Why Vietnam LRRPs Wore No Underwear

In January of 1968, the United States Army in Vietnam issued a regulation about underwear. Not weapons, not tactics, not rules of engagement. Underwear. It ran barely a page. It was signed on behalf of the commanding general of US Army Vietnam, and it told American troops that when they went into the field, they should leave their underwear behind.

The men of the long-range reconnaissance patrols had already worked that out for themselves. Four-man teams, sometimes six, walking into territory nobody else would go into, with no backup within an hour’s flight. They went out with no underwear. A lot of them went out with no socks, either. Some of them went out having not touched soap in weeks.

It sounds like a joke. It was one of the most expensive medical problems of the entire war. The thing about that regulation is that it looks trivial. It is a page of housekeeping in the middle of a war that produced millions of pages of paper. But, it is one of the clearest surviving records of a fight the Army almost never talks about, which is the fight against Vietnam itself.

So, let’s start with who these men were, because the practice starts with them. In July of 1966, General William Westmoreland authorized every division and separate brigade in Vietnam to form a long-range reconnaissance patrol unit. The idea was simple, and the execution was not. Conventional infantry moved in company and battalion strength, loud, heavy, and visible from a long way off.

What Westmoreland needed was the opposite. Small teams, four to six men, inserted deep into areas the Army did not control, whose entire job was to watch, count, report, and not be found. On the 1st of February, 1969, those units were redesignated as lettered Ranger companies of the 75th Infantry [music] Regiment, carrying lineage back to Merrill’s Marauders.

The name changed. The job did not. Many team leaders passed through the MACV Recon School at Nha Trang, run by the 5th Special Forces Group from 1966 until the school closed around 1970. Sources disagree slightly on the throughput. >> [music] >> One set of unit histories records around 5,395 [music] men admitted with roughly 3,357 graduating.

Another records 5,626 attending and 3,515 graduating. We give you both numbers because both are published and neither is confirmed by the other. That’s going to be a theme. Here’s the part that matters for this story. [music] A team went out for days, not hours. Days. Typically four to six, sometimes longer. >> [music] >> And for every one of those days, they were living inside the environment with no way out of it.

There was no resupply unless something had gone badly wrong because a resupply run told everyone within several kilometers exactly where you were. There was no shelter because building one leaves a mark and takes time. There was no washing, no changing clothes, no drying out. Whatever a man was wearing when the helicopter lifted away was what he would be wearing when it came back for him, however many days later that turned [music] out to be.

Regular infantry could be miserable and still get relief. A line company came back to a fire base, got hot food, got a shower, got [music] dry socks. A recon team did not have that option because the entire point of the team was that nobody knew they were there. [music] Vietnam was hot and it was wet and for large parts of the year it did not stop being either of those things.

For a soldier that means skin stays wet. Wet skin softens. Soft skin tears and in a climate that warm everything that lives in water and mud gets into the tear. The army had a word for what that did to a unit and the word was attrition. Peer-reviewed dermatology research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology states it plainly.

Skin conditions were the single most common reason [music] American soldiers walked into a medical facility in Vietnam accounting for around 7.4% of all admissions and 12.2% of outpatient visits. They were also the largest single cause of days lost in the field. The Army Medical Department’s own official history puts numbers on the cost.

Skin disease burned through roughly 66,400 man-days in 1967, about 64,800 [music] in 1968, around 50,800 in 1969, and just over 80,000 in 1970. For scale, malaria was worse. Malaria cost between roughly 167,000 and 228,000 [music] man-days across those same years. So skin disease was not the biggest killer of time in Vietnam.

It was simply the one nobody expected and the one that hit hardest in exactly the units that could least afford [music] it. Put it another way, the army lost the equivalent of tens of thousands of soldier workdays every year to rashes. And in the Mekong Delta, where men operated waste-deep in water for days, it went from a nuisance [music] to an operational emergency.

The 9th Infantry Division surgeon reported in [music] 1968 that after 5 days in the paddies, one battalion strength [music] had at one point been cut by as much as a third. Not by the enemy, by skin disease. A 9th Infantry Division memorandum from October of that year went further. [music] It warned commanders that foot and boot area disease could affect between 35 and 50% of an infantry unit’s combat [music] strength after 72 hours in the water, and it ordered that paddy operations be capped at 48 hours, followed by at least

a full day dry. What comes next is the part [music] that still does not quite compute. One Army dermatologist recorded that before those measures came in, [music] a combat unit could lose 70 to 75% of its personnel to inflammatory skin disease of the feet alone [music] if those feet had been continuously wet for more than 72 hours.

70% from water. >> Terrain dictated what type of uh patrolling went on. I know the the uh 9th Infantry Division, which patrolled in the Delta, very few of their missions lasted longer than a day. Uh mainly because of the terrain, the the wetness, uh the the predominance of of civilians in the area.

So, most of their patrols were one-day patrols, uh where they went out and and mainly moved at night and hid during the day watching a village or something like that. >> So, the Army wrote it down. United States Army Vietnam Regulation 40-29, dated the 10th of January, 1968, titled Prevention of Skin Disease Among Troops Operating in Inundated Areas.

Under the heading Underclothing, it reads, “Troops should be discouraged, but not prohibited from wearing underclothes while on operations in the field. Underclothes reduce ventilation of the skin.” Read that first phrase again, because it is the whole reason this video exists in the form it does. Discouraged, but not prohibited.

You will find a lot of content online telling you there was an order, a ban, a rule that got men in trouble. There was not. What existed was a medical recommendation from the theater command, left to individual commanders to apply where they judged it necessary and practical. The same regulation told troops to wear boots and socks only when they had to, to swap into shower thongs in base camp, to shower immediately on coming in from an operation, and to stop starching field clothing because starch, like underwear, cut down ventilation.

And no, we are not making that up. It is reproduced in full in the US Army’s own dermatology textbook, published by the Borden Institute, and you can read every line of it yourself. The link is in the description. For the recon units, none of this needed to be ordered. They had already arrived at it. MACV-SOG recon veteran John Stryker Meyer, describing what he and Lynn Black carried on missions, wrote that to avoid rashes, infections, and fungus, they did not wear underwear or socks, and that no SOG recon man wore a helmet,

>> [music] >> a helmet liner, or body armor of any kind. The same jungle that hid these teams, that made their entire method possible, was steadily taking them apart. And underwear was only the first thing they gave up. If you are getting something out of this, subscribe. We go through the primary documents on this channel, so you get the version that is actually in the archive, not the version that gets repeated until it sounds true.

While all of that was going on, these teams were solving a completely different problem at the same time, and it shaped the same list of things they left behind. A four-man team’s only real defense was not being found. Everything followed from that. Movement was slow, one deliberate step at a time. Talking was done in whispers, or not at all.

And smell, which almost nobody thinks about, was treated as seriously as noise. So, soap went. Deodorant went. Toothpaste went. Aftershave, obviously, went. Scented insect repellent was used sparingly, or not at all, which meant accepting the mosquitoes, rather than the smell. Uniforms were worn for the entire mission, and were not washed in anything perfumed.

And this is the part where it stops being about comfort. MACV SOG, the cross-border reconnaissance organization, took it furthest. Before a mission, teams went into what men who served there describe as a quarantine. They ate the same food the North Vietnamese ate, so that they and their waste would smell like the enemy, rather than like Americans.

Some smoked local cigarettes for the same reason. And the underlying idea holds up. There is peer-reviewed research on this. A 2006 study in the journal Chemical Senses found that changing a person’s diet measurably changed their body odor, >> [music] >> and that the change was detectable by other people under controlled conditions.

Now, here is where we have to stop and correct something, because this is the single most contaminated topic in Vietnam War content online. You will see specific numbers repeated [music] everywhere. That Vietnamese trackers could smell American aftershave from 2 km. That deodorant gave a team away at 5 to 800 m.

That scent discipline reduced enemy contact by 43%. None of those figures trace to a primary source. Not to a captured document. >> [music] >> Not to a unit after-action report. Not to a memoir. The trail on them runs back to auto-generated content [music] articles with no citations at all. And from there into videos that repeat them as [music] fact.

Which is a strange thing to discover about a war that generated more paperwork than [music] almost any other in history. There is something else worth saying here, because it cuts against [music] the usual framing. The best documented scent detection in Vietnam runs in the opposite [music] direction. It is American veterans over and [music] over describing how they could smell North Vietnamese and Viet Cong positions.

Usually because of nuoc mam, the fermented fish sauce that was a staple of the Vietnamese diet, and because of local tobacco. So, the practice was real. American teams genuinely masked their scent. And they had a scientifically sound reason to. What is not real is the precise, dramatic, unsourced arithmetic [music] that has been bolted onto it.

Up to this point, everything in this story is men adapting by subtraction. Taking things off, leaving things behind. That was about to flip, because while soldiers were stripping down, the army was redesigning what was left. American troops arrived in Vietnam [music] in the OG-107 cotton sateen utility uniform, standard issue since 1952.

It was durable, and it was completely wrong for the tropics. [music] Heavy, hot, and slow to dry, which in a monsoon is not a minor complaint. >> [music] >> The replacement was the tropical combat uniform, what everyone calls jungle fatigues. Lighter cotton poplin, slanted bellows pockets, a loose cut, on purpose, so air could move against skin.

>> [music] >> First pattern adopted in 1963, in Vietnam from late 1965, >> [music] >> reaching line infantry through the spring of 1966, and it kept changing based on what men in the field reported back. Exposed buttons snagged on brush, so the second pattern covered them. Cotton poplin tore, so ripstop poplin took over production through 1968 and 69.

>> [music] >> But the uniform was never the hardest problem. The feet were, and everyone knew it. The jungle boot was built on a premise that sounds like surrender, >> [music] >> and was actually the correct answer. No boot was going to keep a soldier’s feet dry in Vietnam. So, stop [music] trying. Design a boot that drains instead.

Canvas and leather upper, so it dried fast. Screened [music] brass eyelets low on the instep, so water ran out instead of pooling. A ventilating insole. After punji stake injuries in May of 1966, a stainless steel plate went into the sole. And on the 9th of April, 1968, Army Material Command directed the mud-shedding Panama sole for all tropical combat boots, which became the exclusive pattern from 1969.

Every one of those changes is answering the same question that the underwear regulation answered. How do you keep a man functional in an environment [music] that is trying to dissolve him? None of it was enough. The Army’s own medical history in the volume skin diseases in Vietnam states that superficial fungal infections were the most common and most troublesome of every dermatologic condition among [music] US forces there.

And that hardly anyone escaped some form of fungal skin infection >> [music] >> during his tour of duty. Hardly anyone. The same volume records that after long patrols in swamp and flooded paddy, as many as half the men in a unit developed immersion injuries of some severity, with the worst cases evacuated [music] to rear hospitals.

There is a reason this detail has stuck around for 50 years. And it is not the one people think. The treatment, in the end, was almost absurdly simple. Clean the skin, dry it, get weight off it, get it into sunlight, get out of the water and stay out of it. One American brigade bought 5,000 pairs of rubber shower thongs and capped continuous [music] wet exposure at 72 hours and cut its rate of tropical immersion foot to 10% or less.

A [music] brigade solved a combat effectiveness problem with flip-flops. So, the answer to the question, Vietnam LRRPs [music] went without underwear because wet cloth held against skin in that [music] climate bred fungal and bacterial infection fast enough to take a man out of the field.

And because a four-man team, a long way from help, could not afford [music] to lose anyone to anything. Least of all to a rash. The Army agreed with them in writing in January of 1968. Discouraged, [music] but not prohibited. That is the actual language. Not an order, not a ban, not a secret [music] rule. A recommendation in a one-page memo about ventilation.

Written because the jungle was quietly costing [music] the United States Army tens of thousands of working days a year, and somebody in a medical office in [music] Saigon did the arithmetic. The men walking into that tree line were not thinking about regulations. They were thinking about staying alive for four [music] more days.

Everything they left behind, the underwear, the socks, the soap, the toothpaste, was a calculation about what would kill them slower. Every document we quoted is linked below, including the regulation itself, so you can read it rather than take our word for it.