Lynn Waugh News Today

Within the tight-knit communities of Green Berets and CIA covert warriors, Waugh is known as "the Yoda of Special Forces."

"There was no one like Billy," former colleague and close friend Enrique "Ric" Prado tells PEOPLE. "What is there not to love about a national hero?"

He was a Special Forces soldier during the Vietnam War then worked for the C.I.A., tracking Osama bin Laden in Sudan and fighting in Afghanistan after 9/11.

Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War.