PALISADES PARK — Sgt. Gunther Herbert Wald will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery Thursday with full military honors. For his son, Michael Buetow, "it's a long time coming."

Buetow, 43, never got to meet his father, who was killed near the Laotian-Vietnamese border in 1969. "All I knew growing up was he went to Vietnam and never came back," he told NJ.com.

Very few people did know about the circumstances of Wald's death, which remained classified for 20 years after he and two other soldiers were ambushed during a reconnaissance patrol in Quang Tri Province. That's because the three men were members of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, an Army Special Forces team that conducted covert operations in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Wald was identified following a series of nine expeditions into the province, which eventually turned up the remains of the three soldiers, later confirmed through DNA testing.

It took more than 40 years.

Soldier in a 'secret war'

On Nov. 3, 1969, Wald and two other members of Reconnaissance Team Maryland were inserted near Huong Lap Village with six Vietnamese soldiers for a reconnaissance patrol operation, according to the Department of Defense. The Americans were Wald; Army Sgt. 1st Class William T. Brown, 24, of La Habra, Calif.; and Sgt. 1st Class Donald M. Shue, 20, of Kannapolis, N.C.

Not long into the patrol, North Vietnamese soldiers attacked. Brown suffered a gunshot wound to his side, and Wald and Shue were injured by enemy fragmentation grenades.

"My father got a grenade to the chest," Buetow said.

Bad weather and a heavy enemy presence kept search-and-rescue teams away for days, but on Nov. 11, they recovered some of Shue's gear. That's all they'd find for more than 30 years.

Flags in New Jersey are flying at half-staff Thursday in memory of Wald, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1944 before moving to Palisades Park. He joined the Army in June of 1967, after a four-year stint in the Marine Corps, and was sent to Vietnam as a Green Beret.

John Stryker Meyer, an author and Special Forces veteran who met Wald while serving in South Vietnam in 1968, told NJ.com that the men were part of an elite team with "the highest casualty rate of the Vietnam War."

SOG team members were required to sign a 20-year agreement saying they would not discuss their operations — part of what Myers called "a secret war."

"For eight years this war went on," he said. "It was just something that was hidden from the public."

Earl Swift, a journalist whose 2003 book "Where They Lay" chronicled an expedition similar to the one that turned up Wald's remains, told NJ.com that SOG soldiers "were exceptionally well-trained and in exceptionally difficult circumstances where they knew if they got into trouble, no one was helping them out."

Their operations were covert; their actions deliberate.

"These guys weren't allowed to smoke Marlboros," Swift said. "They weren't allowed to leave behind any clues that would identify them as American."

'A long time coming'

People describe Michael Buetow as a quiet and serious character, like his father. But Buetow, who lives in Spring Hope, N.C., had to learn what he could second-hand about Wald.

His mother and father met while Wald was stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C. She was a waitress at a drive-in restaurant. He had a '64 Chevy Impala. Wald shipped off to Vietnam before his son was born, in February of 1969. When he got older, Buetow enlisted, too.

"I didn't really know him, and I wanted something to identify with him," he said.

He joined the Navy, serving on the U.S.S. Saginaw during Operation Desert Storm. Buetow's son, named Gunther, is an Army helicopter mechanic. "He loves his job," his father said.

Between 1993 and 2010, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, made nine trips in and out of the Quang Tri Province looking for the remains of Reconnaissance Team Maryland. Operating out of Hawaii, JPAC conducts archaeological excavations all over the world to find what's left of those who never came home.

"It's kind of an 'Indiana Jones' enterprise that takes military personnel and scientists to the most remote corners of the most remote places on the planet," Swift said.

In a memorial piece written for SOFREP.com, a special operations forces news site, Meyer, the author and Special Forces veteran, wrote that, "To the men who fought in the secret war, we are grateful that Wald, Brown and Shue are home."

"But we are also reminded that there are still more than 50 Green Berets assigned to SOG who fought in the secret war in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam and remain listed as missing in action, grim reminders of how deadly that war was," he wrote.

The remains of more than 900 American soldiers killed in Vietnam have been returned to the U.S. since 1973, according to figures from the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, a military organization that accounts for the dead and missing. By their count, more than 1,600 remain unaccounted for.

When found, Army scientists have to rely on mitochondrial DNA and circumstantial evidence to positively identify the soldiers, as was the case with Wald, Brown and Shue. But in the jungles of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, where the soil is thick and acidic and the rain falls in buckets, very little is left behind.

"So how unusual is it? It's unbelievable, really," Swift said.

A military burial

A farmer near Huong Lap Village first came across the remains of Reconnaissance Team Maryland in 2007. Buetow said he'd been told that the man discovered the remains while digging and, scared by what he found, reburied them.

Eventually he had a change of heart and alerted the authorities. A JPAC team excavated the area in 2010. Along with what was left of the bodies, they found military equipment, Brown's dog tag and Shue's lighter.

"If it weren't for that Vietnamese farmer, my dad would still be out there," Buetow said. It took time, but JPAC was able to positively identify the three. Buetow calls it "closure."

He'll be there Thursday at 11 a.m. when Wald, Brown and Shue are scheduled to be interred at Arlington. The three men, missing together since 1969, will share a single casket.

Related coverage:

• MACV-SOG: RT Maryland's Final Mission | SOFREP.com

• Homecoming for a Veteran of the 'Secret War' in Southeast Asia | NYTimes.com

• Palisades Park soldier MIA in Vietnam War to be buried in Arlington