In the final months of World War II, a small team of American commandos parachuted into the mountains of northern Vietnam to train Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas to fight Japan. They were members of the OSS Deer Team, a short-lived mission that joined U.S. troops and Vietnamese revolutionaries against a common enemy—two decades before the United States would return to Vietnam as their adversary. OSS Missions in the Jungles of Vietnam In July 1945, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services—the wartime