US Vietnam War Soldiers HATED These 5 Pieces Of Gear D

The US military gave its soldiers some of the most advanced kit in the world when they landed in Vietnam. The best equipment money could buy. The most powerful nation on Earth sending its men in fully prepared. That was the theory. In practice, several pieces of that gear would become the most hated things those men had ever touched.

Some of it got them killed. Some of it rotted their feet clean off. And some of it, one congressional investigation would later describe as, in their exact words, bordering on criminal negligence. These are five pieces of gear that US soldiers in Vietnam absolutely despised. And the real stories behind why.

When American soldiers arrived in Vietnam, a lot of them were issued standard all-leather combat boots. The kind of boot designed for marching on roads in Germany or firing ranges in the American South. Not for spending 3 days chest-deep in a Mekong Delta rice paddy. Leather doesn’t drain. Leather doesn’t breathe.

In the kind of tropical humidity that Vietnam delivered year-round, a leather boot was basically just a vessel for holding water against your skin for extended periods of time. The Army Medical Department documented the consequences in detail. They called it tropical immersion foot. Or, in the Delta where it was especially vicious, warm water immersion foot.

Troops called it paddy foot. Whatever you called it, it meant feet that turned white and wrinkled, swelled to the point of blistering, and became so painful that walking was difficult, and evacuation was necessary. Time magazine reported in 1966 that warm water immersion foot was, in certain Delta operations, causing more casualties than the Viet Cong.

That is not a metaphor. That is a direct comparison. The Army Medical Department’s own histories confirmed that in frontline infantry units, disease accounted for 69% of all hospital admissions in Vietnam between 1965 and 1969. Battle wounds were roughly one in six. Now, to be precise, a proper jungle boot had actually been developed.

The M-1966 jungle boot with canvas panels, drainage eyelets, and a ventilating insole was adopted in May 1966. By December 1966 and January 1967, 340,980 pairs were shipped to Vietnam. But in the meantime, and for many troops before that supply chain reached them, what they got were the old leather boots.

And the damage those boots did during the early years of the war was documented, measurable, and completely preventable. There is a real version of this story where proper gear gets issued before men are sent into the jungle. This was not that version. That detail, gear that existed but wasn’t issued in time, would show up again on this list.

But first, something worse. Two pieces of body armor were standard issue in Vietnam. The Army used the M-1952 A, 8.5 lb of ballistic nylon, designed to stop fragments from grenades and artillery shells. The Marines used the M-1955, heavier still at around 10 lb, with a partial fiberglass collar. The important word in all of that is fragmentation.

These vests were designed to stop shrapnel, Not bullets, not AK-47 rounds. They were not bullet-rated. They were never advertised as bullet-rated. And in a war dominated by small-arms ambushes, where the enemy was shooting at you from 15 ft away, rather than lobbing artillery over a hill, the protection they offered was limited.

In jungle infantry, that trade-off became a daily calculation. A veteran from the Central Highlands, 1969 to 1970, put it plainly, the only man in his platoon who chose to wear a flak jacket consistently was one man out of the whole unit. Everyone else left theirs behind. The marginal protection wasn’t worth the weight.

Think about the arithmetic here for a moment. A grunt on a long-range patrol in the Central Highlands in August is carrying a rifle, ammunition, food, water, radio equipment, and a medical kit. He is doing this in 100° heat with 90% humidity. The flak jacket adds 10 lb. A veteran quoted in the research put that 10 lb in very specific terms.

It was the equivalent of carrying 100 rounds of M60 machine gun ammunition. Or a full day’s worth of food. Or close to a gallon of water. Something had to go. For most grunts in the jungle, the flak jacket went. To be clear, the vests had legitimate uses. Helicopter door gunners wore them constantly.

Tankers used old vests on the floor of their vehicles for mine protection. Fire base troops, who faced incoming mortar fire and weren’t humping through the jungle, wore them regularly. That’s the context you need. But for a rifle platoon moving on foot through triple canopy jungle in the summer heat, 10 lb of fragmentation protection against an enemy primarily using rifles was a calculation many men refused to make in the vest’s favor.

And you can’t call that irrational. Given what they were facing, it was just logic. Most people never heard about this part. But the next item on this list everybody has heard of it. They just don’t know the full story. Officially, they were called meal combat individual. Nobody called them that. They were C rations and they had been around since World War II.

12 menus, each containing a meat can, a bread and cracker unit, a small accessory pack with instant coffee, gum, matches, and four cigarettes, and a P-38 can opener that was basically a folded piece of sheet metal that somehow worked. Some of the cans actually arriving in Vietnam still had manufacturing dates from 1944 through 1954 stamped on them.

That is not an exaggeration. These were rations produced during the Korean War and stored in warehouses for a decade before being issued to men fighting in a jungle. Each meal clocked in at roughly 1,200 calories. The daily three-meal ration came to around 3,600 calories by specification. Which sounds fine until you factor in that an infantry soldier carrying 60 to 80 pounds of kit through jungle terrain in tropical heat burns significantly more than that.

And field consumption was often far below the spec because several of the menu options were so deeply unpleasant that men regularly skipped eating rather than open the tin. The most infamous of those menu options was ham and lima beans. Veterans gave it a nickname that we can only partially repeat on this channel.

They called it ham and lima beans or more commonly ham and and then a word that made absolutely clear how they felt about it. It had been on the menu since Korea, and it stayed there until C rations were finally retired in 1981. Major General Vincent Falco, who served as an enlisted soldier in Korea before his commission, described the experience in terms that were still raw decades later.

It was an unnatural mix of ingredients, he said. Why not red beans? Navy beans? Any beans other than lima beans? He also recalled that cans of ham and lima beans left on vehicle engine manifolds, a common heating method, would occasionally explode. The resulting smell, he noted, lingered for days, even after repetitive engine cleanings.

The weight was its own problem. A full daily C ration came to roughly 5 and 1/2 lb. For a long-range patrol lasting 4 or 5 days, that was over 20 lb of food alone before you added water, ammunition, and a radio. The result was that many troops carried the absolute minimum they could manage, which meant going hungry when resupply helicopters were grounded by weather or enemy fire.

Special forces and long-range reconnaissance units solved this by lobbying for and eventually getting freeze-dried LRRP rations, lightweight, compact, genuinely edible. Line infantry mostly didn’t have that option. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected because the next item on this list wasn’t just hated.

It was the subject of a congressional investigation that used language you almost never see in a government document. Before we get to number two, which involves a congressional subcommittee and a phrase that stopped people cold when they read it. If you find this kind of history valuable, subscribing takes 2 seconds and it genuinely helps us keep making it.

All right. Back to it. All right. So, here’s where things get institutional and genuinely dark. Malaria was not a minor concern in Vietnam. It was a medical crisis. In 1965, malaria was hospitalizing American soldiers at roughly the same rate as combat wounds. Per the peer-reviewed record, specifically a 2024 review in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, rates in frontline infantry units exceeded 10 per 1,000 man days of exposure.

The official response was a drug regimen. Soldiers were issued a large orange tablet once a week, a chloroquine primaquine combination pill, and in high-risk areas, a small white dapsone tablet every single day. Take them. Stay healthy. That was the idea. The problem was the pills themselves.

The chloroquine primaquine tablet caused gastrointestinal distress, the runs, starting within 3 hours, lasting into the next day, reliably enough that large numbers of soldiers simply stopped taking it. The dapsone was no better received. Because compliance was so poor, unit medics were eventually ordered to physically watch each soldier swallow his dapsone tablet and check his name off a daily list.

Think about what that means for a moment. In the middle of a war, the army was running supervised pill lines because its own troops were refusing medication so consistently that the honor system had completely broken down. And non-compliance had real consequences. The peer-reviewed record documents 78 confirmed malaria deaths in the US Army during the war, and 46 in the Marines.

The Dapsone itself caused side effects, a condition called methemoglobinemia, where blood oxygen is impaired in roughly one in three soldiers taking it. Some of those men were medically evacuated for symptoms of the pill that was supposed to keep them healthy. One veteran from Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, described the moment he was handed that first large orange tablet on arrival in Vietnam.

He swallowed it, and within 3 hours had diarrhea that lasted well into the following day. “Many men decided to forego taking them,” he said. And he watched the medic come around each morning after Dapsone was added, checking names off a sheet, making sure nobody slipped the pill into their pocket. It wasn’t rebellion.

It was the rational response of men whose bodies were telling them that the cure felt like a punishment. What comes next is the part that still doesn’t make sense. Because number one on this list wasn’t just poorly designed gear. It was gear the Army knew was broken, was told was broken, had the fix sitting right in front of them, and issued anyway.

There is a photograph that circulated in 1967 that a lot of people who study Vietnam War history know. It shows a dead American Marine on a hillside, lying beside his rifle with the bolt carrier group disassembled next to him. He had died trying to fix a jam. That photograph and dozens of accounts just like it were what eventually forced Congress to act.

The rifle being issued to American troops in Vietnam from 1965 onwards was the XM16E1, an early pre-production version of what would eventually become the M16A1. And it had a problem. Actually, it had several problems, and they were not accidental. The dominant failure mode was called failure to extract.

A fired brass casing would stick inside the chamber. The extractor, the small claw that pulls the empty case out, would tear through the rim and leave the brass lodged in place. The only fix, in the middle of a firefight, was to disassemble the rifle and ram a cleaning rod down the barrel to force the casing out. Except most of these men weren’t issued cleaning rods or cleaning kits or maintenance instructions beyond an army manual that stated, and this is an actual quote, that an occasional cleaning will keep the weapon functioning indefinitely. The cause was a decision made in 1963. The rifle had been designed around a specific gunpowder, DuPont 1MR 4475, extruded powder that burned cleanly. The army switched to Olin Mathieson WCC 846

ball powder instead. Ball powder burned dirtier, fouled the gas system, and drove the rifle’s cyclic rate from around 750 rounds per minute to nearly 1,000. The army had been advised against making this switch. They made it anyway. Frankford Arsenal tested this. With the correct powder, the rifle produced 3.

2 malfunctions per 1,000 rounds. With ball powder, it produced 18.5. That’s a failure rate almost six times as high. A field investigation in 1967, which interviewed roughly 250 soldiers and Marines, found that around 50% reported malfunctions, of which approximately 90% were failures to extract. A separate survey of 1,585 troops found that 80% reported at least one stoppage.

The hill fights at Khe San in April and May of 1967 became the moment the country finally had to pay attention. Second and third battalions of the third Marine Division assaulted fortified NVA positions on hills 861, 881 north, and 881 south. Marines began dying beside disassembled rifles. We were a weird unit.

They’d drop us out and we carried our food for 7 to 10 days. We don’t We weren’t We weren’t back at the rear anymore. We would live out there and the helicopter come in and drop food off to us and ammunition and anything else supplies we might need. And maybe a a replacement. And it was like that and we’d operate for about 30 days or so and then we’d come back in for a break.

And again, back out again for another period of time or something like that. It wasn’t a front-on-front. It was mainly we were always out there. We were trying to uh stop their flow of munitions and stuff south. And so we would get to uh uh set a block point like an ambush on a trail and uh heck, I got my I was awarded Actually, I not awarded, earned my Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

You know, it’s certified for 30 days of combat or in in active combat. Lieutenant Colonel Ray Madonna, commanding Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines, wrote afterward, “I will also never forget how badly the M-16 rifles jammed on us.” An anonymous Marine letter from May 1967, quoted in C.J.

Chivers’ book The Gun, has become one of the most cited documents from the entire war. The Marine wrote, “We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19. Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. The men living through this weren’t reading the congressional investigation.

They were in it. What he’s describing was happening everywhere on that line. And by October 1967, it had forced a congressional reckoning. Congress opened a formal investigation. The three-member Ichord special subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Richard Ichord of Missouri, sat from May through August of 1967 and issued its report on October 19th of that year.

It found that more than 90% of the 5.56 mm ammunition delivered to Vietnam had been loaded with the wrong powder, ball propellant. It found that 218,000 rifles had been sent to the army after the army was already on notice that they failed to meet design and performance specifications. And the subcommittee’s conclusion and the final findings, this is the language of a congressional document, not a pamphlet, was that the failure to correct the deficiencies of the 5.

56 mm ammunition borders on criminal negligence. The fixes came after that report. Chrome-lined chamber, revised buffer to slow the cyclic rate. Proper cleaning kits issued. The artist Will Eisner was contracted to produce a comic book-style maintenance manual called The M-16A1 Rifle. Operation and preventive maintenance because the army had concluded that a comic was more likely to actually be read than a technical document.

By 1968, around the time of Tet, the worst of the malfunction crisis had passed. The M-16A1 went on to become one of the most recognizable rifles in military history. But that came after men died beside disassembled weapons on hillsides in 1967 that nobody can fully account for. Five pieces of gear.

Boots that rotted feet in water. Body armor too heavy to carry into a jungle. Rations from the Korean War sitting in cans for a decade. Pills that made you sick enough to refuse them. And a rifle that a congressional investigation said bordered on criminal negligence to have issued in the condition it was in.

None of this was inevitable. Most of it was the result of decisions made in offices by people who were not the ones who would be carrying the gear, eating the food, or reaching for a cleaning rod in the dark. If you found this worthwhile, subscribing takes 2 seconds and it lets us keep going deeper into stories like this one. We’ll see you on the next one.