Billy Waugh, 93, `Godfather of the Green Berets,' dead

Billy Waugh, a near-legendary covert operative who honed his skills in unconventional warfare during the Vietnam War, helped the CIA hunt down terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden, and, in his 70s, fought in Afghanistan, died April 4. He was 93.

His death was confirmed in a statement on Twitter by the Army’s First Special Forces Command, which lauded him as having “inspired a generation of special operations.” It did not say where he died.

The service website Military.com, using the colloquial name for Special Forces made famous during the Vietnam War, called Waugh “the unparalleled godfather of the Green Berets” for his long years of service and numerous missions with them. The New York Times once described him as a “former CIA paramilitary officer who seems to have cut quite a swashbuckling path.”

“He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire, as far as he could get, living large and defending his country,” Cofer Black, a former CIA counterterrorism chief who supervised Waugh, said.

Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War.

Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which

NEW YORK >> required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000 feet or more, he said.

And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“There was no rest at SOG, only war recon, rescue, sleep,” Waugh told Annie Jacobsen in her 2019 book, “Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins.”

In June 1965, Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in a rice paddy. Thinking he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.

“I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in “Hunting the Jackal,” his 2005 autobiography. “Damn, my military career is finished.”

He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis. Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Davis helped Waugh crawl to a helicopter.

Those actions by Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Joe Biden in 2021. Waugh received the Silver Star.

William Dawson Waugh was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Bastrop, Texas.