9 Things the Army Issued in Vietnam That Grunts Refused to Carry JJ

A base camp near Coochi, 1968. A new man sits on a cot with everything the supply sergeant signed over to him spread across the blanket. It will not fit on one body. A grunt with 8 months in walks past. He stops. He looks at the pile. Without a word, he picks up the gas mask in its bag, the rolled air mattress, the mosquito net, and the bayonet, and sets them on the floor.

He says, “You will thank me in the third hour.” nine things. The army wrote its list of what a rifleman carries for Europe and Korea, for roads and trench lines and winter. Then it sent the list to a jungle. The grunt rewrote it with his back one item at a time in the first week. Nine things that were issued, signed for, and left in a base camp.

The reason for each and the price of leaving it. We count them down. 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 nine, the air mattress. The army called it a pneumatic mattress. The grunt called it the rubber lady, and a lot of them had one for a week. It came rolled.

It weighed a few pounds, and you blew it up by mouth, which at the end of a day of humping meant lying on the ground with your lips on a valve, laded, while the next man slept. On paper, it made sense. A man who sleeps is a man who can walk in the morning. In the field, it went wrong in three ways.

The first was the noise. Rubberized fabric under a body that turns over squeaks. And in a position where every man is listening for a footstep, a squeak from your own line is a bad sound. The second was the thorns. Bamboo, wait a minute, vines, the stubble of a cut patty. All of it put holes in it. and a mattress with a hole is a sheet of rubber you carry for nothing.

Accounts from a lot of outfits put the working life of a rubber lady at days. The third was the water. Once wet, it stayed wet and heavy in the roll on top of the pack. So many men left it on the cot in base camp, slept on the ground, and were sore and lighter. Some kept it, and they had reasons. In the delta, a mattress got a sleeping man up off ankle deep water.

Men floated a rucks sack across a canal on one. In the highlands in the wet season, where the ground was cold mud at night, the men who kept it were the ones who slept. Depending on the unit and the year, some sergeants made the whole squad carry them for that reason. The men who left it and the men who kept it were both right.

The difference was the ground they slept on. Number eight, the mosquito net. The army had a good reason for this one, written in the malaria numbers. The net, the mosquito bar, as the list called it, went over a cot or a man on the ground, and a man under it was hard for the mosquito to reach. Malaria took more men out of the line in some units than the enemy did, and the pills have their own file on this channel.

The net was the other half of that plan. The plan assumed a cot and a man who lay down at dark in a place he would still be at dawn. A rifle squad in a night position had no cot, no corners to tie to, and no 20 minutes at last light to rig a tent of pale gauze. A net is light colored. It moves in wind. A man inside it cannot hear well, cannot get to his rifle fast, and when the flare goes up, he is the shape that is not the color of the ground.

In a lot of outfits, the net went into the pile at base camp on day one. What the grunt did instead was what he could do lying down, sleeves down at dark, no matter the heat, collar up, the bug juice, which has its own file on the neck and the hands and the ears, a towel over the face, or the liner pulled up to the eyes. None of it was as good as a net.

All of it was possible in a hole. The price was paid in a hospital ward by the man who shook with a fever 3 weeks after the night he did not rig the net. He did not know which night. On a cot in a base camp, the net worked, and the sergeant who enforced it there was right. It was written for the place a man slept and left behind in the place he lay.

Number seven, the rubber poncho. Two pieces came with the poncho. the poncho itself, coated nylon, and the quilted liner that tied inside it. The liner went home and stayed on a bed for 50 years, and it has its own file on this channel. This file is about the other piece, the heavy one. A poncho is a sheet of waterproof cloth with a hood, and everything good and bad about it comes from the word waterproof.

It keeps rain out. It keeps sweat in. And a man walking under a poncho in 100° is inside a bag of his own steam. So a lot of men decided the rain was the lesser wet. It is also loud. Rain on coated nylon sounds like rain on a tent roof. And a man on a trail wants to hear the trail.

So in many outfits, depending on the season, the poncho went into the pile, and the man kept the liner, which weighed less than a pound, and was warm when wet. The price came in the monsoon. In the highlands, the rain did not stop for days, and it got cold at night, cold enough to shake, and a wet liner with no poncho over it was a wet blanket.

Men who had left the poncho in April looked for one in October. The men who kept it did not wear it. They used it. Two ponchos snapped together and tied to bushes, made a hooch, a roof over a hole for two men. A poncho and two poles carried a wounded man to a landing zone. And that was a use nobody argued with.

So the same item that was dead weight on the back was a roof at night. And the argument in a lot of squads was how many the squad needed and who carried them. Waterproof was the whole point and the whole problem. Number six, the entrenching tool. The folding shovel rode on the belt or the pack in a cover and it weighed roughly what a full canteen weighed.

It was the thing that dug the hole that kept a man alive when the mortars came. And every manual since the First World War said so. The argument was about where you were. A rifle company that moved every day through triple canopy and set up in a new place every night did not dig the way a company on a hill dug. In a lot of outfits, the night position was a shallow scrape or nothing but a liner and a claymore out front because the men were spent and the ground was roots.

A shovel that digs nothing as dead steel on the hip and men dropped it or two men carried one or the squad kept one per fire team. Some swapped it for a smaller one from the exchange or a captured one, lighter still. Then there were the outfits that dug in every night because their sergeants had been in Korea or because the battalion had been hit once with no holes and nobody let it happen again.

In those outfits the shovel was not up for discussion and a man without one dug with his helmet with a bayonet with his hands while the men with shovels were already below ground. That was the price. The night the shovel mattered was the night the mortars found the position. And that hour on a firebase has its own file on this channel.

In a scrape in the open, a man learned in one night what the manual meant. And the next morning, a lot of men who had dropped the shovel went to find one. The shovel was never useless. It was useless most nights, and that is a different thing. Number five, the bayonet. Almost every rifleman was issued one, a blade in a scabbard on the belt made to fix on the muzzle of the rifle.

In most army outfits, it came off the belt within the first month. It hung where the canteen wanted to be. It weighed about a pound. It caught on brush. And in fights that opened at 30 m and ended in 5 minutes, a bayonet on a rifle was a thing nobody had time for. The knife a man actually used for cans, for sandbags, for a trail was the one he bought himself.

And that story has its own file on this channel. There were bayonet fights in Vietnam. They were rare and the accounts are told by name because they were rare. The blade was almost never used the way it was made to be used. Almost. You have been in country 6 days. Your belt is on the cot and the sergeant is looking at it. Not at your face, at your waist.

On that belt is everything that will hang on you for 12 months. Two cantens, a first aid pouch, ammunition pouches, and a bayonet in a scabbard. He does not tell you to take it off. He is not allowed to. He says the belt should feel like it belongs to you and walks on. You pick up the bayonet. You have never used one.

You think about the third hour of a walk in the heat when a pound is a pound. You put it in the foot locker or you do not. Either way, it is your back. The Marines were different. The Marine Corps trained with the bayonet longer and expected it on the belt. And in a lot of Marine outfits, a man kept it whether he liked it or not, and some used it.

So the rule of thumb depending on the unit was this. The army grunt left it. The marine carried it and both opened their cans with something else. Number four, the flack jacket. The vest was made to stop fragments, not bullets, and it did that job. Layers of ballistic nylon in a canvas shell, roughly the weight of a loaded rifle.

Marine units in the north wore it as a standing order in many battalions, and so did army units on the firebases and in the armored cavalry, because a man on a track or in a gun pit met fragments and not much else. The grunt in a jungle unit met heat first. A flack jacket over a fatigue shirt in the wet season was a stove, and by the second hour the padding was soaked, and by the second day it did not dry, and it never would.

Men in a lot of army rifle companies left it in the base camp rack. Depending on the unit and the year, the vest was a firebase item, a convoy item, a thing the line platoon looked at from a distance. Two men in this channel’s comments remembered it from opposite sides. A marine from 1966 and 1967 wrote that the jacket, wet and cold, felt good on him.

An army man wrote that the sweat inside it made it something he could not stand to wear. Both are true. One stood on a line in the north where the nights were cold and the mortars came in. The other walked the lands where only the heat came in. The price was paid when the fragments came, and they did not ask about units.

A mortar round on a trail, a booby trap on a patty dyke. A man in a vest walked away from things that put a man without one on a helicopter. Every man who left the jacket weighed it. Pounds on the back in the third hour were a real weight, and a fragment that might come was not. Men did that arithmetic every morning. Nobody who left it was a fool.

Nobody who wore it was either. Number three, the steel helmet. The steel pot was a shell, a liner, and a cloth cover, roughly 3 lb. on a firebase, on a track, in a defensive position. Most men wore it because a helmet stops the fragment that comes down from above and mortars come down from above. That much was never argued.

The argument was the head steel in the sun heats until a man feels it through the liner. The sweat runs into the eyes. The rim cuts the view. In the recon units, the long range patrol teams, and in a lot of rifle platoon, depending on the year and the sergeant, the helmet stayed in the base camp, and the man wore the soft hat with the brim, the one in the manual file on this channel.

He could hear in it and see in it, and a few ounces on the fourth hour of a climb is not 3 lb. In many line battalions, the helmet was mandatory in the field, and a man caught in a soft hat on patrol answered for it. In others, the platoon leader wore a soft hat himself. The rule was the units, usually written by the last thing that had happened to it.

The price was in the head wounds, and every medic knew it without a number. A fragment that a steel shell turns into a headache goes somewhere else through a soft hat. Men who wore the boon in the jungle and put the pot back on at the firebase had done the arithmetic, and it still did not cover the mortar round that found a patrol on a trail on a Tuesday.

Some men hung it on the pack where it held wash water or a can of rations over a heat tab. The pot had a dozen jobs. Being on the head was the one a lot of men liked least. Number two, the pack and the loaded belt. What the army issued a rifleman to carry his war on was a system. a pistol belt, suspenders, two stiff canvas ammunition pouches in front, a butt pack behind, canteen covers, and a field pack on top.

It was designed in the 50s for a heavier rifle and a war where a man carried a few days of gear from a truck, not a week on his back. The pouches went first. They were made for the heavier rifles magazines. The new ones rattled in them and they sat exactly where a man wanted to lie flat when the shooting started.

Cloth bandeliers held the same magazines across the chest for nothing and the army eventually wrote that down, which is in the manual file. So on a lot of belts in 1968, the pouches were gone. The buttpack, a small stiff box over the tailbone, went next because it held little and hit a man in the back every step. Then the pack.

The field pack that came with the belt was small and it pulled the belt down. In a lot of outfits, a man found something else. The rucksack the Vietnamese and Montineyard troops carried. A light frame with three pockets was one answer. A captured enemy pack was another, and a man who found one on a trail put it on the same afternoon.

The army’s own tropical rucksack came later and fixed a lot of this, and it is in the manual file. What was left in the supply tent was a pile, rows of stiff canvas pouches, butt packs, field packs with the straps still folded, all of it signed for, all of it counted, all of it built for a road in Germany.

The grunt did not throw it away. He set it down in a row and went to the field with a Vietnamese pack and a cloth bandelier. That pile was the list with the jungle’s corrections in the margin. Number one, the gas mask. The protective mask came in a canvas bag with a strap worn on the thigh or the chest in reach for the seconds a cloud would take.

Rubber glass, two filters, roughly 3 lb. It was designed for a war in which the other side had nerve agent and for that war it was the best thing on the list. The other side in Vietnam did not have that war. The mask was by most accounts the first thing the grunt stopped carrying. Gone before the first patrol into a foot locker or a row on a shelf.

No sergeant looked hard because a lot of sergeants had left theirs too. The bag stayed. a canvas bag with a flap exactly the size of a carton of cigarettes, a few cans of rations, a packet of letters. On a lot of thighs, the mask bag went to the field empty of a mask and full of everything else. Some units made the men carry the mask anyway until that sergeant went home.

Now the price. The Americans used gas in Vietnam, not nerve agent. CS the tear gas in grenades and in bulk in the one place a man with no mask could not go the tunnels. In a lot of units a tunnel complex was cleared by putting CS into it by grenade or blower and then by a man going in after the gas and that man wore a mask or did not go.

The same was true in a lot of bunker clearing. Grenade first, men second. A company that met a tunnel complex with the masks 4 days away on a shelf could wait. Send the two men who had kept theirs or go in with a wet towel over the face. Men did all three. The accounts of tunnel work describe what CS does to a face with no mask. The eyes close, the lungs close.

A man crawls out backward or is dragged. So, the mask was dead weight for 360 days and the one thing on the list that could not be replaced for the other five. The men who kept it were usually the ones who had been in the tunnel once. The rest gambled and most of the time the gamble paid. Back on the cot near Coo Chai, the new man watches four things go from the blanket to the floor.

The mask, the mattress, the net, the bayonet. He does not understand yet. The next afternoon, in the third hour, on a trail that goes up, he does. He is carrying his water, his ammunition, his liner, and his rifle. and the list is in a foot locker behind him with the jungle’s corrections in the margin. Now it is your turn.

What did you leave behind? What did your outfit make you carry anyway? And was there a day you wished you had it? H unit and year if you want. 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 set his mask on a shelf. Share it with the family that has heard him say the army made him carry too much and subscribe for more of what they didn’t put in the textbooks.

To the men who learned in one week what the list got wrong and carried the difference on their own backs, this one was for