The Unauthorized Weapons Vietnam Grunts Used Anyway

The Unauthorized Weapons Vietnam Grunts Used Anyway

Imagine yourself in the A Shau valley.  The rain falling sideways.  The line of trees is filled with an enemy that outnumbers you 10 to 1. You reach for the weapon you trust most, not the rifle the army gave you.  It’s a shotgun that you cut down yourself.  Custom-cut barrel .  Recessed handle.

  Something that no regulation has ever approved. Throughout Vietnam, thousands of Americans carried equipment like this.  Weapons sent by mail from home.  Weapons taken from the dead.  Weapons filed in the dark.  Some were simply against the rules, and others that everyone swore were forbidden.  This is what was real.

  So, let’s define the word, because the internet is almost always wrong.  “Forbidden in Vietnam” could mean three very different things.  A weapon could break a rule of the unit.  Something that a commander forbade or that the regulations disapproved of.  Although nothing that a court would call a crime.  A weapon could break the real laws of war, the rules of The Hague and Geneva that decide how countries can fight.

  Or a weapon could simply be a legend, a story told so many times that it became a fact. Almost everything you’ve heard about prohibited weapons in Vietnam falls into that first group or the third.  And what is truly illegal is much rarer than the myths suggest. Keep those three groups in mind because in the next 15 minutes, we’re going to place weapon after weapon in them .

  And a surprising number of celebrities don’t fall where you’d expect.  Separating them honestly is the main purpose of this channel.  Let’s start with the guns, because they were everywhere and almost none of them were official. Officially, a soldier carried whatever the supply chain delivered. In practice, according to American Rifleman and the veterans who lived through it.

  Packages arrived from home containing revolvers, and men bought pistols from South Vietnamese soldiers for a few dollars.  The prize, the handgun that marked you as someone experienced, was a large magnum revolver, the kind a Hollywood detective would be wielding years later.  Gordon Rottman of Osprey, who cataloged small arms in warfare, describes this private gun culture as something that commanders tolerated far more than regulations allowed.

  A gate gunner wanted a heavy revolver in case he fell into the trees.  A “tunnel rat” wanted something small and safe in a hole barely wider than its shoulders.  And many ordinary riflemen simply wanted a second weapon that was theirs, one that no one could take away from them.  Was it prohibited?  That depended entirely on the man over you.

  Some commanders demanded that any privately owned weapon be registered and authorized in writing.  And one veteran recalled an inspection that revealed crates of weapons that the troops didn’t have time to hide.  Other units, such as the 1st Cavalry, treated a personalized pistol as a source of pride and didn’t mess with it.

  There was no single order prohibiting them throughout the entire theater of operations.  What existed was a mosaic of discretion on the part of commanders that hardened as the war dragged on, a much more chaotic truth than any headline about prohibited weapons.  Then there’s the shotgun, and this is where the myth runs deeper.

  The combat shotgun was not contraband at all. It was regulation equipment.  The Ithaca 37, the Stevens 77E, the Winchester 1200 and the Remington 870 entered the jungle with official blessing.  And Bruce Canfield , writing in American Rifleman, points out that units armed with them tended to register higher numbers in close-quarters combat, where the shotgun does its most lethal work.

  Entire squads learned to love that weapon on the perimeter at night, when an ambush would erupt at close range and a single cartridge could take down more than one man at a time.  So where does its reputation as a prohibited weapon come from?  It comes from what men did to these weapons after the gunsmiths obtained them. At least.

    I mean, if we’d been given the option, we probably would have considered it, but who knows.  Now, this is, this is a Ken Bow Ray.  Um. Special. Special here.  He was, uh, and you can see some pictures of him, and he said these were good if he could find one that wasn’t soaked in blood and didn’t have a hole in it.

  Because you didn’t have much time to recover on the battlefield. TRUE.  TRUE. of the type you just shot, but he’s, um, he’s, you know, from the North Vietnamese army. Official magazine pouch and whatever this thing was . And that’s right, it’s a chest harness.  You know , nowadays we’d call it a chest harness, and again, just that. At the Frankford arsenal, engineers built a strange mouth attachment called a “duckbill” .

  A disperser that flattened the pellets into a wide horizontal fan intended to sweep a path in the jungle.  The Navy ordered thousands of special Ithaca 37s for this purpose , and the most famous one belonged to a SEAL named James Watson, who called his sawed-off and extended magazine shotgun “sweetheart” and wrote about it in his memoirs.  Pointer.

  The “duckbill” didn’t last.  Both Forgotten Weapons and historian Leroy Thompson in SWAT magazine described how the shock absorber cracked and opened up under repeated fire.  And many men considered it no better than a normal cannon.  Next to her was the sawed-off shotgun.  Much longer than any civilian weapon, they were carried by tunnel rats and vanguard men who wanted a wall of lead in a space the size of a corridor.

  And this is where the word forbidden finally acquires a real history.  Except not the one people expect.  The shotgun was the subject of a genuine international protest. But it happened in World War I , not in Vietnam.  In 1918, Germany formally complained that the American combat shotgun violated the laws of war and even threatened to execute any prisoner captured with one.

    The United States categorically rejected it .  Secretary of State Robert Lansing responded that the shotgun could not be the subject of any reasonable protest and that its use would not be abandoned.  No treaty ever prohibited the shotgun, neither then nor now.  When a colonel once warned SEAL James Watson that his shotgun broke Geneva rules, Watson simply told him that if he was ever sent to Geneva, he would leave it at home.

  One of the men who actually brought a sawed-off shotgun to that valley was a Green Beret named Bennie Adkins, who won the Medal of Honor there.  Here we see him describing his own weapon in his own words. And I had a gun that, uh, nowadays I probably wouldn’t be authorized to use, but it was a, uh , shotgun.

  And I had taken this, uh, pump-action shotgun, cut the barrel to this length, and cut the grip, and basically, uh, I made a gun that would work, uh, if you were, uh , uh. Now, let’s move on to the enemy’s own rifle .  The captured communist weapons , the AK-47, the SKS carbine, the Tokarev pistol, were also carried by Americans.

  Although much more often by special operations men than by the common rifleman.  The reasons were practical.  At the beginning of the war, the American rifle could not always be trusted , while the enemy’s rifle could, with a larger magazine and a tolerance to mud that bordered on the magical.  But taking her was a different kind of gamble.

  As both The National Interest and historian Kevin Dockery point out, the AK had a distinctive sound and a green tracer bullet.  Therefore, a man who fired one in the dark risked being shot down by his own side.  For cross-border teams, there was a second reason that had nothing to do with performance.  A man of reconnaissance deep in Laos or Cambodia, where his government swore no American had ever set foot, wanted a weapon that would leave no American traces, a rifle and cartridge that could belong to anyone.  So the Pentagon

even manufactured its own unmarked ammunition to supply them.  There was a second strange danger, and it came from the Americans themselves.  Under a covert program promoted by Colonel John Singlaub, an operation later called Eldest Son, technicians prepared captured cartridges to explode inside enemy weapons.

  A single sabotaged cartridge hidden among thousands could increase the pressure to a level that the rifle was not designed to withstand and cause it to explode in the shooter’s hands .  Information was deliberately leaked , whispered over enemy radio, and planted in the press. Partly to make each enemy combatant fear their own ammunition, and partly to warn American teams using captured weapons not to mistakenly pick up a poisoned magazine.

  All this covert work points to a single place.  The shadowy world of the Study and Observation Group.  The cross-border reconnaissance men known as MACV-SOG.  Their war remained classified for a longer time .  And that’s the subject of the documented history we’ve compiled at truevietnamdocs.com.  Linked at the top of the description.

  With every claim in it backed up in the same careful way that we document these videos.  If that hidden corner of the war is what attracts you, that’s where all the documentary evidence lies.  And if you want more of this right here, take a second to subscribe.  Because this channel exists to correct the records, one weapon at a time.

  And it’s worth staying for the next update.  Now, to the arsenal that the SOG actually carried.  Here the line between the forbidden and the assigned becomes completely blurred.  Because the strangest weapons the SOG used were both things at once.  The silenced pistol that the SEALs nicknamed “hush puppy,” built on a Smith & Wesson frame to neutralize sentries and guard dogs, was developed and assigned discreetly, not smuggled.

  The Swedish K submachine gun, purchased for the Central Intelligence Agency and the SEALs, was valued because it could fire the instant it emerged from the water.  And often all markings were removed so that nothing could be traced back to an American hand.  The Green Berets cut the stock and barrel of the M79 grenade launcher until it became a thick pistol that they could attach to their equipment.

  There was even a small, silenced .22 pistol, a remnant of the World War II espionage world, kept for sentries and dogs when absolute silence was the only thing that mattered. The Swedish weapon also had a strange irony, because when Sweden opposed the war, it cut off the supply and a US company was quietly ordered to copy the design so that the teams would never run out.

  And according to American Rifleman’s account, Medal of Honor recipient Bob Howard once cut down an entire rifle and fed it with double-loading cartridges to fire far more fire than the weapon was designed to give.  None of this was smuggled.  Everything was duly signed.  And then there were the leaves. Because a silent death doesn’t need any gunpowder.

  The Randall knife was a status symbol worth waiting years for. Carried out by both generals and Green Berets.  The Gerber Mark II, designed by a former paratrooper and shaped like a short Roman sword, sold out at military outposts as soon as it arrived.  SOG had its own sterile Bowie, secretly made in Okinawa.

  Deliberately unmarked so that a body could never be traced back to a U.S. unit.  And a Navy veteran named Peter LaGana revived the Tomahawk himself.  Forging thousands of them for troops who wanted an axe in the dark and dense thicket.  The weapon a soldier chose for himself said something the supply chain never could.

  He said he expected the fight to be close. Close enough for the steel to finish what the rifle started.  So, which of these were actually against the laws of war?  Here, the honest answer will disappoint the mythmakers. The flechette ammunition, the ” hive” projectile that sprayed thousands of small steel darts, was terrifying, but it was never illegal.

  And Kevin Dockery points out that troops often found common shot more reliable at close range.  The army even tested flechette projectiles for the shotguns themselves.  Darts instead of pellets, and they discovered that they flew farther, but impacted more gently.  So, the ammunition was tested, debated, and quietly filed away, never banned.

White phosphorus, the fiery “Willie Pete” of a hundred war stories, was and still is a conventional ammunition under the rules.  The weapon that attracted real legal fire was tear gas.  Agent CS pumped into the tunnels to force the men out into the open.  Critics abroad argued that it crossed a chemical line.

  The US government insisted that a riot control officer did not do that.  And years after the firing stopped, an executive order finally restricted its first use in the war.  That was the real gray area, and even that was the cause of a fierce argument rather than an established crime.  Which leaves the deeper question.

  Why did so many men look beyond the weapon their own nation had given them?  For one brutal reason above all others: they didn’t trust her. When the M-16 first arrived, it jammed, and men were dying with cleaning rods stuck in its barrels trying to free a stuck casing.  In the hill fighting on Khe San, marines were found in their sniper pits with their rifles wide open.

  They were killed while trying to fix a weapon that had malfunctioned.  A Congressional investigation, the 1967 I Corps report, determined that a change in gunpowder and the lack of a chrome-plated chamber caused the failures. And he wrote that such carelessness bordered on criminal negligence.  When the rifle in your hands could fail at the worst possible moment, a home shotgun, a captured rifle, or a pistol sent by your father stopped seeming like a violation and started looking like survival.

  So, Vietnam’s banned weapons were real, but not in the way the legends promised.  They were outlawed by a nervous commander, by a registration form, by a rifle that betrayed its bearers far more often than by any treaty .  The truly outlawed weapons were mostly things that men built themselves.  And what was truly illegal were mostly things that men could only imagine.

That gap between what everyone swore was forbidden and what actually was forbidden is the whole story of this miniature war.  A war where the rules on paper and the reality on the ground almost never coincided.  The men in that valley did not carry those weapons to break the law.  They carried them so they could return home.

  If this is the kind of story you want to hear straight up, subscribe and stay with us.  Because next time we’ll advance with the Marines’ Patton tanks into the streets of Hue, into a battle that rewrote how the United States fought within a city. See you there. And I had a weapon that, uh, today I probably wouldn’t be authorized to use, but it was a shotgun;  I took this pump-action shotgun, cut the barrel to this length, and cut off the grip.

 Basically, I made a working gun, and, uh…