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.

Forgotten Weapons covers a recent trip to Knight’s Armament.

They covered the Stoner 63 earlier, and he seems to verify what I’ve heard so many times – the controllability is exceptional.

I have always thought that the U.S. Military made a mistake in not buying into the full Stoner system of firearms.

Around these parts we speak the name of Eugene Stoner only with hushed reverence and awe.  I wish he had had more success pushing his fully automatic, crew-served area suppression weapons on the armed forces.