"Help! I Found a Company of ARVN Hiding in My Basement" Topic

All the new stuff coming out of Gringo and Empress has got me all giddy about doing Vietnam again.

Sorting out and checking the things I have built over time and I stumbled over a tackle box fiull of 28mm ARVN. Maybe a short description will help.

One platoon worth of Baker Company ARVN. Helemts and M16s. Very nice figures. I even have a second platoon not built in my lead pile.

Now for the surprising part. Back in the day of their crazy sales deals, I bought a small mountain of the old Black Tree Design US troops with M1 carbines. A quick exacto decapitation and drilling and I got one platoon worth with the fatigue or baseball style cap and a whole other platoon wearing jungle hats. They are actually pretty similar in slimness and only a millimeter or so difference in height to the Baker ARVN so they'll fit in.

I figure that the baseball cap and the jungle hat platoons would be about right for regional force or better yet as CIDG or whatever the SF guys called their locals.

Now of course I also have a platoon of Gringo ARVN in helmets with carbines and a platoon of Empress with helmets and M16s on the way, with another platoon worth of Gringo ARVN in helemts with M16s to order.
(Ged this is your fault ******!)

Now the ARVN in helmets and M1 carbines can stay as they are in olive or jungle green for the up to 1967-68 look.

The platoons of Baker, Gringos and Empress in helmet and M16 can likewise stay as they are and be in jungle green for the 1968 and forward look.

The platoon in ball caps and carbines though,,, how about duck hunter/Pacific war style cam and maybe reddish skin tomnes for Khmer or one of the Dega tribes?

What do I do with the platoon in jungle hats and carbines?
Jungle greens and maybe a darker skin tone for some of the other tribes or asian skin tone?

What other cam patterns were there and who wore them and when?

French lizard pattern, maybe some airborne types early on like '62-66.
Duck hunter or commercial, maybe CIDG, Meo Hmoong?
Tiger stripe, I imagine that was mostly the more elite reaction types like the mobile support groups for the SF?

Was ERDL in use by any locals?

This site posted here awhile ago may help.
rvnhs.com/museum/uniforms.html

Thanks, that is quite a nice site. A lot of those uniforms were more widespread than I thought.

What you really need to do is ------ package them up carefully and send them to my wife ASAP before before she destroys my credit card buying ARVN from Empress.

Cover of National Geographic 1965. Special Forces soldier with M-1 carbine and CIDG troops. I have this magazine somewhere, great story about the Montagnard uprising. Most of the Montagnards are shown wearing a dark version of "duck hunter" camo.

link

Wow! I found it! What an age we live in!

link

I remember reading through all those National Geographics from the early sixtes and on. Wow, nice find and reminder.

Surprised they even covered any of the FULRO rebellions!
Must have ticked off the RVN somewhat.

A big part of the problem was that the South was such a polyglot of ethnicities and peoples that it is more of a wonder that it lasted as long as it did.

Duck hunter cam for the ball cap guys it is.
I think I 'll go with the reddish skin tones for the khmer look.

Don't despise those figures in baseball caps and jungle hats carrying M2 carbines. Paint them up as Hmong and Montagnard tribesmen. These primitive mountain people served throughout the war as Mike Force mercenary units under command of Special Forces A-Teams in the mountainous jungles along the Cambodian/Laotian borders of the Central Highlands and I Corps. They were expert hunters, stealthy trackers, brave warriors, crack shots with their native cross-bows when silent killing was desirable and utterly loyal to their SF leaders. They HATED the Vietnamese (the NVA only slightly more than the South Vietnamese – racial/cultural thing IIUC).

Special Forces became so attached to these tribes of "little people" that they evacuated (by one means or another) a considerable number of families out of Vietnam to the USA when things went "pear shaped" in 1975.

From what I have read those mountain tribes who remained in VN after 1975 continued to resist the Vietnamese for many years and may still be doing so. They were arguably some of the most potent jungle fighters of the Vietnam War.

FWIW.

Please note These Mike Force units had no connection whatsoever to VN "Ruff-Puffs" or CIDG.

B

I must correct myself. The photos in the National Geographic article shows a pretty even mix of tiger stripes and duck hunter pattern camouflage. I'm just guessing that the Montagnards got the duck hunter pattern so the two sides more easily tell each other apart.
This could make an interesting skirmish wargaming scenario with a three-way standoff featuring South Vietnamese, Montagnard and VC/NVA forces with American Special Forces squeezed in between all three. That could be hairy!

I remember seeing images of the duck hunter cam early on in the war. Say up to 1965-66 a bit more. A combination of using left over war stock material, and then because the CIA was running so much of the border wrs and SF at the time, a lot of the same or similar uniform material as bought commercially too. Most of the ones wearing it if I gt it right were a combination of Meo, Hmong and other Montagnard tribes working for the SF.

I wish I could find some ethno-anthropological studies of the tribes I once went through. It broke down their language and cultural mix but also went into phisical details about heights, builds and skin tones. Those tribes could be anywhere on the skin tone spectrum from typical asian tones to reddish to even brown.

I once had a great book, since lost due to a basement flood. It was written by a SF vet who used the files kept at HQ on each camp that the SF ever used or built. It had a tiny history and which companies used it and their tribal affiliations. It showed where they were on a map and had photos of airiel views for the strike forces and reinforcements should they ever need to help or retake as well as a bunch of photos of bunkers and things around each camp. I would kill for that book now.

Hi troopwo,

I once had a great book, since lost due to a basement flood.

Wondering what book you were referring to -

"Special Forces at War – An Illustrated History, Southeast Asia 1957-1975" by Shelby Stanton?

or perhaps

"SOG – A Photo History of the Secret Wars" by John Plaster?
Or maybe Plaster's SOG text history companion to this volume?

B