People's Army of Vietnam Special Forces

The Pochentong raid

On the night of January 21–22, 1971, a hundred or so-strong PAVN "Sapper" managed to infiltrated through the defensive perimeter of the Special Military Region (Région Militaire Speciale – RMS) set by the Cambodian Army around Phnom Penh and carried out a raid on Pochentong airbase. Form into six smaller squad armed mostly with AK-47 assault rifles and RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers, the PAVN raiders succeeded in scaling the barbed-wire fence and quickly overwhelmed the poorly armed airmen of the Security Battalion on duty that night. Once inside the facility, the raiders used small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades against any aircraft they found on the parking area adjacent to the runway and nearby buildings; one of the commando teams scaled the adjoining commercial terminal of the civilian airport and after taking position at the international restaurant located on the roof and fired a rocket into the napalm supply depot near the RVNAF apron.

Afterward, the Khmer Air Force had been virtually annihilated. A total of 69 aircraft stationed at Pochentong at the time were either completely destroyed or severely damaged on the ground, including many T-28D Trojans, nearly all the Shenyang, MiG, T-37B and Fouga Magister jets, all the L-19A Bird Dogs and An-2 transports, the UH-1 helicopter gunships, three VNAF O-1 Bird Dogs and a VIP transport recently presented to President Lon Nol by the South Vietnamese government. Apart from the aircraft losses, 39 AVNK officers and enlisted men had died and another 170 were injured. The only airframes that remained were six T-28D Trojans temporarily deployed to Battambang, ten GY-80 Horizon light trainers (also stationed at Battambang), eight Alouette II and Alouette III helicopters, two Sikorsky H-34 helicopters, one T-37B jet trainer, and a single Fouga Magister jet that had been grounded for repairs. Pochentong airbase was closed for almost a week while the damage was assessed, wreckage removed, the runway repaired, and the stocks of fuel and ammunitions replenished.^[5][6][7][8]

Similar raids occurred the following year against U-Tapao Airfield which housed Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers, with three bombers being damaged and a Thai sentry killed.^[9]

Training of foreign commando units in Southeast Asia and Latin America

The effectiveness of the Dac Cong during the Vietnam War saw them instruct various other countries and Marxist rebel groups. From the 1970s to 1990s, they covertly provided training at the PAVN Special Forces School in Vietnam, by Vietnamese advisors assigned to the Cuban Army’s Sapper School in Cuba, and, during the 1980s, by a secret Vietnamese sapper training team stationed in Nicaragua.  In addition to training Cambodian, Laotian, Soviet, and Cuban military personnel, their publications revealed that among the foreign revolutionary forces that received training in tactics, bomb-making, and the use of weapons and explosives, were members of the Marxist El Salvadoran FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), the Chilean MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) fighting against the regime of Augusto Pinochet, as well as the Colombian FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) movement.^[10]