MACV-SOG Hated These Pieces Of Gear In Vietnam 

MACV-SOG Hated These Pieces Of Gear In Vietnam 

Somewhere west of the border, an American soldier unpacks his kit before a mission. He takes the steel helmet the army issued him and sets it aside. Then the armored vest. Then the poncho, the entrenching tool, and his own dog tags. By the time he finishes, most of what the United States Army gave him is sitting in a pile on the tent floor.

 He is not being careless. What nobody outside that compound knew was that leaving all of it behind was the best chance he had of coming home. The equipment designed to keep him alive was the exact equipment most likely to get him killed. In 1968, that was not one man’s opinion. That was standard practice.

 The unit was called the Studies and Observations Group. And behind that deliberately boring name sat the most secret ground unit of the Vietnam War. Roughly 2,000 Americans passed through it across eight years, and only a few hundred of those ran reconnaissance and direct action missions across borders where American troops were not officially supposed to exist.

 So what they carried and what they threw on the floor was a life and death decision every single time they went out. Let’s start with the two items every other American soldier in Vietnam was ordered to wear. The steel helmet and the fragmentation vest. standard issue, non-negotiable for a conventional infantryman, and almost never seen on a reconnaissance man working across the fence.

 John Striker Meyer ran a team out of the forward operating base at Pubai in 1968 and 1969, and he put it about as plainly as it can be put. No recon men wore helmets, helmet liners, or armored vests of any sort. None of it. The flack jacket in particular soaked up water in the humidity until it was heavier wet than dry.

 And it turned an already brutal load into an impossible one. And the load was already brutal. Meyer once weighed his own gear on a small scale at Pubai and it came out at roughly 90 lb. One of his teammates, Douglro, carried more than 100. So the calculation was not about whether armor works. Armor works.

 The calculation was that a six-man team a long way from any friendly position does not survive a firefight. It survives by never being found in the first place. Protection you can hear coming is not protection. It is an announcement. Which brings us to the second category. And this one is stranger than it sounds. The gear they threw away was not thrown away because it failed.

 It was thrown away because of the sound it made. Think about what a standard American soldier in 1967 carried. A metal canteen in a metal cup with a cap on a little chain, a rubber poncho, an entrenching tool, and dog tags around the neck. Every one of those rattles, clinks, or crackles. Lynn Black Jr., who came to the unit from the 173rd Airborne, described what a normal American squad sounded like moving through jungle.

 He said a squad of guys sounded like a Chinese drum line. Louis Deeda, who made the same transition, described the fix from the other side. They carried nothing that made any noise, and everything was taped down or tied down. So, the cantens got taped, the magazines got taped along both edges. The dog tags came off entirely.

 No ponchos because unfolding one sounds like tearing paper when the enemy is 15 ft away. No cooking. No smoking. Meyer even swapped his rifle sling for a piece of rope with the ends taped because the issue sling was noisy against the weapon. Now, here is the part that still doesn’t make sense on paper.

 The most famous weapon associated with this unit is a compact carbine, and the magazines that fed it were a constant problem. The larger 30 round magazine existed. Recon men just could not get it. In the Tactical Rifleman interview, Meyer says it flatly that they never saw 30 round magazines. That is a man who fought all day running gunfights against pursuing enemy units, doing it 20 rounds at a time.

 There was a second problem stacked on top. For much of the war, the unit was issued magazine pouches built for a completely different rifle, the M14. So, the pouches did not properly fit the magazines being carried. Historian and former recon man John Plaster documented both. The workaround was pure improvisation.

 Old Browning automatic rifle belts whose pouches happened to hold four magazines perfectly. Stretched canteen covers which held six. And when the supply system could not deliver, team leaders bought commercial 30 round magazines out of the back of a guns and ammo advertisement with their own money. A national supply chain worth billions of dollars.

 And the fix came from a magazine ad. Pay attention to this next detail because it is where most videos on this subject get it badly wrong. You have probably heard about the boots. The story goes that this unit was issued reversed tread boots or boots with a bare foot pattern molded into the sole so their tracks would look indigenous and enemy trackers would be fooled.

Those boots are real. They were produced by the unit’s own private supply operation. The counterinsurgency support office on Okinawa run by a quartermaster named Conrad Baker who could get his people equipment the regular army could not or would not provide. But the popular version of the story leaves out the ending.

 Here is Meyer sitting in front of the actual boots being asked that exact question >> raction to where you guys would occasionally wear these or there was another uh another boot that had actually a foot >> pattern on the bottom. So >> that came from SISO our supply. >> Yes, >> in Okinawa. >> Indeed Baker. >> If if you wanted Ed Baker. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so if you actually wanted to get a uh leave like a footprint or leave um an indigenous print, then then you would sometimes uh >> Yeah, we never we never got to this far to us wearing it >> because uh one thing about the our jungle boots, we had that metal plate. So, if we ever or >> think about stepping on something more explosive, >> true.

>> You know, that would protect your foot a little bit at least. >> And we had we given the option, well, we would have thought about it, but who knows? The Vibram tread on an American jungle boot was a genuine problem. In an area where no American was supposed to be walking, that print was a signature. But the solution was not the fake foot boot.

 The unit’s own answer was the steel plate in the sole of the standard jungle boot, which protected against pungi stakes, and as Meyer notes, gave you at least some protection against stepping on something explosive. Given the choice between disguising your footprint and keeping your foot, they kept the foot. There is one more category to cover before we get to the radios, and it is the one where the gap between reputation and reality is widest.

Silent weapons. Everybody knows this unit used suppressed weapons for taking prisoners and for dealing with trackers and dogs. That part is true. What is less known is how much the men actually carrying them disliked them. A suppressed weapon in this era fired a pistol round, and a pistol round carried two weaknesses at once.

 The first is obvious. It did not reliably put a man down. The Swedish K, a 9mm submachine gun supplied through the Central Intelligence Agency, was judged inadequate for knocking enemies down and keeping them down in the kind of running fights these teams ended up in. Men were carrying 13 magazines of it, close to 500 rounds, and still came away feeling undergunned.

The second weakness is the one almost nobody thinks about. A suppressed weapon produces no muzzle blast in a firefight. Muzzle blast is not a side effect. It is doing work. As Plaster put it, in the noise of a gunfight, the enemy heard no blast to deter his assault or make him take cover.

 You could be shooting at a man and watch him keep walking toward you because nothing about your weapon was telling his body to be afraid. Then there was the upkeep. The suppressed grease gun added roughly three pounds and needed the metal mesh inside its suppressor cleaned out. And the Stin, for all its reputation, had a bolt that clacked loudly enough to be the noisiest thing about a supposedly quiet weapon, which is why a lot of men carried them broken down in a rucks sack and reached for something else.

 Before we go on, if you are finding this useful, subscribing genuinely helps this channel keep doing the research instead of recycling the same three stories everyone else tells. Enter the piece of equipment that everybody hated and nobody could leave behind. The A/Prc25 field radio. Every account of this unit agrees on two things about it.

 It was essential and it was miserable. Meyer described it as taking up the most space in his rucks sack and elsewhere said it weighed a ton and was famous for being inconsistent in the field. The unit’s own training material at the 10 zero school told new team leaders the same thing in flatter language that the radio weighs about 25 lb and takes up enough room that it limits what else you can carry.

 But weight was not the real problem. Carrying it made you a target. The North Vietnamese army put a high priority on destroying the radios or killing the operators because the radio was the link to American air power and air power was the only thing that made a six-man team survivable at all. Meyer hid his antenna under his arm for exactly that reason and even then it often did not work.

 The radio needed line of sight and the terrain was limestone carst and triple canopy jungle close to the worst possible environment for that. Teams leaned on a forward air controller circling overhead to relay their transmissions or on fixed relay sites built on mountaintops. If the aircraft went home, the radio became 25 lb of dead weight, which is exactly when they reached for the backup.

 And the backup is the item on this list with the highest cost of failure. The A/UrC10 was a survival radio carried in the upper left jacket pocket, single channel and meant to be monitored at all times by every aircraft over the operational area. On the 6th of October 1968, Meyer’s team was on the ground and in trouble, and he turned on the emergency beeper.

 In his own account, nobody answered. Help arrived only because a fighter returning from an unrelated bombing run happened to hear the signal. One channel and no guarantee anyone is listening. That is a lifeline that only works if a stranger happens to be in the right piece of sky. The last item is the one that actually killed people.

 And unusually, we can name the moment it got replaced. The Maguire rig was how you got a man out of jungle with no landing zone. It was a cargo strap cut down to length with a wrist loop on the end, dangled from a hovering helicopter. You sat in the loop, put your hands through the straps, and held on while the aircraft lifted you out through the canopy.

 It worked, but it depended entirely on the strength and the consciousness of the man using it. Your hands were not free. You could not fire a weapon. And if you were badly wounded, you could not reliably hold on. During one combat extraction, a wounded special forces soldier fell out of a Meguire rig. Sergeant Firstclass Clifford Roberts sketched a replacement design on a napkin.

 Working with Major Robert Stevens and Captain John Nab at the Ricondo School at NA training, he turned it into a full body harness worn as the man’s own loadbearing equipment. So, it was already on him. His hands stayed free and it would hold an unconscious man. They called it the Stavo rig and Roberts received a Bronze Star for the design.

 It went into wide production in 1970. A man had to fall out of the sky before that got fixed. Now, one correction, because this channel would rather be right than viral. Search this topic and you will find video after video claiming this unit hated its rifle, that the carbines jammed constantly, that men threw them away and picked up enemy weapons instead.

That is a real story from the Vietnam War. It is just not this unit’s story. The jamming crisis belonged to the early rifles issued to conventional army and marine units and it was serious enough that Congress investigated. The special subcommittee on the M16 rifle program reported in October 1967 and found the ammunition powder and the unlined chamber were the root causes.

 Special forces had been using this rifle family early and by choice. The carbine had real faults. The flash suppressor fouled with debris. The muzzle blast was loud and the short barrel spun rounds hard enough to affect their flight. Recon men took every one of those trade-offs because plaster who carried one for years called it the finest combat weapon he ever used.

 So the version you have heard that they hated their rifle is not the full picture. They hated the 20 round magazine. They loved the gun. And that distinction is the point of this whole list. This was not a unit that hated equipment. It was a unit handed a mission the standard supply system was never designed for, then left to make up the difference itself.

 With tape, with rope, with private purchases, with a napkin sketch, and with a supply officer on Okinawa, quietly building what the army would not. Almost every piece of gear on this list was eventually fixed, replaced, or abandoned. It just took someone getting hurt first nearly every time.