DailyProgress.com - Special Operations reunion brings... -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 10/14/2002
Last Visited: 10/14/2002
On Christmas Eve 1970, Capt. Jim Butler and other recon men gathered in the club and willed one of our colleagues back home.
"All the recon teams had been brought back to camp because of Christmas except for Dale Dehnke and his team," said Butler, founder of SOA."He and his team were in Laos and couldn't get out because they were socked in by bad weather.
"My mother had shipped me one of those little papier-mache Christmas trees with the blinking lights.I took it into the recon club and put it on the bar.
"I turned it on and it started playing 'Silent Night.' Everybody stopped their partying and came over.
...
By the fall of 1971 SOG had been deactivated and most of the men had been reassigned to the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Devens, Mass. Butler was among them.
"I proposed that all the SOG guys get together on Christmas Eve at the Rod and Gun Club at Devens," Butler said."I think 36 guys showed up and we all firmly attested that this organization and our love and friendship was never going to die, and we were going to live for the guys we had left behind.
"We swore we would always be there for everyone who had ever served on the recon teams at CCN.When I got out of the military in 1975 I tried to assimilate myself into the Special Forces Association, and I took a look at the local VFW and American Legion.
"I didn't fit into any of those groups, and there wasn't this unbelievable brotherhood that we had formed at CCN.
...
So in the fall of 1977 I put out the word that we were going to get together the week before Christmas in Vegas to party and reaffirm the vows we had made in '71 at the Rod and Gun Club," Butler said.
...
"It's a hell of a lot more sedate now than it used to be," said Butler as he sat at one of the tables in the large hospitality room that doubles as a banquet hall.
"During the first five or six years these get-togethers weren't something you would want to bring your wife to.We were fun-loving kids.
"Let's just say our first reunions were wild, and let it go at that."
Amen.
12 online sources [ view sources ]
Profile is not claimed [ claim profile ]
