Why Soldiers Were Ordered NEVER to Wear Underwear in Vietnam 

Why Soldiers Were Ordered NEVER to Wear Underwear in Vietnam 

You step off of Huey into warm brown water. Chest height. Monsoon season. The patty stretches in both directions and the tree line is a green wall 30 m ahead. Your rucks sack pulls at your shoulders. Your boots went soft 2 days ago and haven’t dried since. You will be in this water on and off for the next 4 days.

 Somewhere in the grass along that tree line, a rat is moving through the water line. You are a rifleman with the 9th Infantry Division, Meong Delta, 1967. You are wearing standardisssue cotton underwear. The same underwear the army has been issuing since before anyone in your unit was born. Designed for statesside climates and garrison environments where a man can expect to be dry by the end of his day.

 In 4 days, that underwear is going to take you off the line. The rat is not incidental to this story. It is the mechanism. The problem was the cotton. Standardiss issue underwear was designed for Fort Benning. It dried in an hour on a statesside morning. In the Meong Delta in monsoon season, it did not dry. The delta is not a wet environment in the way that rain is wet. It is saturated.

The water table sits at the surface. The air is 95% humidity before the rains add to it. And when the monsoon rains come on top of that, they don’t fall in a dry landscape. They fall on a landscape that is already as close to saturation as a terrestrial environment can be while still supporting infantry operations.

 A man who steps into a rice patty is not getting wet. He is entering a warm liquid environment and he will not be fully dry again for the duration of his operation. Nothing dried. Not in the field. Not in the hooch. Not after a 3-day patrol when the only dry period was 4 hours on the firebase before the next insertion.

 The same uniform that soaked through on the first canal crossing stayed wet through the fourth day. And the cotton underwear against the skin stayed wet with it. pressed into the groin by rucks sack straps and body weight sitting there in 95 degree heat and perpetual moisture doing exactly what cotton does in those conditions holding the water in pressed against skin that have been wet for 72 hours.

 Cotton incubates in the folds and creases where moisture pools and body heat concentrates. It creates the condition that whatever lives in patty water needs to grow. The Army quantified what this did to its units. Alfred Allen’s medical survey of the war, published by the Army’s own medical department in 1977, documented groin fungal infections in one in three infantrymen operating in wet terrain.

90% of yeast infections in the theater were located in the groin and tow. Soulsberger and Acres Army estimate put skin disease at as high as 70% of man days lost in wet terrain units during monsoon months. That figure is stated as an upper bound. Even at half that rate, skin disease was the dominant operational limiting factor in the Meong Delta.

 It pulled more men off the line than enemy contact. When a unit came out of 72 hours in Patty Water, the afteraction report included men who had not been shot. The fungus had a specific name, Triopitan Mntagraphites. The Army Medical Department identified it as epidemic across wet terrain operations. It moved through shared field conditions.

 The rivers where men bathed, the drainage channels they crossed, the hoochas where 12 men lived in 40 square ft of canvas in uniforms that had been wet for days. What made it epidemic wasn’t only the contact between men. It was the source of the contact. 23% of wild rats trapped near unit barracks in the delta tested positive for the virulent strain.

 The rats use the same patty water as the soldiers. They move through the same channels along the same tree lines through the same drainage ditches. Tricopitan mantigraphy traveled from rat fur to patty water to human skin and the cotton underwear held that water against the groin for 72 hours at a stretch, giving the fungus the warm human environment it needed.

 A battalion strength was at one time reduced as much as a third by skin disease. The division surgeon reported after 5 days of sustained wet terrain operations. not wounded, not killed, disabled, operationally removed from the line because they could not function. That report traveled to 9inth division headquarters in January 1968.

 It came back down as a regulation. US ARV regulation 4029 exists. United States Army Vietnam. Signed January 10th, 1968. Two men put their names to it. Brigadier General Robert C. Taber, the 9th Infantry’s Chief of Staff, and Colonel William H. James, the agitant general. The regulation governs medical field standards across the theater.

 Foot hygiene, heat injury, water discipline. In paragraph 5.F, there is a sentence about underwear that has been misqued for 30 years. Troops should be discouraged but not prohibited from wearing underclo while on operations in the field. Undercloed ventilation of the skin. Not banned, not ordered. Discouraged but not prohibited.

 Four words. They’re the entire distance between the true story and the one everybody tells. The army formally documented a medical finding, carried it through a chain that ended with a general signature, and issued it as theaterwide guidance across Vietnam. That sequence matters. A theatwide regulation discouraging something does not happen unless the problem has reached a threshold where formal paper is warranted. Someone wrote a memo.

 The memo traveled up the chain. A general signed it. That sequence exists in the record. And still the document said discouraged, not banned, not prohibited. 30 years of forum posts and documentaries have been calling it a ban. Read the regulation. It does not say ban. The medical officers who drafted paragraph 5.

F understood the mechanism. Cotton was creating the incubation chamber. Wool and synthetic fabrics dried faster, held less moisture, gave skin the ventilation that tricaphy and mintagraphy could not survive. Remove the cotton, restore air flow, denied the fungus the environment the cotton had been providing. The solution to a bacterial and fungal crisis was a choice of fabric.

 They wrote discouraged rather than prohibited because field officers needed the authority to enforce the guidance informally without making non-compliance a punishable offense under the uniform code of military justice. Medics could direct every man who came through sick call with a groin infection to remove the cotton before the next operation.

The regulation gave them the standing to do it without it becoming a formal charge. In practice, enforcement was more direct than the regulations language suggested. VA records from the period describe medics telling men plainly, “Lose the underwear before you go out. No paperwork, no ceremony, you have an infection, lose the shorts, go back out.

” The men did it, not because a regulation said too, because a medic told them they had a groy infection and the next patrol started in 4 hours. And that was sufficient motivation. They didn’t have a phrase for the practice. Nothing was named. A medical instruction got followed because it worked. The regulation gave it institutional backing.

 and the ratinfested patty water had already made the argument before any of them arrived in country. There is a phrase that comes from all of this. Everybody thinks they know where it was born. They’re wrong by 8 years and 7,000 mi. The phrase first appeared in 1974, not in Vietnam, not in a patty or a firebase or a jungle in a college slang glossery compiled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring semester of 1974.

 The collector was Connie Eli, a UNCC linguist who spent her career documenting the informal language that circulated in dormitories and dining halls and never made it into formal dictionaries. The entry Ely recorded go commando to be without underwear. No military context, no Vietnam attribution, no reference to any army regulation or any documented field practice, just a phrase and a date.

 Spring 1974, 6 years after Brigadier General Taber signed USRV 4029, 8,000 mi from the Mong Delta. The men who had followed that regulation home from Vietnam were 30-year-old civilians by the time someone wrote this entry down in a dorm hall in Chapel Hill. The competing origin stories don’t survive contact with that date.

 The British World War II commando origin holds that commandos went without underwear as standard field practice, and the phrase entered military slang in the 1940s. No written record of this claim exists anywhere before the 1974 UNCC document. Three decades of circulation in British military culture would have produced something in print before a student slang collection in North Carolina first documented it.

 The Falcon’s Royal Marine origin collapses on the timeline alone. The 1974 UNC document predates the Falcon’s war by 8 years. A phrase cannot be coined in 1982 if it already appears in a published collection from 1974. The Green Beret origin has no documentary support, no memoir, no SARS and Stripes column, no unit history, no primary source of any kind places the phrase in use among GIs in Vietnam during the war.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s own assessment describes the phrase’s origin as obscure, with the most likely illusion being to the general toughness and hardiness associated with commandos as a class rather than to any specific military practice. The OED finds no Vietnam connection. The illusion is to military toughness broadly conceived.

That is the kind of illusion a college student in 1974 would reach for when coining a phrase about forgoing a civilian comfort. The men in those patties never said it. The rats and the cotton and USR 4029 were real. The phrase was somebody else’s. After UNC Chapel Hill in 1974, the phrase spread across American campuses through the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 Ely continued documenting it as she collected each semester’s student slang. It stayed there in the half-documented world of campus informal language for 22 years. The Chicago Tribune printed it in 1985 with a parenthetical note confirming it as campus slang. It hadn’t crossed into common speech a full decade after its first documentation.

 Jesse Sheidedauer, principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary’s North American Division, confirmed in 2002 that no military source for the phrase had been found, predating or concurrent with the 1974 UNCC entry. The soldier origin is a good story. The documentary record doesn’t support it. Then September 26th, 1996, Friends season 3, episode 2.

 Joey Tribani, wearing Chandler’s clothes because he has none of his own, delivers the line, “I’m not going to go commando in another man’s fatigues.” The studio laughs. The country laughs with it. The phrase exits campus slang and enters national language overnight. Note the word fatigues. Military clothing.

 The friend’s writers put the phrase in a military clothing context without any awareness they were attaching a campus slang term to a military origin story that didn’t exist. The phrase came from a campus. The clothing in the joke was army issue. That accidental collision is where the Vietnam mythology took root.

Nobody intended the origin story. The explanation fit the phrase, so it spread. 22 years after Connie wrote the entry down in Chapel Hill. Six years after the last American units left Vietnam, the men who had followed USAver 40 to 29 in the Patties were in their mid-40s by the time Joey Tribani said the line that put the phrase on every American’s tongue.

 The men who survived US regulation 4729 never called it that. They had an instruction from the medic and they followed it. If you ask Vietnam veterans who served in the Meong Delta what they called the practice, the most common answer is that they didn’t call it anything. The medic told them they did it. There was nothing to name.

 This is how mythology attaches to Vietnam. A practice was real. The men who did it came home and said little. A phrase appeared somewhere else with the right shape with military vocabulary in it. And it got attached to the story of what actually happened in the patties of the Mikong Delta in 1967.

 Nobody planned the attachment. Nobody checked the dates. The story fit, so it spread. The phrase arrived 8 years later from a campus and got attached to their story by a culture that needed a tough origin for a tough sounding phrase. The evidence when you follow it back to the actual sources says otherwise. The regulation was real.

The practice was real. The phrase was somebody else’s. If you were with the 9inth Division or any unit in the Mikong Delta between 1967 and 1971, did your medic tell you to lose the shorts? What did your unit call it? The record lives in the comments.