What The Viet Cong Actually Thought About American Equipment D

In 1965, America arrived in Vietnam with the most advanced military arsenal in human history. Helicopters that could deliver an army in minutes. Rifles that could fire 700 rounds a minute. Bombs that could erase a forest. But what nobody knew at the time was that the Vietkong were studying every piece of that arsenal.

They were capturing it, copying it, and decades later putting some of it in their national museums. Today, using captured documents, post-war memoirs, and the words of Vietkong soldiers themselves, we look at what the enemy actually thought about American military equipment. To understand the Vietkong perspective, you have to understand where it came from.

American intelligence captured over 2.7 million pages of Vietkong and North Vietnamese documents during the war. That archive called the Combined Document Exploitation Center is now housed at Texas Tech University. The Rand Corporation conducted around 2400 interviews with prisoners, defectors, and refugees from 1964 to 1968.

After the fighting ended, the people who survived started telling their story. Truong Nuang, a senior Vietkong official, published his memoir in 1985. Ba Nin, a North Vietnamese infantry veteran, wrote a novel that still studied in Vietnamese schools today and generals like Vo and Guuan Gap and Chu Huy Man sat down with their former American enemies and finally talked.

What they said about American equipment is sometimes surprising and it starts, oddly enough, with the rifle that defined the war. For decades, popular history has pushed a simple story. American troops hated their M16 rifles because they jammed in the jungle, while the Vietkong loved capturing them.

That story is halfright. The American part is true. Early M16 models fielded in 1966 and ’67 did suffer catastrophic jamming problems. A congressional inquiry in October 1967 blamed it on a switch in gunpowder, on a lack of chrome lining in the chamber, and on rifles being issued without cleaning kits.

But the Vietkong half of the story doesn’t hold up. By the autumn of 1967, every Vietkong main force battalion had been re-equipped with the AK-47 and its Chinese copy, the Type 56. captured American training documents and weapons charts focused on the AK, not the M16. Photos from 1965 and 66 show Vietkong fighters carrying older French rifles, Chinese SKS carbines and captured South Vietnamese weapons before standardizing on the AK.

when American special forces, SEALs, and long range patrols started picking up enemy AK-47s because they trusted them more than their M16s. The Vietkong didn’t return the compliment. They held on to their AKs. The first lesson the enemy taught us about our own equipment was that they didn’t want it. The next piece of American gear the Vietkong studied was the M79 grenade launcher.

American troops called it the Blooper or the Thumper because of the soft popping sound it made. It fired a 40mm grenade up to 350 m and it was deadly accurate. When Vietkong soldiers captured them, and they did capture them, they weren’t always interested in using them as launchers.

They were interested in the grenades themselves. American afteraction reports from 1966 and67 catalog what happened to abandoned ammunition. One US Army summary documented 174 recovered American grenades that had been turned into Vietkong booby traps. 35 used American hand grenades. Four used captured claymore mines.

and 10 anti-tank mines were rigged for electrical detonation using parts of discarded American radio batteries. The duds and discarded ordinance picked up from a battlefield wasn’t trashed to the Vietkong. It was free engineering. The M79 grenade you couldn’t be bothered to retrieve might come back at your patrol 3 days later buried under a trail.

American soldiers were trained to plant the claymore facing the enemy, pull a hidden trip wire or hit a clacker, and 700 steel ball bearings were sprayed in a 60° arc, lethal to anyone within 50 m. The Vietkong respected the claymore enough to base an entire weapon system on it. China supplied them with a copy called the DH10.

It was crudely built, but more powerful than the American original. and Vietkong sappers used it to mine helicopter landing zones. Captured wooden training mock-ups of the DH3, a smaller variant, were photographed by American intelligence officers in the late 1960s. You’ll often hear a story that Vietkong scouts would crawl up to American positions in the dark, loosen the screws on a claymore mine, and turn it around so it would fire backward when triggered. Veterans tell that story to this day. The truth is that anecdote almost never appears in actual Vietkong documents or post-war memoirs. It’s a tale that grew bigger in the telling. What did happen and what is documented is that the Vietkong recovered American claymores by the dozen, redeployed them in their own ambushes, and at one captured weapons cache, guarded their treasure

with a double ring of M18 claymore mines. If there is one piece of American equipment that defined the Vietnam War for the people fighting against the United States, it was the helicopter. specifically the BelleuH1 Iraquoy known to American GIS as the Huey. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietkong called it something else.

To them, it was the most feared sound on the battlefield. In November 1965, the US First Cavalry Division landed thousands of troops by air deep into the Iad Drang Valley in the Central Highlands. It was the first time the Vietkong and North Vietnamese army had faced full air mobility on a battlefield. They lost the engagement at landing zone X-ray, but they took the lesson of their lives.

After the battle, North Vietnamese General Nuen Chian wrote a doctrine that became famous in Vietnam. In Vietnamese, it’s pronounced nam that lung jich majan and it translates as grab the enemy by the belt and fight. The idea was simple. Get close enough to the Americans that their helicopters and their artillery couldn’t fire without killing their own men.

Decades later, Hal Moore, the American commander at LZ X-Ray, sat down with Lieutenant General Enuan Huan, the North Vietnamese officer who had fought him in 1965. General Anne told Moore that his orders for the Albany ambush had been simple. Move inside the column. Grab them by the belt.

Avoid casualties from the artillery and the air. General Vu Enuen Gap, Hanoi’s most senior commander, told American journalist Joe Galloway in 1990 that if they could defeat American tactics, meaning the helicopters, they could defeat the entire American strategy. But you don’t have to take a general’s word for it.

In 1981, an American documentary team interviewed Captain Anguan Kong Dan, a Vietkong officer who had fought through the war. Dan described in his own words what it was like to face an enemy that arrived from the sky. For Dan and millions like him, the

helicopter wasn’t just a vehicle. It was a problem to be solved. And the answer they came up with cost American forces dearly. There is one piece of American equipment so prized by the Vietkong that you can find a monument to it in modern Vietnam. It isn’t a tank. It isn’t a fighter jet. It’s a radio.

The A/Prc25 was the standard tactical radio of the US military in Vietnam. American troops called it the prick 25. It was heavy. It was reliable. And it broadcast the location, intentions, and weapons inventory of every American unit using it. In voice, almost always in the clear. The Vietkong and the North Vietnamese Army figured this out fast.

A signals intelligence unit operating in the Coochai area, sometimes referenced as the 47th Reconnaissance Battalion, used captured PRC2 sets to listen in on American radio traffic. They built profiles of US units that included the methods of navigation in use, the weapons in inventory, and the modes of transportation.

Their reports also rated the equipment they were spying on. They were impressed by the Huey helicopter and the M113 armored personnel carrier. They were not impressed by the V100 armored car the military police drove for road patrols or by the M151 Jeep. China actually manufactured replacement batteries for captured American PRC25s and shipped them down the Hochi Min trail.

Today in a Vietnamese military museum, one of those exact radios sits in a glass case. The only piece of American equipment given a permanent display. For all the high technology, some of the American equipment the Vietkong remembered most clearly was something Americans didn’t even consider equipment. It was lunch. A North Vietnamese veteran interviewed after the war said this about the standard American cration.

Then he added a darker line. He said many of his fellow soldiers were killed because they tried to gather American food boxes that were left on the battlefield. The Saigon Black Market moved enormous quantities of American food aid into communist supply caches. American troops on patrol routinely found their own seation tins, sometimes with intact contents hidden in Vietkong tunnels and bunkers.

The cigarettes, the coffee packets, the small can openers called P38S were collected and reissued. For an army that was fighting on rice and dried fish, an American lurp ration with chocolate, jam, and powdered cocoa was almost unimaginable luxury, and it was apparently worth dying for.

Of every American weapon the Vietkong faced, none entered their writing the way the B-52 did. In 1965, the US Air Force began a campaign called Ark Light, tactical bombing missions flown by B-52 strategic bombers, dropping bomb loads of around 27 tons each from over 30,000 ft. The Vietkong almost never heard the planes coming.

The bombs simply began arriving. Truang Hutang, the senior Vietkong official we mentioned earlier, lived through repeated B-52 strikes near the Cambodian border. He survived because Soviet intelligence trwers in the South China Sea tracked the bombers and gave the Vietkong a few minutes of warning.

He used those minutes to write down what an Ark light strike actually felt like. He wrote, quote, “The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack, it seemed as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor that I had been caught in the apocalypse. The terror was complete.

One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.” Then he added something even more haunting. He wrote that when the B-52s found their target, the place you’d lived in didn’t just get destroyed, it ceased to exist. Quote, “You would come back to where your bunker had been, your home, and there would simply be nothing there, just an unrecognizable landscape gouged by immense craters.

” Captured North Vietnamese documents from the siege of Kesan in 1968 backed this up. One captured Pavan regimental report said 3/4 of the entire regiment had been lost in a single B-52 raid. American interrogators noted prisoners coming in dazed with blood streaming from their noses and mouths from concussion alone.

After the war ended in 1975, the Vietkong and the North Vietnamese Army carried home thousands of pieces of captured American equipment. M16 rifles, M79 grenade launchers, PRC25 radios, Huey helicopters. Some of it ended up in factory yards. Some of it ended up in scrap and some of it ended up in museums in Hanoi and Ho Chi Min City displayed as trophies of a war they had won.

What the Vietkong actually thought about American equipment is in the end not what their propaganda said and not what American gun magazine said either. They feared the helicopter. They studied the bomber. They built doctrine around getting close enough to neutralize American firepower.

They took our radios, our food, our minds, and turned them around on us. And they wrote about it after the fact with a clarity their enemies never quite matched. The story of any war is told by the victors, but sometimes the truer story is told by the people who learn to survive.

If you want the next chapter of this story, watch our breakdown of the battle of Iad Drang on screen