12 Things Grunts Did in Vietnam That Forced the Army to Rewrite Its Own Manual JJ

A rifleman sits on a sandbag in 1966 with a knife in his hand and his own pack across his knees. He cuts the shoulder straps off his shirt because they catch on everything. And he sews a pocket of green cloth where one of them used to be with a needle from a sewing kit his mother mailed him. He does not ask anybody. Nobody would have said yes.

A few years later, the army issued a shirt with no straps to cut off. 12 things. The army went into Vietnam with a manual. The grunt went in with a knife, a roll of tape, and a tailor in the village down the road. 12 times the manual lost, and the man who fixed it in the field never saw his name on the page that got rewritten.

We count them down from the cloth hat to the one that put two weapons in one pair of hands. Before number 12, a like and a subscribe cost you nothing. And a comment saying where in the world you are watching from helps this channel more than you know. Number 12, the boon hat. In 1965, a rifleman on patrol had two choices for his head.

The steel helmet, close to 4 lb, which cooked in the sun, or the fatigue cap, a stiff baseball cap with a short bill that kept the rain off nothing. So, in a lot of outfits, men found a third choice. A Vietnamese tailor in the village or a shop in Saigon would run up a soft cloth hat with a full brim for a couple of dollars.

Cut the way the ARVN wore theirs. The hat did what the helmet and the cap could not. The brim shed rain off the collar and put shade on the neck. It rolled into a pocket. A soft round shape does not read as a head from a treeine the way a steel dome does, and a soft hat lets the ears work. The army watched for a year or so, then stopped arguing.

Around 1967, by most accounts, the supply system began issuing a hat jungle with a wide brim, a chin cord, and a row of loops for foliage. First in the same green popppllin as the fatigues, and later in riptop and camouflage. It started as a purchase from a tailor who did not speak English. The army did not invent it. The army caught up to it.

Number 11, the Panama soul. The jungle boot has its own file on this channel, so this is only about the bottom of it. The first boots that went to Vietnam in quantity wore a deep lug sole, sharp cleats with square edges. On rock, it was fine. In the patties, it was a problem in the first hour. Wet clay packed between the lugs, filled them flat, and turned the sole into a slick plate of mud.

Men went down on dyke walls and in stream crossings. In a lot of outfits, men scraped the soles with a knife at every halt, and some shaved the lugs down on purpose. And the answer had been sitting in the army’s own files since the Second World War, when boot testing in the jungle of Panama had produced a sole with wide angled cleats and open channels between them.

Cut so that the mud packed in on one step was squeezed out the sides on the next. It did not try to grip the mud. It tried to get rid of it. The army put that soul on the tropical boot by roughly 1968 along with a thin steel plate against the sharpened stakes the enemy set in the trails. The design was older than the men wearing it.

It took a few thousand falls in a rice patty to get it out of the drawer. Number 10. The two quart canteen. The issue canteen held one quart. A rifleman in the dry season under a load in heat above a hundred could drink a quart in an hour and want another. So he carried more of them. Two on the belt was normal, four common.

In a lot of outfits, men went out with six or eight one quart cantens hung off the belt and the pack, each a separate weight on the hip. Some men hung a canvas water bag off the pack. The army’s answer to needing more water was more of the same small container, rigid whether it was full or empty. A man who drank four cantens by noon still carried four cantens.

The field wanted one big soft container that got smaller as it emptied. Around 1968, by most accounts, the supply system began issuing a two quart canteen, a collapsible bladder in a nylon cover with a shoulder strap built to hang off the pack rather than the belt. Empty, it folded flat. Full, it carried two quarts in the space where the belt cantens had been fighting each other.

A lot of men kept a one quart on the belt because the canteen cup nested under it and the cup was the kitchen. But the two quart took the water problem off the belt, which the men had been trying to do with canvas bags for 3 years. Number nine, the riptop uniform. The first tropical uniform reached Vietnam around 1963. a loose cotton poppplland shirt and trousers with slanted chest pockets based on a paratrooper uniform from the Second World War.

This channel has files on what happened to that uniform in the field. So, this is only about the cloth. The first version had exposed buttons that snagged, shoulder straps that snagged, waist tabs that snagged, and a plain popppllin weave that tore on a thorn and kept tearing. Men cut the straps and the tabs off with a knife, which is where this file started.

Men taped the buttons flat. The army changed the uniform in steps, and the steps followed the complaints. A second version dropped the shoulder straps and the waist tabs. A third covered the buttons with a flap, so they had nothing to catch on. And around 1967 or 1968, a fourth version came in a different cloth.

Cotton popppllin woven with a grid of heavier threads. That grid is the whole trick. A tear in plain popppllin runs like a run in a stocking. A tear in riptop reaches the next heavy thread and stops. The cloth was lighter and dried faster, too. Every one of those changes had been made in the field first with a knife or a strip of tape by men who were not asked.

The specification wrote down what the shirts already looked like. Number eight, erdl camouflage. An American rifleman in 1966 went into the jungle in plain olive green, one flat color. The men who lived closest to the enemy did not like it. Reconnaissance teams, long range patrols, men who lay in the brush for days, went to the tailor and bought the striped camouflage the Vietnamese units wore.

That is the tiger stripe story, and this channel has already told it in one sentence. Never issued, bought, and everywhere a recon man could get it. Recon man. The army had a camouflage pattern of its own drawn up in 1948 by its engineer research and development laboratory. four colors in a leaf and branch print and it had sat on a shelf for nearly 20 years because nobody in Europe needed it.

Vietnam did around 1967. By most accounts, the leaf pattern went into production on riptop poppplan and it went first to the same men who had been buying tiger stripe, special forces, recon, some marine units, and then more widely as the war went on. The men called it ERDL after the laboratory. A four-color pattern breaks up the outline of a man at 50 yards in a way that one shade of green does not.

The army answered with a pattern it already owned. The men had been right for years before the army could say so. Number seven, the jungle sweater. Vietnam is a hot country, and this channel has already told the story of the nights in the central highlands when it was not. Huh. So, one sentence. on a ridge at 3,000 ft in the wet season.

A soaked rifleman in cotton could shake so hard he could not hold a canteen. The tropical uniform was built for the heat, and nothing in the standard load was built for anything else. So men asked for wool and wrote home for it. In a lot of outfits, a man who scredged a sweater from a supply sergeant or a package from home guarded it the way he guarded his rifle because wool holds heat when it is wet and cotton does not.

The supply system had something in the catalog. A knit pullover of olive green wool and nylon listed as a sleeping shirt meant for sleeping. Whether it was pushed into the line units because of the highlands or was already in the system and finally reached them. The accounts agree on where it ended up. It came out at dusk, went on under the shirt, and in the mountain units it stopped being a sleeping shirt and became the jungle sweater worn on watch, worn until it fell apart.

A veteran wrote in this channel’s comments in five words, “Blessed be the jungle wool sweater.” The men had asked for wool. It took a while, but wool came. Number six, the tropical rucksack. The army’s load carrying equipment in 1965 was a belt, a pair of suspenders, a small pack on the back of the belt, and a set of pouches designed for a soldier who went back to a supply point at night.

A rifleman in Vietnam walked for days. He carried food for a week, water for a day, ammunition, a poncho, a liner, a claymore, a battery for the radio, and the small pack held about a third of that. So the field went shopping. The most popular answer was the indigenous rucksack. The small canvas pack made for the Vietnamese and irregular units, copied more or less from the enemy’s own pack with three outside pockets and a shape that sat low and stayed out of the way of the rifle.

line units picked it up wherever they could and captured enemy packs went into service the same afternoon. A lightweight nylon rucks sack on a tubular aluminum frame reached Vietnam around 1965 or 1966. It carried the load, but the frame was tall and it caught on brush. Then around 1968 came the tropical rucksack nylon three outside pockets, a shorter frame that let the pack sit lower.

After the war in 1973, the army rolled the lessons into a new system, and the Alice Pack carried that outline into the 1990s. The Grunt had found the right shape in a captured rucksack. The army built it in nylon. Number five, the LRRP ration. A canned combat ration weighed close to 2 lb a meal.

A patrol team going out for 5 days could not carry 30 lb of cans a man and still carry water, ammunition, and a radio. So they did not. They opened the cases in the rear, threw the cans out, kept the crackers, the peanut butter, and the cocoa, and went to the field with a week of food in the space of a day. Some teams carried rice.

The Army’s food laboratory at Natic, Massachusetts, had been working on freeze drying for years, and Vietnam gave it a customer. Around 1966, by most accounts, a new ration reached the patrol units. The food packet, long range patrol, a foil pouch of freeze-dried food in eight menus that weighed under a pound. A man poured canteen water into the pouch, waited, and ate.

Some men ate it dry and drank the water after. The chemistry was the point. Freeze drying takes the water out of cooked food under vacuum and leaves the structure. So the meal weighs a fraction of the can and the water goes back in from the canteen. Line riflemen traded for it, stole it, and asked for it by name until it spread.

The men had thrown the cans out of the ration. The army took the cans out of the ration. Number four, the bandelier and the 30 round magazine. The magazine pouches of 1965 were built for the rifle before the M16, and they held its 20 round magazines badly. A [snorts] pouch that fit, was stiff, and held two or three. A rifleman who wanted 20 magazines on his body, and many did, had nowhere to put them.

The answer was in the ammunition crate. M16 ammunition came packed in cloth bandeliers, seven pockets meant to be thrown away. Men found that a loaded magazine fit the pocket and that two bandeliers crossed over the chest and a third around the waist carried more ammunition closer to the hands. The claymore bag, which has its own file on this channel, took the overflow.

Both were meant to be trash. Both became the standard way a rifleman in Vietnam carried his ammunition. The army wrote it down. Later, bandeliers came with pockets cut to take a loaded magazine and a safety pin to close the flap. Then the magazine changed. Men had complained from the first firefight that 20 rounds ran dry in the time it took to find the next magazine.

A 30 round magazine went first to the special units around 1969 by most accounts and to the rest of the army over the years that followed. The rifle’s earlier troubles have their own file here. This one was not about the rifle. It was about a man who stood in a crate of cloth bandeliers, looked at the pouches on his belt, and chose the trash. Number three, the shotgun.

Here is the point man’s arithmetic. You are walking first on a trail through bamboo, and you can see 10 yards on a good stretch and four on a bad one. Your rifle is built to hit a man at 300. Its light round can tumble or break up on the first stock of bamboo it meets. If the man you meet is four yards away with his rifle already up, you have the time it takes to swing a barrel a yard long and put one round into a space the size of a dinner plate.

He has the same problem. Whoever is luckier wins. Now put a shotgun in your hands. 12 gauge pump a load of buckshot like a fistful of marbles. At four yards, you do not aim it. You point it the way you point a finger and it fills the trail. That was the request from the point men and the recon teams and it was old.

The army had bought shotguns for the trenches of the First World War and the jungles of the Pacific. And some of those same guns came out of the warehouses for Vietnam. And the Army and the Marines bought more in quantity the Ithaca 37 above all with Stevens and Winchester pump guns alongside it.

tens of thousands over the war by most accounts for point men and for the men on the wire at night. The manual had one rifle for one rifleman. The trail asked for something that filled it in the time it took to blink. The point man asked and got it. Number two, Stabo and the rope extraction. A reconnaissance team of six men deep in the enemy’s ground is running.

The helicopter coming for them cannot land because the trees are 100 ft tall. The first field answer was a rope hung out the door of the helicopter with a loop at the end a man could sit in. A special forces sergeant major had put it together from a rope, a sling seat, and a wrist strap, and it carried men out who would have died on the ground.

It was called the Maguire rig, and it had a flaw. He sat in a loop with both hands on the rope. He could not shoot. If he passed out or was hit, he could slide out of it in the air and men did. So in 1968 or 1969, by most accounts, three instructors at the Massiev Ricondo School at Nha Trang built something better.

They sewed a harness into the webgear itself with leg straps rolled up and snapped out of the way until he needed them. When the rope came down, he clipped in, pulled the leg straps down, and rode out of the trees upright, rifle up, and could not fall out. The name Stabbo came from the initials of the three men who designed it.

The army adopted it, had it manufactured, and issued it to the recon and special forces units for the rest of the war. No manual in 1965 had a page about a man lifted out of triple canopy on a rope. Three instructors wrote that page on a sewing machine at a school in Natrang. Number one, the M203. In 1965, an infantry squad had a grenadier, and the grenadier carried the M79, a singleshot launcher that threw a 40mm grenade out to about 350 yd.

It was also the only weapon the Grenadier had. The manual gave him a pistol on his hip, and in a firefight at 40 yards, the grenadier had one shot, a slow reload, and then a handgun. So, the field fixed it. In a lot of outfits, the grenadier carried the M79 on a sling and a rifle in his hands, or the other way around, and ammunition for both.

Some units cut the M79 stock down so it hung on the webgeear like a pistol and drew like one. Some men carried the launcher loaded with buckshot for the trail, which turned it back into a shotgun. All of it was two weapons in one pair of hands, and every man doing it wanted one that did both. The army tried. Around 1967, it sent a launcher to Vietnam that hung under the barrel of the M16, and by most accounts, it failed in the field with a trigger and a mount the men did not trust.

The army went back and did it again. Around 1969, the M203 was adopted. A 40mm launcher clamped under the M16’s barrel with its own trigger just ahead of the rifles. So, a grenadier fired his rifle, dropped his hand 2 in, and fired a grenade. It reached the units in the last years of the war, and it stayed under the American rifle for the next 40 years.

The men had carried two weapons because the manual gave them one. The army answered with one weapon that was two. That is the whole file. Go down the list. A hat from a tor. A sole from a drawer. A bladder for water. A shirt with the straps cut off. A camouflage the field bought first. A sweater from a mother. A pack copied from the enemy.

A ration with the cans thrown out. Ammunition carried in the trash. A shotgun from the last war. A harness sewn by three men at a school. Two weapons in one pair of hands. The Army’s equipment list in 1972 was item for item. The list a rifleman had written with his own body in 1966. The army was not wrong to be slow.

An institution that issues a thing to a million men has to be sure. The grunt had himself a knife and the afternoon. Both of them got it right. One of them got it right first. The rifleman on the sandbag. The knife. the straps on the ground and the pocket sewn where one used to be with his mother’s needle. A few years later, a shirt with no straps came out of a supply tent and nobody handed it to him and said, “Thank you.

Now it is your turn. What did your outfit make, buy, or cut down that the army later issued a standard? Name it, the year, and whether they ever admitted where it came from.” The best answer becomes a future file. If this one was worth your time, leave a like because it puts this file in front of the next man who cut his straps off and thinks nobody noticed.

Share it with the family that has heard him say the army never got it right. And subscribe for more of what they didn’t put in the textbooks. To the men who fixed it in the field with a knife and a roll of tape and never got their name on the manual, this one was for