On the morning of May 20th, 1968, six men climbed into a helicopter at a secret base in South Vietnam and flew west across the border into Laos, a country the United States swore it had no troops in. A few minutes after they touched the ground, they sent back a single radio message. Two words. Team okay.
Those were the last words anyone ever heard from them. There were no bodies, no wreckage, not even a grave. 58 years later, they are still out there somewhere in that jungle. And the rescue team sent in to find them? They barely made it out alive. To understand how six trained Green Berets could simply vanish, you have to understand where they were sent.
And officially, they were never there at all. By 1968, the Vietnam War had a hidden front. Just across the border in supposedly neutral Laos and Cambodia, the North Vietnamese had built a vast supply network called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Tens of thousands of troops, trucks, fuel, and weapons moved down it every month feeding the war in the South. The problem was political.
Laos was officially neutral. On paper, the United States was not allowed to have a single boot on that ground. So, it built a unit that didn’t exist. The name was deliberately boring. The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group. MACV-SOG. Behind that dull title was one of the most secret and most dangerous commands of the entire war.
SOG sent small reconnaissance teams across the border to watch the trail, tap enemy phone lines, grab prisoners, and call in air strikes. The men who served in it signed agreements to stay silent for 20 years. These cross-border missions had their own code name, Prairie Fire, and the teams that ran them were tiny.
Usually two or three Americans paired with a handful of indigenous fighters dropped into territory crawling with an enemy that outnumbered them hundreds to one. According to the veterans who survived it, intelligence believed 40 to 50,000 North Vietnamese troops were operating in that stretch of Laos alone. The math was brutal.
SOG Recon is often described as having a casualty rate unlike almost anything else in modern American military history. Every man knew the odds when he got on the helicopter, they went anyway. One of those teams was called Spike Team Idaho. Spike Team Idaho flew out of a SOG base called FO B-1 near Phu Bai, just south of the old Imperial City of Hue is.
On May 20th, 1968, the team that boarded the helicopter was led by a man named Glenn Oliver Lane. Lane was 36 years old from Texas. He wasn’t some green kid. He had already fought in Korea before he ever set foot in Vietnam, and by 1968, he was one of the most respected team leaders on the base.
In SOG, the American team leader was called the one-zero. It was a title you earned, not a rank you were handed, and Lane had earned it on mission after mission across the fence. Just days before this one, he had recommended another soldier for promotion to lead his own team. By pure chance, that recommendation is the only reason that soldier wasn’t on the helicopter on May 20th, remember him.
He comes back into this story later. The second American was Robert Owen, the 1-1, the assistant team leader. Owen was 29 from Virginia, and his story is the kind of thing that stays with you. He had reportedly lied about his age to enlist at just 14 years old. Three weeks before the mission, Owen had been home on leave.
And to save money for his family, he hitchhiked the entire way back across the country instead of buying a ticket. Before he left, he made his young daughter a promise. He told her he would be home for her birthday. With them were four indigenous teammates, South Vietnamese and ethnic Nung fighters who made up the rest of the team.
We know they were there. We know they died alongside Lane and Owen, but here is the part that tells you everything about the secret war. Their names were never recorded in any public list we can find today. Six men got on that helicopter, only two of them have names we can still say out loud.
There was one more witness at the base that morning. A young replacement, brand new to the unit, who had landed at FOB 1 that very same day. In ’68, by May of ’68, which this was, it was like around May 22nd, 23rd, um Idaho went in to give a team okay, and they were never heard from again. And the bright light went in 2 days later, and George Sternberg, Mike Tucker, and Perry, Mike Perry went in.
And um they ran they made instant contact with the NVA. The NVA had uh CAR-15s, and they had M-26 frag grenades, one of which blew off the boots of George Sternberg. And so everybody was wounded, some critically, and they had one team member that was KIA on that. That replacement was John Striker Meyer.
He would go on to lead Spike Team Idaho himself, survive his own brushes with death in that same jungle, and decades later become one of the few people willing to tell these stories out loud. On May 20th, he was just the new guy watching six men he barely knew lift off toward the border.
The aircraft carrying them wasn’t even American. So, G teams were often flown by South Vietnamese crews in aging H-34 helicopters they nicknamed King Bees from the 219th Special Operations Squadron. The King Bee carried Spike Team Idaho West out of South Vietnam and across the border into a target area marked on their maps as W-5, Whiskey 5. The insertion went in clean.
The helicopter flared into a small landing zone, the team jumped out, and the King Bee pulled away leaving six men alone in enemy territory. Then came the radio call. “Team okay.” The standard signal that the team was on the ground and safe. Up above, in a small spotter plane the teams called Covey, the crew acknowledged it and settled in to relay communications.
That is the version most people know. But the case file later compiled on this mission adds a colder detail. According to that record, when the team made contact, they reported that they couldn’t even talk because North Vietnamese soldiers were already all around them. They had been dropped almost on top of the enemy.
And then the radio went quiet. At first, nobody panicked. Silence wasn’t unusual. A team moving carefully through enemy ground might go quiet for hours to avoid being heard. So, Covey kept circling, kept calling. Nothing. As the afternoon dragged on, the calls got more urgent. Still nothing. Through the night, command aircraft tried to raise them on every frequency they had.
The jungle just swallowed the signal. By the next morning, the mood at FOB 1 had changed completely. A team that goes silent for an hour is being careful. A team that goes silent for a full day, right after reporting the enemy was on top of them, is in serious trouble or already gone. The men at the base knew what that silence usually meant, but they also knew the one rule that defined SOG.
You do not leave your people behind. Not ever. If there was even a chance Lane, Owen, and the four indigenous soldiers were alive out there hiding, wounded, or captured, then someone had to go in after them. That someone would be another recon team, and what happened to them is the part of this story almost no one knows.
In SOG, a rescue mission for a missing or surrounded team had its own name. A bright light. It was the single most dangerous job in an already suicidal line of work because you were deliberately flying into the exact spot where another team had just been overwhelmed. You knew the enemy was still there. You went anyway.
Two days after Idaho vanished, a team called Spike Team Oregon loaded onto the Kingbees to run the bright light. Three Americans led it. The 1-0, Mike Tucker, a Green Beret named George Sternberg, and a young medic named Steven Perry, who would later write one of the only first-hand accounts of what happened next.
With them were their own indigenous teammates, including a striker named Ha. They were inserted into the same landing zone Idaho had used. And almost immediately, they found the first clue. A freshly cut trail leading away from the LZ through the elephant grass. They followed it.
About 50 m in, they found the signs of a fight. Craters from concussion grenades. Proof that something violent had happened right there. And then, the jungle erupted. A North Vietnamese force, described as company-sized, hit them from several directions at once. But it was what the enemy was shooting that told the real story.
The NVA were firing American CAR-15 rifles. They were throwing American M26 grenades. Those were Spike Team Idaho’s weapons. The enemy had taken them. And now they were using Idaho’s own guns against the men who came to find them. That single detail is the closest thing this case has to an answer.
It meant Idaho hadn’t slipped away into the jungle and gone to ground. They had been overrun. Their gear stripped and turned around. For Spike Team Oregon, the next few minutes were a fight just to stay alive. The volume of fire was so heavy that a one Skyraider attack planes had to make gun runs almost directly on top of the team to hold the enemy back.
Every single American on the ground was wounded. One of the indigenous soldiers was killed. And Ha, the striker, was hit again, and again, and again. By the accounts of the men who were there, he was wounded 94 times and somehow lived. A third helicopter tried to push in to help.
On board was the very soldier Lane had recommended for promotion days earlier, the man I told you to remember, nicknamed Spider Parks. As they came in, they checked a bomb crater where survivors might be hiding. There was no one left to save. On the way out, the door gunner sitting right next to Parks was shot and killed.
The bright light was called off. There would be no ground search after that. The area was simply too thick with the enemy to throw another team into it. Spike team Oregon limped home shot to pieces having lost men of their own and having found no living trace of the six they were sent to bring back.
And that, in the most painful sense, was that. Glenn Lane and Robert Owen were officially listed as missing in action. For years, that status hung in limbo. The way it did for so many SOG men whose missions technically never happened in countries the United States technically wasn’t fighting in. Owen was eventually declared dead in 1973.
Lane in 1974. But declared dead is not the same as found. No remains were ever recovered. No grave was ever marked. In the decades since, the men of SOG fought a second war. This one just to be acknowledged at all. John Stryker Meyer, the veteran who took over Spike team Idaho, has written that Lane and Owen are among roughly 50 Green Berets still missing from the secret war in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam alongside dozens of air crew who died trying to support them. Spider Parks, the man who survived that helicopter, never let it go. In the years after the war, he reportedly went back to that landing zone in Laos more than once. He even tracked down former North Vietnamese soldiers who had fought in the area, trying to piece together what really happened to his friends.
He came home with no remains and no certainty. And today, the United States government still has not closed the file. The agency responsible for finding missing service members, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, still lists both Glenn Lane and Robert Owen as unaccounted for. Their case sits in a category the agency calls active pursuit, meaning it’s still considered open and still being worked.
They are two names among more than 1,500 Americans who are still missing from the Vietnam War. You can find Lane and Owen today on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Glenn Lane is on panel 66 East Line 10. Robert Owen is on panel 67 East Line 1. Their names are cut into the same black granite as everyone else.
The only difference is a small symbol carved beside each name, a cross instead of a diamond, the mark the memorial uses for the missing, the ones who never came home and were never found. And somewhere in the hills of Laos, in a place Spike Team Idaho was never officially supposed to be, four South Vietnamese and Nung soldiers lie in unmarked ground.
Their names lost entirely, the teammates that history forgot to write down. Robert Owen promised his daughter he’d be home for her birthday. He never made it, but she didn’t forget him, and neither did the men he served with. For more than 50 years, they’ve refused to let these names disappear, even when the war that killed them was a secret they were ordered to take to their graves.
That’s really why this story matters, not just how six men vanished, but how hard people have fought to make sure they’re remembered. As long as someone is still searching, the story isn’t over. If you want to understand the secret war that swallowed Spike Team Idaho, the missions these men ran across the fence, and why almost none of it could be told for 20 years, the video on screen right now breaks down how MACV-SOG actually operated. Watch that next.
And if you believe these men have earned it, the simplest way to honor them is to make sure their story keeps getting told.
