of the most dangerous jobs in American military history.
Background
Nick Brokhausen ran Recon Team Habu with MACV-SOG, operating out of Forward Operating Bases that inserted small teams into denied territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. He served during the period when SOG operations were at their most intense — 1969 through 1971 — when the NVA had developed dedicated anti-recon formations specifically designed to find and destroy American Recon Teams before they could report what they'd seen.
Brokhausen did not write his memoirs immediately after the war. We Few was published in 2011, more than forty years after the events it describes. That distance is visible in the writing: Brokhausen has had time to process what happened, to cross-reference his recollections against the documentary record that has gradually become available as SOG's missions were declassified, and to write with the perspective that immediate post-war accounts often lack. The result is unusually clear-eyed about what worked, what didn't, and what the institutional pressures were that shaped decisions both good and bad.
Whispers in the Tall Grass, published in 2021, is the previously unpublished account of Brokhausen's second tour — when the war had entered a new phase, the NVA's counter-recon capability had improved substantially, and the casualties among experienced SOG operators were accelerating. The two books together form the most complete recent account of what it meant to run recon for MACV-SOG.
The Writing
Brokhausen writes with dark humor and operational specificity. The humor is not a defensive posture or a way of avoiding the weight of what he's describing — it's the natural voice of a professional who dealt with impossible situations by finding what was absurd in them. SOG operations were simultaneously the most serious work imaginable and riddled with institutional absurdities that would be funny if people weren't dying. Brokhausen captures both registers without forcing them to resolve into something more comfortable.
The operational detail is what separates We Few and Whispers from many Vietnam memoirs. Brokhausen explains why specific tactical decisions were made — why a particular insertion point was chosen, why a patrol moved at a certain pace, what the signs were that a team was being followed rather than simply observed. This makes the books genuinely useful for understanding how cross-border SOG operations actually functioned, not just what it felt like to be in them.
He is also unusually honest about failure — his own, his unit's, and the system's. Missions that went wrong, decisions that made things worse, moments where the institutional pressure to produce intelligence resulted in operational risks that killed people. That honesty is what makes Brokhausen's account more valuable than sanitized memoirs that present special operations as a sequence of professional successes with acceptable losses.
The Series
We Few
We Few (2011) and Whispers in the Tall Grass (2021) — the two-volume account of Recon Team Habu's SOG operations in Laos and North Vietnam. Read We Few first.