What The Viet Cong Actually Thought About American Equipment 

What The Viet Cong Actually Thought About American Equipment 

  In 1965, America arrived in Vietnam with the most advanced military arsenal in human history.    Helicopters that could deliver an army in minutes, rifles  that could fire 700 rounds a minute, bombs that could erase a forest. But what nobody knew at the time was that the Viet Cong were studying every piece of that arsenal.

They were capturing it, copying it, and decades later putting some of it in their national museums. Today, using captured documents, post-war memoirs, and the words of Viet Cong soldiers themselves, we look at what the enemy actually thought about American military equipment. To understand the Viet Cong perspective,  you have to understand where it came from.

American intelligence captured over 2.7 million pages of Viet  Cong and North Vietnamese documents during the war. That archive, called the Combined Document Exploitation Center, is now housed at Texas Tech University. The RAND Corporation conducted around 2,400 interviews  with prisoners, defectors, and refugees from 1964 to 1968.

After the fighting ended, the people who survived started telling their story. Truong Nhu Tang, a senior Viet Cong official, published his memoir in 1985. Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese infantry veteran, wrote a novel that’s still studied in Vietnamese schools today. And generals like Vo Nguyen Giap and Chu Huy Man sat down with their former American enemies and finally talked.

What they said about American equipment sometimes surprising,  and it starts, oddly enough, with the rifle that defined the war. For decades, popular history has pushed a simple story.  American troops hated their M-16 rifles because they jammed in the jungle, while the Viet Cong loved capturing them.

 That story  is half right. The American part is true. Early M-16 models fielded in 1966 and ’67  did suffer catastrophic jamming problems. A congressional inquiry in October 1967 blamed it on a switch in gunpowder, on a lack of chrome lining in the chamber, and on rifles being issued without cleaning kits.

But the Viet Cong half  of the story doesn’t hold up. By the autumn of 1967, every Viet Cong main force battalion  had been re-equipped with the AK-47 and its Chinese copy, the Type 56.  Captured American training documents and weapons charts focused on the AK, not the M-16.  Photos from 1965 and ’66 show Viet Cong fighters carrying older French rifles, Chinese SKS carbines, and captured South Vietnamese weapons before standardizing on the AK.

When American special forces, SEALs, and long-range patrols started picking up enemy AK-47s because they trusted them more than their M-16s, the Viet Cong didn’t return the compliment. They held onto their AKs. The first lesson the enemy taught us about our own equipment was that they didn’t want it.

 The next piece of American gear the Viet Cong studied was the M-79 grenade launcher. American  troops called it the blooper or the thumper because of the soft popping sound it made. It fired a 40-mm grenade up to 350 m and it was deadly accurate. When Viet Cong soldiers captured  them, and they did capture them, they weren’t always interested in using them as launchers.

 They were interested  in the grenades themselves. American after-action reports  from 1966 and ’67 catalog what happened to abandoned ammunition. One US Army summary documented 174 recovered American grenades that had been turned into Viet Cong booby traps. 35 used American  hand grenades, four used captured Claymore mines, and 10 anti-tank mines were rigged for electrical detonation using parts of discarded American radio batteries.

 The duds and discarded ordnance picked up from a battlefield wasn’t trashed  to the Viet Cong. It was free engineering. The M79 grenade you couldn’t be bothered to retrieve might come back at your patrol 3 days later buried under a trail. American soldiers were trained to plant the Claymore facing the enemy.

Pull a hidden tripwire or hit a clacker, and 700 steel ball bearings were sprayed in a 60-degree arc lethal to anyone within 50 m. The Viet Cong respected the Claymore enough to base an entire weapon system on it. China supplied them with a copy called the DH-10. It was crudely built but more powerful than the American original,    and Viet Cong sappers used it to mine helicopter landing zones.

Captured wooden training mock-ups of the DH-3,  a smaller variant, were photographed by American intelligence officers in the late  1960s. You’ll often hear a story that Viet Cong scouts would crawl up to American positions in the dark, loosen the screws on a Claymore mine, and turn it around so it would fire backward when triggered.

Veterans tell that story to this day. The truth is that anecdote almost never appears in actual Viet Cong documents  or post-war memoirs. It’s a tale that grew bigger in the telling. What did happen and what is documented is that the Viet Cong recovered American Claymores by the dozen, redeployed them in their own ambushes,    and at one captured weapons cache, guarded their treasure with a double ring of M-18 Claymore mines.

If there is one piece of American equipment that defined the Vietnam War for the people fighting against the United States,    it was the helicopter. Specifically, the Bell UH-1 Iroquois, known to American GIs as the Huey.    The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong called it something else.

To them, it was the most feared sound on the battlefield. In November 1965, the US 1st Cavalry Division landed thousands of troops by air deep into the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands. It was the first time the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army had faced full air mobility on a battlefield. They lost the engagement at Landing Zone X-Ray, but they took the lesson of their lives.

 After the battle, North Vietnamese General Nguyen Chi Thanh wrote a doctrine that became famous in Vietnam. In Vietnamese, it’s pronounced “Nam that lung dich ma jan” and it translates as “Grab the enemy by the belt and fight.” The idea was simple. Get close enough to the Americans that their helicopters and their artillery couldn’t fire without killing their own men.

Decades later, Hal Moore, the American commander at LZ X-Ray, sat down with Lieutenant General Nguyen Huu An, the North Vietnamese officer who had fought him in 1965.  General An told Moore that his orders for the Albany ambush had been simple. “Move inside the column, grab them by the belt, avoid casualties from the artillery and the air.

” General Vo Nguyen Giap, Hanoi’s most senior commander, told American journalist Joe Galloway in 1990 that if they could defeat  American tactics, meaning the helicopters, they could defeat the entire American strategy. But you don’t have to take a general’s  word for it. In 1981, an American documentary team interviewed Captain Nguyen Cong Dan, a Viet Cong officer who had fought through the war.

Dan described in his own  words what it was like to face an enemy that arrived from the sky.  Now,  For Dan and millions like him, the

helicopter wasn’t just a vehicle. It was a problem to be solved  and the answer they came up with cost American forces dearly. There is one piece of American equipment so prized by the Viet Cong that you can find a monument to it in modern Vietnam.  It isn’t a tank, it isn’t a fighter jet, it’s a radio.

 The AN/PRC-25 was the standard tactical radio of the US military in Vietnam. American troops called it the prick 25. It was heavy, it was reliable, and it broadcast the location, intentions, and weapons inventory of every American unit using it in voice almost always in the clear. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army figured this out fast.

 A signals intelligence unit operating in the Cu Chi area, sometimes referenced as the 47th Reconnaissance Battalion, used captured PRC-25 sets to listen in on American radio traffic. They built profiles of US units that included the methods of navigation in use, the weapons in inventory, and the modes of transportation.

 Their reports also rated the equipment  they were spying on. They were impressed by the Huey helicopter and the M113 armored personnel  carrier. They were not impressed by the V-100 armored car the military police drove for road patrols or by the M151 Jeep. China actually manufactured replacement batteries for captured American PRC-25s and shipped them down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

 Today, in a Vietnamese military museum, one of those exact radios sits in a glass case, the only piece of American equipment given a permanent display. For all the high technology, some of the American equipment the Viet Cong remembered most clearly was something Americans didn’t even consider equipment. It was lunch. A North Vietnamese veteran, interviewed after the war, said this about the standard American C-ration.

Then he added a darker line. He said, “Many of his fellow soldiers were killed because they tried to gather American food boxes that were left on the battlefield.” The Saigon black market moved enormous quantities of American food aid into communist supply caches. American troops on patrol routinely found their own C-ration tins, sometimes with intact contents,  hidden in Viet Cong tunnels and bunkers.

The cigarettes,  the coffee packets, the small can openers called P-38s were collected and reissued. For an army that was fighting on rice and dried fish, an American Lurp ration with chocolate, jam, and powdered cocoa  was almost unimaginable luxury. And it was apparently worth dying  for.

Of every American weapon the Viet Cong faced, none entered their writing the way the B-52 did. In 1965, the US Air Force began a campaign called Arc Light. Tactical bombing missions flown by B-52 strategic bombers dropping bomb loads of around 27 tons each from over 30,000 ft. The Viet Cong almost never heard the planes coming.

 The bombs simply began arriving. Truong Nhu Tang, the senior Viet Cong official we mentioned earlier, lived through repeated B-52 strikes near the Cambodian border. He survived because Soviet intelligence trawlers in the South China Sea  tracked the bombers and gave the Viet Cong a few minutes of warning. He used those minutes to write down what an Arc Light strike actually felt like.

He wrote, quote, “The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack, it seemed,  as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor, that I had been caught in the apocalypse. The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.” Then he added something even more haunting.

 He wrote that when the B-52s found their target, “the place you’d lived in didn’t just get destroyed, it ceased to exist,  quote, you would come back to where your bunker had been your home, and there would simply be nothing there, just an unrecognizable landscape gouged by immense craters. Captured North Vietnamese documents from the siege of Khe San in 1968 backed this up.

One captured PAVN regimental report said 3/4 of the entire regiment had been lost in a single B-52 raid. American interrogators noted prisoners coming in dazed, with blood streaming from their noses and mouths from concussion alone. After the The story of any war is told by the victors, but sometimes the truer story  is told by the people who learn to survive.

If you want the next chapter of this story,  watch our breakdown of the Battle of Ia Drang on screen now.