Donald Blackburn

Donald Blackburn (1916 - 2008) ) was a United States Army officer who, throughout a long career, was a specialist in insurgency, counterinsurgency and special operations before that was recognized as a specialty, and certainly before it was a prestigious area in the U.S. military.

He became a U.S. Army reserve second lieutenant in 1938, and was assigned to duty in the Phillipines in 1940.

Filipino-American resistance to the Japanese

Blackburn, as a junior officer when the Japanese conquered the Phillipines, refused to surrender, and built a major and effective guerilla organization, working well with both Americans and Filipinos. At the end of the war, he was the youngest full colonel in the United States Army, which was not quite sure what to do with a combat-proven 29-year-old colonel. As an indication of the contemporary career dead end that was special operations, twenty years later, he was still a colonel, with the longest time in grade of any colonel in the Army.

Vietnam War: MACV-SOG

Blackburn, once the youngest colonel in the U.S. Army and now, the colonel with the longest tenure at that rank, became the second commander of MACV-SOG. For special operations at the time, this was an unusual case of putting "the square peg in the square hole"; most of the commanders had no experience operating intelligence collection or covert action as an insurgent in an area controlled by a hostile government. Those, however, were exactly the things he did in the Phillipines.

Vietnam War: Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities

Later in the war, he was the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA) to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most notably during Operation IVORY COAST, the attempted rescue of American prisoners of war from the camp at Son Tay in North Vietnam