Weird Weapons of the Vietnam War
BY PGF
1 year, 3 months ago
Pretty interesting stuff. Pictures of each are provided.
Vietnam gave America the first taste of modern asymmetric warfare. We faced a guerilla force and quickly learned that nation-building and fighting a guerilla force is nearly impossible. We later forgot and waged a 22-year war in the middle east without getting much accomplished. In this article, I won’t get too deep into foreign policy failure, but I will dive deep into the world of the weird weapons we saw come out of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam was a brutal place. It was dense jungles, cities, creeks, rivers, and coasts. It created a very diverse and difficult environment for a modern fighting force that was more or less designed for the European theatre of warfare. Southeast Asia, mixed with guerilla warfare, created an environment that required creativity. The folks behind weapons design in the United States were certainly creative and gave us some interesting solutions to interesting problems. Here are some of the weird and creative weapons of the Vietnam War.
Stealth was the order of the day, including a tunnel rat revolver I’d never seen.
I could never imagine being a tunnel rat. Having to crawl into a small tunnel likely made by hand in the middle of a war zone would be terrifying. The tunnel rats would go down these hotels with an M1911, a moonbeam, and a prayer. The M1911 was fine, but the tight quarters often challenged its reliability due to the reciprocating slide in ultra-tight quarters. With that in mind, the military developed the Quiet Special Purpose Revolver.
The idea wasn’t to just give tunnel rats a more reliable weapon, but they would give them a weapon that was easier to use in close quarters overall. The revolver used specially designed ammunition that used an integrally suppressed ammunition known as 10mm QSRP. This round fired 12 pellets, much like buckshot, and was designed to help the shooter fight in situations where aiming was tough.
The QSPR used a Model 29 as its core design, cut the barrel down to nearly nothing, and re-chambered to fit the 10mm QSPR. These were distributed in Vietnam in short numbers. A Ranger team even scored a kill with one, according to an official report. The war ended before they could be widely fielded, and they faded away after the war.
And many others, such as the Remington Model 7188 and the Stoner 63, are also covered.
On August 25, 2023 at 5:08 am, jrg said:
Crawling through dank tunnels to get to the real network underground, I would have thought a revolver would have even more crevices where earth could invade the innards and cause stoppages. Way back when, the revolvers vs. automatics argument in trench warfare was often waged.
On August 25, 2023 at 4:27 pm, Wes said:
He should’ve at least featured the suppressed High Standard .22. That was the ticket with MACV-SOG. In a galaxy far away I got to handle one at a SA museum at Rock Island Arsenal. Not bad, ’bout like you’d expect a heavy-barrel High Standard match gun to handle.
On August 25, 2023 at 11:47 pm, We Will Barry You said:
“They are an impatient lot”, he said, “they paint the world as they would like to see it and insist that it is true. But they never have the patience or fortitude to ever actually see it through. They hide from their own shadows and possess no end-game besides fostering their own illusions. Victory, therefore, shall be ours.”
Ho Chi Minh
On August 30, 2023 at 2:27 am, Daniel K Day said:
I remember reading a write-up of the QSRP revolver in Guns & Ammo magazine in the 70s. The description in your attached article is woefully inadequate, in that it fails to explain the remarkable “internally suppressed” ammunition in the modified S&W Mod 29. The following is what I remember from the article, published about 50 years ago.
Behind the load of “buckshot” projectiles in the case was a piston which contained the powder charge. When the revolver was fired, the piston was driven forward by the burning powder to expel the shot. Once the piston had reached the mouth of the case, it was stopped by a circumferential ridge inside the case, such that the pressurized gases were retained inside the case. This made for a nearly silent weapon, saving the hearing of the “tunnel rats” firing the weapon in the confines of the tunnels.