On February 7, 1967, a platoon of 40 men was dropped directly onto a patch of terrain that had just been bombed by B-52s. Deep in enemy territory.  Their task was to walk through the craters and count the dead.    A few minutes after landing, over 100 enemy soldiers attacked them from three sides. Part of this platoon was led by a “Green Beret” named George Sisler.

When two of his men fell in the open , he ran through the fire to pull them back.  When the defense line almost broke through, he grabbed grenades and rushed into the attack alone.  He broke through it. And then, standing in the open and calling for an airstrike on the retreating soldiers, he died.

  Sisler became the first soldier from America’s most secretive unit of that war to receive the Medal of Honor.  The text of his award is a public document .  You can read it today.  What the text doesn’t say is what he had in his hands.  According to Green Beret historian John Plaster, the gun Sisler was carrying that day was a Gyrojet—a gun that didn’t fire bullets.

  He was shooting rockets.  The Army never issued this pistol to ordinary soldiers.  And this is just one of the strange weapons that ended up in Vietnam with people who shouldn’t have had them at all.  This is a list of five weapons that American infantrymen carried with them anyway. We bought some in stores. Some were sent by mail from home.

  One type was secretly sabotaged by the army , and then was forced to warn its own soldiers not to touch it.  And in the process, we will separate what actually happened from the stories made up on the internet.  To understand the reason, you need to know what the average American soldier was actually given.

  The standard rifle for most of the war was the M-16.  When it first entered the battlefield , it gained a reputation for being a weapon that would get stuck in mud and dampness at the most inopportune moment .  And that reputation haunted her, regardless of whether every rifle in the ranks deserved it.  So people started looking for something else.

  And this “something else” was very diverse.  We have to be honest here, because most of the information on the internet is not.  The word “unauthorized” is of great importance here.  Some weapons were simply not standard, and no one prevented the fighters from carrying them with them. The other was bought with the soldier’s own money in a store in his homeland and sent halfway around the world.

  They took some from the killed enemy soldiers.  And some of them actually broke the rules or came from programs that the government has refused to discuss for decades.  So keep that in mind as we list them.  Not all of this was contraband.  But none of these items reached the army through official supply channels as planned. Number five: the revolver sent by the family.

    The official weapon in this war was the 1911, the same .45 caliber that the army had used during World War I.  But it wasn’t the only gun in Vietnam. Gun columnist Tom Lamelin describes in American Rifleman how many soldiers and Marines carried civilian pistols, especially in the early years when regulations on personal weapons were more relaxed.

  These guns were either brought from home or sent by excited family and friends.  Think about this for a moment.  A mother or wife in the United States would go to a store, buy a gun, pack it in a box, and send it off to war. Most often, revolvers were sent, .38 caliber, such as the Smith & Wesson Model 10.

 And there was a good reason why the man might need one.  Lamelin notes that these private pistols began to appear more frequently when rumors of M-16 jamming spread. A revolver doesn’t care about mud and dirt, unlike an automatic pistol.  If a round misfires , you simply press the trigger again and the next one is fed.  Those who descended into the tunnels understood this better than anyone.

  In the darkness and mud, a gun that didn’t fail was more valuable than a large magazine. The hardest part was getting the weapons back home.  Towards the end of the war, bags and personal belongings began to be searched precisely in search of such souvenirs.  Number four.  A blade too brutal for store shelves.  Not every private purchase was a weapon.

  Some went to war with knives and axes that the army never issued. The most famous was the Gerber Mark II.  A double-edged combat dagger, developed in 1966 .  According to all historical data, it was never the subject of military support.  It was one of the most popular knives purchased privately throughout the war , sold straight off the shelves in military stores.

  It was so associated with Vietnam that when the war was coming to an end, the supply system was forced to remove it as too brutal.  And to get it back on the shelves, the manufacturer cut the serrations on the butt and resold the same knife as a survival tool.  And there was also a tomahawk.  In 1966, a Marine Corps veteran named Peter Lagana founded a small company to sell modern combat tomahawks— light axes with a spike on the handle.

  According to Homer Brett’s handbook, Lagana produced about 3,800 units and sold most of them privately to the military, many through advertisements in the Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck.  Imagine this .  A soldier opens a magazine, sees an advertisement for a tomahawk, and mails an order to take it with him into the jungle.

  This is perhaps the most unofficial weapon imaginable. It is harder to prove how often they were actually used in combat. There are many records of how they were taken on assignments.  Records of their combat use are much harder to find.  Number three.  A weapon designed to be untraceable . Remember that rocket gun from the beginning of the video?  To understand the origins of such things, you need to know about the MACV-SOG unit, the Research and Surveillance Group.

  SOG was waging a secret war.  Those cross-border missions to Laos and Cambodia that officially didn’t exist at all. And since those missions could be abandoned, the fighters needed weapons that would never be associated with the United States. They called it ” sterile”.  This is where strange pistols appeared. SOG’s first primary weapon was the Swedish Carl Gustaf submachine gun , which the fighters called the “Swedish K “.

  According to American Rifleman , it was supplied through the CIA.  It had no markings that could be traced, and the standard ammunition load was 13 magazines, approximately 468 rounds. Because the SOG group could find itself in a situation of a day-long battle against an enemy that was significantly superior in numbers.  Here is one of the SOG veterans, Dale Hansen, describing just such a situation in an interview for “The Sean Ryan Show.

” I carried…Well, I guess the caveat was also when we were finally able to carry the M-16.  Because when we started there, we had to be completely ” sterile,” which meant no foreign weapons.  So I wore a ” Swedish K” for a while.  ” Swedish K”, what is it?  I don’t even know what this is.  This is a 36-round magazine.

  You pull the bolt back, and it’s…about 360 rounds per minute. This is funny.  I…John Plaster wore them too. And I remember, I was getting ready to go on an assignment, and he was just about to return .  And he said, “Dale, these things are no good.”  He said that 9mm bullets do not penetrate vegetation.  They get the guys, you know.

  And he started the thing here that we were asking for: ” Let us carry the M-16, you know, or, in our case, the CAR-15.” Um, and the reasoning was that enough of our rifles had been captured, so we could do it now.  So I immediately switched to CAR-15. Ultimately, the 9mm cartridge was deemed too weak to reliably take down a man in the dense jungle.

  So the teams switched to captured rifles and shorter carbines. Swedish supplies also dried up once Sweden refused to sell any more of its weapons for use in the war. And there was also a gun from the introduction.  The Gyrojet fired tiny rockets instead of bullets, and SOG obtained a small number of them, partly because of the belief that they were silent.

  In practice, they were extremely inaccurate and slow to reload, and their actual combat experience was almost zero.  But one Medal of Honor recipient took it into his last battle, and that’s the only reason the strangest pistol of that war is remembered at all. If it’s the secret war that’s making you listen now, then it’s the corner of history that we’ve explored the most deeply.

We have compiled the entire history of these missions, the people who carried them, and the weapons they carried, into an e-book, linked to in the description on truevietnamdocs. If you want this 15-minute version to become the complete picture, this is the place for you .  Number two.    A shotgun that fired sideways.

  Shotguns were never the standard weapon for the average infantryman.  They appeared in small numbers, often one per squad, and some soldiers simply bought them at the military store because they wanted the power of buckshot at close range in dense undergrowth.  But the strangest version belonged to the Navy SEALs.  It was a device called a ” duckbill.

”  The idea grew out of an Army arsenal project in the mid-1960s, a special muzzle constrictor that flattened the shot into a wide horizontal fan-shaped stream instead of a circle.  In dense vegetation, against a moving target, such lateral spread gave the shooter a better chance of hitting.  According to gun historian Kevin Dockery, its most famous user was a ” cat” named James Watson, who carried a ” duckbill” shotgun that he nicknamed ” Sweetie.

”  It wasn’t ideal equipment .  The device had a tendency to crack, and even within SEAL teams there was debate about whether it actually worked better than a regular muzzle.  But for a period of the war, a handful of the most elite American units moved through the rivers of Vietnam armed with a shotgun that fired sideways, and there was nothing standard about that.

  Number one.  A rifle that the army sabotaged and then ordered its own men not to touch.  The AK -47 was the enemy’s rifle.  Strong, simple, with a magazine for 30 rounds, at a time when American troops were still fighting with 20. Therefore, captured AKs became trophies.  According to weapons historian Kevin Dockery, they were originally prestige weapons, and for secretive cross-border groups they were valuable for a second reason.

    The foreign rifle left no American footprint in a mission that, by design, did not exist. But there was a catch.  And it’s one of the darkest and best- documented stunts of the entire war. It was called the “Eldest Son” project.  The SOG took enemy ammunition— AK rounds, as well as rounds for enemy machine guns and mortars—and secretly mined them so that they would explode when fired.

  Then they would return this sabotaged ammunition back into the enemy supply chain, so that somewhere in the jungle a North Vietnamese soldier would load a fake round and his own weapon would explode in his hands. According to SOG veteran and historian John Plaster, writing for American Rifleman, more than 11,500 rounds were counterfeited for the AK alone as part of the program.

Plaster describes one test round that destroyed the rifle and threw the bolt back with enough force to kill the person who pulled the trigger.  And here’s the twist that ties this entire list together. With this poisoned ammunition now circulating somewhere out there, American commanders had to change course and warn their soldiers: “Do not pick up captured AKs and do not fire them unless in a real emergency, because you have no way of knowing whether the round in the chamber is one of ours.

”  Not because of the statute, but because they mined these munitions themselves, and could no longer be sure which ones were safe.  So, the most coveted unofficial weapon in Vietnam became the one that the army itself ordered its men to leave lying on the ground. Now, there is a related story that can be found online that says that carrying an AK was dangerous because its distinctive sound could provoke ” friendly fire” from other Americans.

  These are mostly campfire conversations.  This is repeated everywhere, but it is not confirmed by any strict orders or documents, unlike the ” Eldest Son” project.  When you look for the real reason why the Army warned its soldiers against using captured rifles, a sabotage program is what is actually documented.  So, here they are.

  Five types of weapons that American infantrymen carried with them anyway.    A revolver sent by mail from home.  A dagger that the military store stopped selling due to its excessive cruelty.  And a tomahawk, ordered from an ad in a magazine.  The secret, unaccountable weapon of a unit that officially did not exist. Right down to the gun that fired rockets.

    A shotgun that scattered shrapnel to the side. And an enemy rifle, so valuable that the army poisoned the ammunition so that its own soldiers wouldn’t dare use it. Notice what almost none of this actually was.  Little of this was smuggling in the true sense.  It was a weapon that fighters resorted to when official supplies did not give them what they needed.

  Whether it’s a package from home, a rifle from a fallen soldier, or a warehouse that the government still doesn’t want to talk about openly.  This gap between the official story and what the fighters actually carried with them is the main reason for the existence of this channel.  If you found this content interesting, subscribing will help us continue the archival work these stories require.

  The sources of everything you just heard, every document and every name, are linked in the description. See you in the next video.