RIP LTG Sam Wilson

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Gen. Wilson — he was known as “General Sam” — served for nearly four decades in military intelligence, having lied about his age to enlist in the National Guard at 16. Peter Schoomaker, a retired general who served as Army chief of staff from 2003 to 2007, said in an interview that Gen. Wilson was a “quiet giant” who did “much that nobody will ever know about” and “an awful lot of things that you see movies made about.”

During World War II, he joined the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime precursor to the CIA, and was chief reconnaissance officer with Merrill’s Marauders, a storied unit that operated in the China-Burma-India theater.

He later became a Russian specialist with influential posts during the Cold War, among them U.S. defense attache in Moscow. Joseph L. Galloway, a friend of Gen. Wilson’s and author of several books on the military, said that Gen. Wilson wore both an “Army uniform and a CIA officer’s hat” — serving secretly, while defense attache, also as CIA station chief in Moscow.

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As one of Merrill’s Marauders, he discovered and penetrated a weak point in Japanese lines, then rode 30 miles on horseback back to Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill to set the stage for what DIA described as “the first engagement of U.S. ground combat force on the continent of Asia” in World War II. He was an adviser on the 1962 film “Merrill’s Marauders” and, credited as Vaughan Wilson, played the general’s assistant.

His subsequent career took him to Vietnam in the early days of the war there. He also recalled that he “roamed the five continents and the seven seas, strolled in the market places from Marrakesh to Baghdad to Samarkand and Ulaanbaatar, browsed in the book stalls of Paris, Berlin, Moscow, [Beijing] and Tokyo, watched the sun rise out of the South China Sea and set in the Indian Ocean, the moon come up over the snows of the Himalayas and the lightning play in the peaks of the Andes.”

Gen. Wilson made those remarks in a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, a men’s liberal arts school in Virginia, where he was president from 1992 to 2000.

In an announcement of his death, the college credited Gen. Wilson with leading the school through a period of declining enrollment, when school officials considered becoming a coeducational institution. The board ultimately decided in 1996 to continue the school’s tradition as a college for men.

Gen. Wilson’s decorations included the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit, according to his family. His intelligence decorations included the Director of National Intelligence’s Distinguished Service Medal.

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