May 2nd, 1968. In the AA Valley near the La Oceanian border, three men from a MACV SOG recon team lie motionless in the mud. They have been frozen in place for 40 minutes. They do not swat the leeches crawling up their necks. They do not wipe the sweat stinging their eyes. They breathe through open mouths to silence the rush of air.
10 yards away, a North Vietnamese Army patrol moves south. The enemy soldiers are talking, confident, their AK-47s slung casually over shoulders. They are walking on a trail that American intelligence says does not exist. The Americans are outnumbered 50 to1. If they are discovered, they die. There is no immediate air support.
There is no artillery battery calibrated to this grid square. They are ghosts in a country they are technically not in. In this silence, the difference between life and death is measured in decb. A standard issue US Army canteen, half empty, makes a rhythmic sloshing sound when a soldier moves. That sound carries 30 yards in the bush.
A standard issue dog tag chain clinks against a neck. That sound carries 10 yards. A standardisssue M16 rifle, if not obsessively cleaned, jams after the third round. That silence is the loudest sound of all. One of the Americans shifts his weight. His gear does not rattle. He is not wearing the heavy flack jacket mandated by high command.
He is not carrying the standard loadbearing suspenders. His canteen is a soft collapsible bladder taken from a survival kit wrapped in tape. His weapon is not the long black rifle issued to the infantry, but a sawed machine gun with the serial numbers filed off. He is wearing black pajamas, not olive drab. He looks less like a soldier of the United States Army and more like a shadow of the jungle itself.
The NVA patrol passes. The noise fades. The American team leader signals with a hand gesture that is not in any field manual. They move out silent as smoke. They are alive because they stripped away the bureaucracy of the American military machine and built their own war from the ground up. They realized that the standard issue loadout was designed for a war in Europe that never happened.
And in Vietnam, standard issue meant a standard death. This is the story of how the most elite warriors of the Vietnam War rejected the billions of dollars of research and development poured into the American soldier. It is a story of canvas, steel, and duct tape. It is a story of men who realized that to survive the chaos of modern warfare, they had to break the rules of the army that sent them there.
This is why they ditched the gear. To understand why a recon man would cut the barrel off a 40mm grenade launcher, or so his own ammunition pouches, you first have to understand the machine he was fighting against. Not the North Vietnamese Army, but the United States Department of Defense. By 1965, the American military was the most logistically advanced force in human history.
It was a marvel of industrial engineering. A supply chain stretching from factories in Ohio to depots in Saigon ensured that hundreds of thousands of men were fed, clothed, and armed with identical equipment. The philosophy was standardization. The Pentagon viewed the soldier as a modular component in a larger weapon system.
If every soldier carried the same rifle, the same ammo, the same rations, and the same uniform, logistics became predictable. Predictability was the god of the planners in Washington. Robert McNamera, the secretary of defense, was a numbers man. He believed that war could be managed like a Ford automotive plant. He believed in efficiencies of scale.
The standard infantry loadout was the product of this thinking. It was designed by committees who looked at charts, not jungles. The standard loadout for an infantry man, a grunt in the first infantry division or the Marines, was heavy. It included a steel pot helmet with a camouflage cover, a flack jacket designed to stop shrapnel weighing nearly 10 lb, a set of web gear with suspenders, a pistol belt, two cantens made of hard plastic, an entrenching tool, a bayonet, a poncho, a poncho liner, and universal ammunition pouches.
He carried the M16A1 rifle. He carried sea rations in tin cans. He carried fragmentation grenades and smoke grenades. In total, the standard combat load weighed between 60 and 80 lb. The doctrine stated that this weight was manageable for a healthy American male. The doctrine assumed the soldier would be fighting in terrain where he could stand up.
It assumed he would be supported by armored personnel carriers or helicopters. It assumed he was part of a company-sized element, a massive block of firepower moving across a map to seize and hold territory. But for the men of the special forces and specifically the innocuously named studies and observations group or Hoji, the doctrine was a suicide pact.
Their war was not about seizing territory. They did not hold ground. They did not have company-sized elements. Theyoperated in teams of three to six men inserted deep behind enemy lines in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Their mission was reconnaissance, wiretapping, prisoner snatches, and ambush. For a Soji operator, the jungle was not a battlefield to be conquered.
It was an ocean to be navigated. The physical environment of Southeast Asia was an enemy as formidable as the NVA. The heat often exceeded 100°. The humidity rotted fabric in days. The terrain was a vertical nightmare of limestone carsts and razor sharp elephant grass. In this environment, 80 lbs of gear was not just uncomfortable, it was paralyzing.
A soldier carrying standard gear moved slowly. He broke brush. He left a trail of crushed vegetation that an experienced tracker could follow at a run. The noise discipline of a standard infantry unit was non-existent by Soji standards. The clanking of metal clips, the squeak of leather boots, the rattle of hard plastic cantens against belt buckles created a noise signature that traveled hundreds of meters.
But the problem went deeper than weight and noise. It was about lethality. The standard American loadout was defensive. The flack jacket was for protection. The helmet was for protection. The entrenching tool was to dig holes for protection. Special forces doctrine was aggressive. Their defense was speed and overwhelming violence of action.
If a six-man team made contact with a battalion of NVA, a flack jacket would not save them. A helmet would not save them. What would save them was the ability to put more lead in the air in 5 seconds than the enemy could in 5 minutes and then vanish before the return fire started. So, they started stripping down.
They looked at the pile of governmentissued equipment on their bunks and asked a simple question. Does this help me kill or does this help me die? The first thing to go was the uniform. The standard jungle fatigues were olive drab. In the deep shadows of the triple canopy, olive drab looked like a solid black silhouette against the foliage. It stood out.
It didn’t break up the human outline. The SR operators looked at the enemy. The Vietnamese peasants in the Vietkong often wore black. At first glance, this seemed counterintuitive. Why wear black in a green jungle? But in the deepest parts of the forest, where light struggled to penetrate, the shadows were black.
A man in black pajamas moving through the shade disappeared. Operators began sourcing black clothing. They bought dyed pajamas from local markets in Daang or Saigon. They stole flight suits. They even dyed their own jungle fatigues in 55gallon drums filled with ink and water. Later in the war, they would adopt the erratic tiger striped camouflage, a pattern specifically designed for the close-range density of the Southeast Asian brush.
But in the early days, the choice was often personal, improvised, and strictly against regulations. This deviation from the uniform code was not rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It was a calculated tactical decision. If a team was spotted at a distance wearing black pajamas and carrying AK-47s, the enemy might hesitate.
That hesitation, that split second of confusion, is that one of ours? Bought the team time to shoot first or fade away. Then came the footwear. The standard issue jungle boot was a good piece of equipment. It had a canvas upper for breathability, drain holes for the water, and a steel plate in the sole to protect against pung stakes.
But it had a distinct tread pattern. An NVA tracker could look at a footprint in the mud and know instantly, American. The footprint was a signature. It revealed the presence of US forces in areas where they were claiming total deniability. It compromised the mission before a shot was fired. So, the operators got creative.
Some wore the BA boot, a canvas sneaker used by the Vietnamese peasantry and the NVA. It had a soft sole that allowed the wearer to feel the ground, to sense a twig before it snapped. It left a print that looked like a locals. It was quieter. Others took this a step further. They glued sections of tire tread to the soles of their boots to mimic the Ho Chi Min sandals worn by the enemy.
They even experimented with boots that had footprint shapes molded into the sole to look like a barefoot peasant. The goal was to leave no trace, or if a trace was left, to make it a lie. This obsession with the footprint reveals the core of the special forc’s mindset. They were fighting an information war as much as a kinetic one.
Every detail down to the impression in the mud was a piece of data that could be used against them. The standard army provided boots to walk in. The special forces needed boots to lie with. But the most radical changes happened with the weaponry and the loadbearing equipment. This is where the ingenuity of the American soldier met the harsh reality of the kill zone.
Consider the ammunition. In a standard infantry unit, a rifleman might carry 300 rounds of 5.56 millimeterammunition. He carried it in magazines, usually 20 rounds per magazine, though often loaded to only 18 to prevent spring failure. For a Saji team, 300 rounds was a warm-up. When a recon team made contact, they utilized a tactic called the peel.
The point man would open fire on full automatic, emptying a magazine in seconds to suppress the enemy. He would then fall back while the second man opened fire. This rolling wall of lead required a volume of fire that defied logistics. SGE operators carried massive amounts of ammunition. It was not uncommon for a single man to carry over 1,000 rounds on his person, but you cannot carry 1,000 rounds in standard pouches.
There isn’t enough room on the belt. The solution was the Stabbo harness and customsewn vests. The stabbo or stabilized body extraction harness was invented in Vietnam to allow teams to be pulled out of the jungle by helicopter ropes without landing. But it doubled as a loadbearing system. Operators would take canvas cantens covers, survival kit pouches, and even modified claymore mine bags and sew them directly onto their gear.
They created heavy loadouts that looked like suicide vests of ammunition. They wore canteen covers that held six magazines each instead of a water bottle. They wore belts of machine gun ammo crisscrossed over their chests like bandidos, not for a machine gun, but to feed their own rifles if they ran dry on magazines, stripping the rounds off the links during a lull in the fight.
They realized that in a contact, you never reloaded magazines. You dropped the empty one and grabbed a fresh one. If you ran out of loaded magazines, you were dead. So they carried them all, 30, 40 magazines per man. To carry this weight, they had to cut everything else. They cut the handle off their toothbrush.
They cut the labels off their clothing. They stopped carrying underwear. They ate local food to reduce the bulk of sea rations. They carried concentrated rations, long range patrol rations that were dehydrated and light years before the rest of the army saw them. They analyzed the weight of every object in ounces.
A standard grenade was heavy. A mini grenade, the V40, was the size of a golf ball. You could carry three V40s for the weight of one standard M26 frag. The kill radius was smaller, but the noise and the confusion it caused were just as effective for breaking contact. Operators would tape these mini grenades to their suspenders, their belts, their knife sheath.
They became walking claymore mines. The weapons themselves underwent surgery. The XM177E2, known as the CAR 15, became the symbol of the elite. It was a shortened version of the M16 with a telescoping stock and a 10-in barrel. It was loud, producing a massive muzzle flash and a crack that sounded like a cannon.
But even the CAR 15 was modified to manage the recoil of fully automatic fire. Operators attached vertical foregrips. But the army didn’t issue vertical foregrips, so they made them. They took the pistol grip from a damaged rifle, drilled a hole in the handguard of their own weapon, and bolted the second grip onto the front.
This allowed them to pull the weapon tight into the shoulder and spray a stream of fire with reasonable accuracy. It was the great grandfather of the modern tactical rifle setups we see today. Born in a hooch in Kum with a drill and a stolen spare part. Then there was the M79 grenade launcher, the Thumper.
It was a singleshot breakaction weapon that fired a 40mm explosive round. Standard doctrine said it was a support weapon fired from the rear of the squad to clear bunkers. It was long and awkward to carry in dense brush. The recon men saw it differently. They saw a handheld shotgun. They took hacksaws to the barrel, cutting it down until it was just inches long.
They cut the stock off, leaving just a pistol grip. The result was a pirate gun, a handheld cannon that could be holstered on a hip. It kicked like a mule and had terrible range, but at 10 m in the jungle, range didn’t matter. It was a bunker buster you could draw like a revolver. These modifications were not approved by the ordinance department.
If a regular soldier was caught sawing the barrel off a government weapon, he would face court marshall. SOG operators operated under a different set of rules. Their commanders understood that the mission profile required tools that did not exist in the supply catalog. The result was a culture of extreme innovation driven by the Darwinian pressure of the battlefield.
But the most chilling modification was not to the weapon, but to the mind of the man carrying it. The standard soldier was taught to trust the system, trust the radio, trust the air support, trust the medevac. The SRG operator was taught that the system could not reach him.
He carried a last resort that was not in any manual. It might be a single grenade left on his web gear with the pin bent for easy pulling, intended for himself if capture was imminent. Itmight be a small vial of poison. The loadout reflected the grim reality that there were fates worse than death in the camps of the enemy.
This psychological burden added a weight that no scale could measure. Yet it stripped away the fear of death. If you control your own end, you fight with a ferocity that a drafted soldier cannot match. By late 1968, the visual difference between a regular infantry unit and a SOG team was absolute.
One looked like a regimented projection of American industrial power, heavy, uniform, and slow. The other looked like a band of ragged pirates armed with saw-off shotguns and silenced pistols moving with the fluidity of the indigenous people. This divergence created friction. When Soji teams returned to base, they were often mocked or reprimanded by regular officers for their appearance.
They were out of uniform. Their hair was too long. They didn’t salute. But the men who had been in the Prairie Fire emergency zone knew the truth. The polish of a boot didn’t stop a bullet. The crease in a trouser leg didn’t silence a footstep. The story of these unique loadouts is not just a list of cool gear.
It is a study in the failure of centralized planning in the face of chaotic reality. The Pentagon tried to fight a war with a spreadsheet. The men on the ground fought it with a hacksaw. But how did they actually get this gear? The supply system was rigid. You couldn’t just order a Swedish K submachine gun or a suppressed high-standard pistol through the normal channels.
The logistics of the special loadout required a special economy. This was the shadow supply chain of the Vietnam War. It ran on barter. It ran on theft. It ran on personal connections in bottles of scotch. Essog supply sergeant was a man of immense power. He didn’t trade in paperwork. He traded in favors. If a team needed six CAR 15s and the depot only had M16s, the supply sergeant might trade a captured AK-47 and a case of stakes to an Air Force pilot who was flying into Thailand.
That pilot would trade the stakes to a CIA contact who had access to a warehouse of sterile weapons, weapons with no serial numbers intended for covert operations. This black market of warfare meant that a recon team might go into the field carrying German ammunition. Swedish guns and Swiss compasses. They used rucks sacks made by the indigenous Montineyard tribes woven from rattan and bamboo because they were lighter and drained water better than the American canvas packs.
They ate rice purchased from local villages because it cooked faster and smelled like the jungle. Whereas American beef stew smelled like a foreign invader. The indigenous ruck serves as a perfect microcosm of this shift. The American rucks sack, the Alice Pax’s predecessor, was a large framed canvas beast. It held a lot, but it pushed the wearer’s center of gravity backward.
In the mountains, this was dangerous. If you slipped, the pack pulled you off the cliff. The Montineyard ruck was a basket. It sat high on the shoulders and hugged the back. It forced the wearer to lean forward into the slope. It was designed by people who had lived in those mountains for a thousand years. The Americans with all their degrees in ergonomics had designed a pack for marching on a road.
The Montineyards had designed a pack for climbing a wall. The Sugi operators were humble enough to realize the illiterate tribesmen knew more about loadbearing than the US Army Quartermaster Corps. This humility was key. The refusal to use standard gear was an admission that the American way of life did not apply here.
To survive, they had to become something else. They had to adopt the logic of the scarcity they were fighting in. Standard gear is built on the assumption of abundance. If you fire all your ammo, a helicopter brings more. If you break your rifle, the armorer gives you a new one. In the over the fence missions of Laos and Cambodia, there was no abundance.
There was only what you could carry. This scarcity mindset led to the sawed off culture. Why carry 20 in of barrel when 10 will do? That extra 10 in is weight. It is drag. It is a liability. Cut it off. Why carry a full ration meal with the heavy tin can and the plastic spoon and the toilet paper packet.
You only need the calories. Take the food block out, wrap it in foil, throw the rest away. The result was a loadout that was dense, efficient, and lethal. A SOG operator might carry 80 lb just like the regular infantryman, but his 80 lb was 90% ammunition and explosives. The regular infantryman’s 80 lb was 50% life support, sleeping gear, extra clothes, heavy food.
The SOG operator accepted he would be wet, cold, and hungry. He traded comfort for firepower. He traded the long-term sustainability of a campaign for the short-term survivability of a firefight. Let’s look closely at the one zero vest. The one zero was the team leader. His loadout was the template. He often wore a modified mesh vest originally designedfor air crew survival.
It was covered in pockets. In the top left pocket, a signal mirror and a compass. In the top right pocket, a pengun flare launcher. Below that, saw off M79 rounds, high explosive. On the belt, a strobe light for night extraction. On the harness, a knife, usually a Bowie style blade or a pilot survival knife, sharpened to a razor edge. But not just for fighting.
It was a tool. It dug holes. It cut landing zones. It opened crates. And the tape, everything was taped. Green duct tape, black electrical tape. They taped the suspenders to the belt so they wouldn’t slide. They taped the grenade pins so the jungle vines wouldn’t pull them out by accident. They taped the muzzles of their rifles to keep the mud out and the water out.
The tape was the universal fix. It was the symbol of the improvisation. This brings us to the pivotal realization that reframed the entire conflict for these men. They weren’t just fighting the NVA. They were fighting the friction of the environment. The standard gear generated friction. It fought the user. It snagged on vines. It grew heavy with water.
It rusted. The modified gear flowed with the environment. It was streamlined. It was silent. It was adapted. This adaptation was not immediate. It was learned in blood. In 1965 and 1966, teams went out with standard gear. They died. They were tracked down because of the noise. They were overrun because they ran out of ammo.
The survivors came back and started cutting. They started sewing. They started stealing. By 1968, the evolution was complete. A new species of soldier had emerged. And this species was about to face its greatest test. As the war dragged on, the NVA adapted too. They created counter recon units specifically designed to hunt SOG teams.
These hunter killer teams knew the American tactics. They knew about the helicopters. They knew about the black pajamas. The technological edge the Americans relied on, the jets, the sensors, the radios was being neutralized by the sheer density of the enemy presence. The only edge left was the man and what he could carry on his back.
The loadout became the last line of defense. And in the spring of 1969, on a hill simply labeled 927, a team named Nevada would prove that a few men carrying the right gear and possessing the will to use it could stop an army. They would take the logic of maximum firepower, minimum weight to its absolute limit. But before we get to Hill 927, we have to understand the specific anatomy of the tools they built.
We have to look at the hush puppy pistol. We have to look at the seismic sensors. We have to look at the toe popper mines. These were not just weapons. They were tricks. They were mechanical lies designed to confuse and terrify. The standard army fought with mass. The special forces fought with deception, and their gear was the physical manifestation of that deception.
The weapon that perhaps best embodied this philosophy of silence and deception was the Mecock 22 Mod 0. The operators called it the hush puppy. In the conventional army, a pistol was a badge of authority for officers or a lastditch emergency tool for a machine gunner. It was an M1911 45 caliber, a heavy, loud slab of steel designed in 1911 to stop a charging Morrow warrior in the Philippines. It was a hammer.
ESOG didn’t need a hammer. They needed a scalpel. The issue with the standard M1911 was noise. Even with a suppressor, the heavy slide cycling back and forth made a distinct metallic clack clack that could be heard 50 yards away in a quiet jungle. Furthermore, the standard 45 ammunition created a sonic boom.
The bullet traveled faster than the speed of sound, creating a miniature crack of thunder that no silencer could mask. The Navy designed the MEN 22 specifically for the SEALs and SOG. It was based on the Smith and Wesson model 39, but it had two modifications that turned it into a ghost.
First, the ammunition was the Mark 144 round, a 9mm projectile that was heavy, weighing 158 grains. Because it was so heavy, it traveled slowly, below the speed of sound, no sonic boom. Second, and most ingeniously, it had a slide lock lever. When the operator engaged this lever, the slide could not move. When he pulled the trigger, the gun fired, but the empty casing was not ejected.
The mechanical action stayed closed. The noise of the slide cycling was eliminated. The gas didn’t escape. The only sound was the hammer falling and a muffled cough, quieter than a hand clap. The operator would then have to manually rack the slide to load the next round. It was a singleshot weapon in this mode, but it was designed for a very specific target, sentry dogs and ducks.
The NVA used geese and ducks as biological alarms around their base camps. They would squawk if an intruder approached. The hush puppy was used to liquidate the wildlife before it could sound the alarm. It was also used on enemy sentries, often at ranges of less than 5 m. This was the intimacy of the SOG war.
A B-52 bomber pilot killed from 30,000 ft, never seeing the enemy. An artillery man killed from 10 mi away for it pulling a lanyard on coordinates called in by radio. The recon man killed from 5 ft away looking into the eyes of the sentry using a pistol modified to not wake the man sleeping in the next hammock. But while the hush puppy dealt with the enemy in front, the saji teams had a darker tool for the enemy behind.
This was the M14 mine, affectionately and horrifically known as the toe popper. Standard defensive doctrine relied on the claymore mine, a large curved plastic brick filled with C4 and steel balls. The claymore was excellent for an ambush triggered by a wire, but it was heavy and it required setup time. When a team was running for its life, peeling backward with a 100 NVA soldiers on their heels, they didn’t have 5 minutes to set up a claymore.
They needed something they could drop while running at full sprint. The M14 toe popper was tiny. It was a cylinder of plastic roughly 2 in in diameter and 1 and 1/2 in tall. It weighed less than 4 oz. It looked like a small jar of shoe polish. It contained very little explosive, less than an ounce of tetrol. The genius of the toe popper was in its limitation. It was not designed to kill.
If a soldier stepped on it, the blast would shear off the front of his foot. It would turn the boot into a ruin of leather and bone. The victim would scream. He would not die immediately. In the calculus of jungle logistics, a dead man is one problem. You leave him or you bury him. A wounded man is three problems. He cannot walk.
Two other soldiers must carry him. One mine effectively removes three enemy rifles from the fight. Furthermore, the screaming demoralizes the unit. It slows the pursuit. ESOG operators would carry these mines in their pockets or tape to their webbing during a prairie fire emergency extraction. They would arm them and drop them blindly on the trail behind them.
The pursuing NVA running full tilt to catch the Americans before the helicopters arrived would run straight into a minefield that was being laid in real time. The psychological impact was devastating. NVA documents captured later in the war revealed a deep fear of the exploding apples, a nickname given to the round M67 grenades and the small minds left by the black ghosts.
However, not all specialized gear was designed to maim. Some was designed to listen. The American military obsession with technology reached its peak and its nadier with the sensor programs deployed in the La Oceanian border regions. The program was called Igloo White. The concept was high-tech warfare. Drop thousands of sensors into the jungle from aircraft, listen to the movement of trucks and troops, and bomb them with computers.
The sensors were called atids, air delivered seismic intrusion detectors, and acusids, acoustic seismic intrusion detectors. They looked like lawn darts, 5t long, camouflaged to look like jungle plants. They cost thousands of dollars each. They were supposed to replace the human reconnaissance teams.
The Soji operators hated them. They hated them because they didn’t work as advertised and often the teams were sent in to retrieve them or replace their batteries. This was the ultimate insult, risking human lives to service a machine that was supposed to replace human lives. But the operators, true to their nature, found a way to use a different kind of sensor, the people sniffer.
This was the XM2 or XM3 personnel detector. It was a backpack mounted chemical laboratory. It had a probe on the front that sucked in air. It analyzed the air for ammonia concentrations. Human sweat and urine release ammonia. The machine was designed to detect the invisible aluvia of a hidden army. When the concentration of ammonia rose, a needle on the gauge would spike or an audio tone would sound in the operator’s headset. Imagine the tension.
You are walking point in a dense bamboo thicket. You cannot see two feet in front of you. You are wearing a headset connected to a box on your back. Suddenly the tone rises. Beep. The machine smells them. They are here. You stop. You signal the team. You wait. The problem was that the machine was indiscriminate. Water.
Buffalo urine is very similar to human urine. A monkey colony creates a lot of ammonia. The people’s sniffer often led teams into ambushes or caused them to call in air strikes on herds of livestock. Most operators ditched the people sniffer. It was heavy. It required batteries and it gave false readings.
They preferred the indigenous sensors, the reaction of the birds, the smell of NVA tobacco, which was harsher and stronger than American cigarettes, and the behavior of the monkeys. If the monkeys were quiet, something was wrong. This rejection of the high-tech sensor suite in favor of biological observation highlights the rift between Washington and the jungle.
Washington trusted the circuit board. The operator trusted the gut. But there was one piece ofhigh-tech gear the OG teams prized above all else, though they rarely spoke of it. It was the wiretap kit. The CIA and the NSA provided so with specialized tap devices to intercept NVA field telephone lines.
The NVA ran thousands of miles of communication wire through the trees to coordinate their movements on the Ho Chi Min Trail. The tap kits were small, roughly the size of a cassette player. The mission profile was insane. Find the wire in the middle of a million square miles of jungle. Splice into it without breaking the connection, which would alert the enemy.
Record the conversation. Exfiltrate. To do this, operators had to carry climbing gear. The wires were often strung high in the canopy to avoid elephants and trucks. An operator would have to shimmy up a tree hanging 60 ft in the air exposed while an NVA patrol walked underneath. He would carefully strip the insulation, attach the alligator clips, and sit there, sometimes for hours, changing tapes.
The gear for this was sterilized, no US markings. The tape recorders were often high-end commercial units like Sony or Nagra, modified for durability. If an operator fell and died, the NVA would find a dead man in strange clothes with a Japanese tape recorder. Plausible deniability was maintained, even in death. While the Americans were modifying their own gear, they were also looking continuously at the enemy’s gear, and they realized something uncomfortable.
In the specific context of a jungle ambush, the Soviet designed RPD machine gun was superior to the American M60. The M60 was a beast. It fired the 762 NATO round. It was heavy, prone to jamming if dirt got into the feed tray, and it fed from belts that hung loose, snagging on brush. It was 42 in long. The Soviet RPD fired the smaller 762 by 39mm round, the same as the AK-47.
It fed from a self-contained drum that held 100 rounds. The drum kept the ammo clean and prevented snagging. Saw operators began capturing RPDs and modifying them. They cut the barrels down to the gas tube. They modified the sights. They created a weapon they called the sawed off RPD. This was the ultimate jungle alley sweeper. It was short enough to be fired from the hip while running.
It had 100 rounds on tap without a reload. And most importantly, it sounded like the enemy. In a firefight, sound is identification. If you hear the deep thump thump thump of an M60, you know it’s American. If you hear the higher pitched crack crack of an AK or RPD, you assume it’s communist. When a SOG team opened fire with RPDs and AK-47s, the NVA were confused.
They hesitated to return fire, thinking they might be shooting at their own comrades. That hesitation saved American lives. The logistics of using enemy weapons were complex. You couldn’t just go to the ammo dump and ask for 7.62 Russian short. The ammo had to be sourced. This fell to the counterinsurgency support office Cyo on Okinawa and specifically to a legend named Ben Baker.
Baker was the Q branch of the Vietnam War. He was a civilian logistics officer who understood what the men needed better than the generals did. Baker organized the production of sterile ammunition. Millions of rounds of AK-47 ammunition were manufactured in US arsenals with no headstamps, no markings, packed in crates that look like they came from China or the Eastern Block.
This ammo was shipped to Soji for their captured guns. But Baker went further. He designed the gear the army wouldn’t. He designed the Siso rucksack, the indigenous ruck mentioned earlier. He designed the SOG knife, a heavy bolo made of non-reflective steel capable of chopping through the fuselage of a downed helicopter or the skull of an enemy.
He realized the standard rations were too heavy. So Siso developed the PIR, patrol indigenous ration. It was rice, dried fish, and spices. It was light. It was dehydrated. It kept the teams fueled without weighing them down. One of the most profound innovations from SISO was the sterile uniform policy. Baker sourced denim, canvas, and dyes that could not be traced to any US textile mill.
If a button fell off a SJI operator’s shirt in Laos and was found by a Russian adviser, that button could not be matched to a US Army specification. This level of detail bordered on paranoia, but it was necessary. The US government was officially stating it had no combat troops in Laos. The gear had to support the lie.
The cost disparity was staggering. A standard US infantryman was a walking investment of thousands of dollars in research, training, and standard equipment. A Saji operator in his modified kit might be wearing $5 worth of black dyed cotton, carrying a stolen gun worth $0 to the taxpayer, and wearing sneakers he bought for $2 in the market.
And yet, the man in the $2 sneakers was exponentially more lethal. This brings us to the heavy team concept that evolved in the late war period. As the as the NVA caught on to the SOG tactics, they stopped running from thesmall recon teams. They started standing and fighting. They deployed trackers. They used dogs.
The SOG response was to upg. And the loadouts shifted from stealth to devastation. They began carrying the XM1 174 grenade launcher. This was an automatic grenade launcher fed by a drum that fired the same 40mm rounds as the M79, but at a rate of hundreds per minute. It was mounted on a tripod for base defense, but SOG operators, ignoring all safety protocols, carried it by hand.
Imagine a man carrying a weapon that is essentially an automatic mortar. The recoil was brutal. The weight was crushing. But in an ambush, it turned a single operator into an artillery battery. They also adopted the customized death machine. This was a minigun, the sixbarreled rotary machine gun usually mounted on helicopters, modified to be manportable.
It was powered by motorcycle batteries carried in a backpack. It fired thousands of rounds a minute. It was experimental, unreliable, and absurdly heavy. But the fact that they tried it shows the desperation. They were looking for the technological silver bullet that would allow six men to fight 600. But the most reliable tool remained the simplest, the car 15 and the will to use it.
By 1970, the saji loadout had become a distinct visual language. You could read a man’s role by his gear. The point man, minimal gear, no heavy ruck, a sawed off weapon, lots of magazines. His job is speed and initial contact. He is the tip of the spear. The RTO radio telephone operator, the target.
He carries the PRC25 radio, the lifeline to the air support. He carries extra batteries which are heavy bricks of lead and acid. He is the most protected man in the formation because if he dies the air strikes stop and everyone dies. The tail gunner, the most paranoid man in the team. He walks backward half the time. He carries the mines.
He carries the tear gas grenades CS gas to drop behind the team to choke the pursuers. He carries a drumfed RPD to suppress the trail. Each man carried a distinct panic item. For many, it was the URC10 emergency radio. It was a tiny brick-sized radio that broadcast a beacon on the international distress frequency.
If the team was split up, if the RTO was dead, this little box was the only hope. And then there was the extraction gear. Every man wore a stabo harness. This was not something you put on when the helicopter arrived. You wore it all mission. It was a web of straps that ran between the legs and over the shoulders. It was uncomfortable.
It chafted the skin raw in the heat. But when the helicopter hovered 100 ft above the jungle canopy because it couldn’t land and it dropped a rope with a carabiner, you didn’t care about the chafing. You clipped that carabiner to D-rings on your shoulders and the helicopter pulled you straight up through the trees.
The Stabo rig was the ultimate expression of the SOG reality. You are never safe. You are never on solid ground and your only exit is vertical. The standard army soldier had a deros date eligible for return from overseas. He counted the days he cleaned his gear to pass inspection. The SOG operator didn’t clean his gear for inspection. He cleaned it for survival.
He painted his face with camouflage stick until his skin broke out in acne. He taped his magazines together. He sharpened his knife until it shaved hair. There is a famous photo from the era of a Soji team just returned from a mission. They are filthy. Their clothes are ripped. They are wearing a mix of tiger stripe, black pajamas, and green canvas.
One man is wearing a boonie hat that has been cut down to a visor. Another is wearing a headband made from a triangular bandage. They look like pirates. They look like wrecks. But look closer at the gear. The rifles are clean. The muzzles are taped. The harnesses are repaired with parachute cord. It is a tableau of professional disorder.
This unique visual identity was not just about function. It became about status. The coolness factor of the sawed off M79 or the Swedish K submachine gun became a recruiting tool. Men from the regular infantry saw these ghosts at the base cantens drinking beer with their strange weapons leaning against the table and they wanted in. They wanted to be part of the unit that didn’t follow the rules.
But breaking the rules had a cost. The custom loads were dangerous. Using C4 explosive to heat a cup of coffee, a common trick, as C4 burns hot and fast without exploding if it’s not compressed, was risky. Carrying unpinned grenades on your belt was risky. The saw-off weapons had less range and less accuracy. The Soji operator accepted these risks because the standard risk walking into the AA Valley with a standard army loadout was a certainty of failure.
In the final analysis of the gear, we have to talk about the prairie fire load. This was the maximum weight a human could carry. When a team launched into an area where they knew they were compromised, they went heavy. 20magazines, four cantens, two claymores, six grenades, two smoke grenades, two white phosphorus grenades, Willie Pete, a survival radio, a signal panel, a morphine curette, and a blood expander kit serum albumin to keep a wounded man from going into shock.
This load could weigh 100 lb on a man weighing 150 lb in 100° heat. The physiology of this is staggering. The human body is not designed to do this. The knees fail, the back fails, but the SOG operators trained for it. They ran miles with sandbags in their rucks. They pushed the limits of human endurance because the gear was their armor.
They didn’t wear steel plates. They wore bullets. A wall of fire was the only protection that worked. As the war entered the 1970s, the SOG mission began to wind down. The Americans were leaving. The specialized gear was either destroyed, smuggled home in duffel bags as war trophies, or left for the South Vietnamese.
But the legacy of those loadouts is with us today. Look at a modern special forces operator in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Look at his rifle. It has a short barrel. It has a vertical foregrip. It has optics. He wears a chest rig, not a belt. He carries a specialized pistol. He wears comfortable softs sold boots.
Every single piece of tactical gear sold today can trace its lineage back to a sweaty hooch in Kum where a guy named Mad Dog or Spider took a hacksaw to a governmentissued rifle because he wanted to live another day. The SOG operators proved that the soldier on the ground knows more than the engineer in the lab. They proved that in the extremes of human conflict, standardization is a weakness and adaptation is the only strength.
But there is one final tragic chapter to the story of the gear. It involves the things they couldn’t bring back and it involves the things they left behind on purpose. The most dangerous piece of equipment in the Vietnam War was not a gun. It was a single cartridge of AK-47 ammunition that looked exactly like millions of others but was manufactured in a covert laboratory in Okinawa.
This was project eldest son. It was the darkest innovation of the SOG logistics war. The operators realized that while they were stripping their own gear to the bone, they could add weight to the enemy’s gear. Not physical weight, but psychological weight. Technicians at the CIA and CISO took standard 7.
62 by 39mm rounds, pulled the bullets, emptied the gunpowder, and replaced it with a high explosive called high velocity gunpowder. Often indistinguishable from standard powder, but vastly more volatile. They receded the bullet. To the naked eye, it was perfect. SOG teams, while on Deep Recon in Laos, would not just observe enemy ammo dumps.
They would infiltrate them. They would slip a single captured magazine filled with these sabotaged rounds into a crate of thousands. They would plant a single rigged mortar shell in a stack of regular ordinance. When an NVA soldier later fired that round, his rifle didn’t just jam, it exploded.
The receiver would shatter, sending shards of steel into his face and eyes. The mortar tube would detonate, killing the entire crew. The genius was in the aftermath. The NVA commanders didn’t blame the Americans. They couldn’t conceive that the Americans had touched their ammo. They blamed the Chinese manufacturers.
They blamed the quality control of the communist supply chain. A report captured later showed an NVA commander forbidding his troops from using ammunition from a specific lot number, citing treasonous sabotage by the factory workers. SOG had successfully weaponized the enemy’s trust in their own gear. They turned the AK-47, the symbol of communist reliability, into a potential hand grenade.
This forced the enemy to doubt every trigger pull. In the mental loadout of the soldier, doubt is the heaviest thing you can carry. But while SOG was sabotaging the enemy, they were struggling with the weight of their own lifeline, the PRC25 radio. The prick 25 was the god of the jungle. Without it, a SG team was just six men waiting to die.
With it, they were the eyes of the entire US Air Force. But the radio weighed 23 lb. The spare batteries, magnesium bricks that look like oversized cassette tapes, weighed nearly 3 lb each. A standard RTO, radio telephone operator, carried the radio and three spares. That is over 30 lbs of communication gear alone.
The antenna was a 10-ft whip of steel. In the jungle, it was a snagging nightmare. It hit lowhanging hives of aggressive bees. It whipped back and hit teammates in the face. Worse, it was a flag. The NVA knew that the guy with the antenna was the guy calling the air strikes. He was the first target. So, the operators modified the radio.
They built jungle antennas. They took coaxial cable, stripped the shielding, and created flexible wire antennas they could sew into the shoulder straps of their rucks sacks or tape along the brim of a boon hat. They realized the handset cable was too short. If the RTO waspinned down, the team leader couldn’t grab the mic without crawling on top of him.
So, they spliced extra coil cord, making 6 ft extensions. This allowed the RTO to stay behind cover while the one zero team leader took the handset and crawled forward to direct the napalm. This modification had a grim utility. If the RTO was killed, his body might be in an exposed kill zone. The extension cord allowed the survivors to fish the handset back to safety and call for help without exposing themselves to retrieve the radio off the corpse.
The radio brought the fast movers, the F4 Phantoms and the A1 Skyraiders. But to get the planes to hit the target, the pilots had to see the team. In the triple canopy, this was nearly impossible. The green ocean swallowed everything. Standard issue smoke grenades were the answer, but smoke drifts.
It gets trapped under the trees. It marks a general area, not a specific point. Enter the SDU5E strobe light. Originally designed for down pilots to float in the ocean, the strobe was a brick-sized flash unit. SRG operators realized its piercing highintensity blue white flash could cut through the gloom of the jungle floor better than smoke.
But there was a problem. The strobe flashed in all directions. If you turned it on at night, you blinded your team and lit up your position for every NVA soldier within a mile. The fix was low tech. Operators took a cardboard toilet paper roll or a piece of black tape and created a snoot, a tube that extended from the light.
This focused the beam into a narrow cylinder that went straight up. It became a pillar of light visible only to the aircraft directly overhead. The enemy on the ground 10 ft away saw nothing. This improvisation saved countless lives. A forward air controller fact flying a tiny Cessna bird dog at 2,000 ft could look down into a sea of black and see a single pulsating star.
I have your sparkle, the pilot would say. That sparkle was the difference between a bomb landing on the enemy or landing on the team. The reliance on these specific modified tools created a unique medical pathology among soed veterans. It was known as rucksack palsy. The brachial plexus is a network of nerves running from the neck into the arm.
The heavy straps of the indigenous rucks sacks loaded with 100 pounds of ammo and gold bullion used for bribery and radio batteries dug into the shoulders for days on end. The blood flow was cut off. The nerves were crushed. Operators would come off a mission and find they couldn’t lift their arms. Their hands were numb. Some suffered permanent nerve damage.
They had literally crushed their own nervous systems to carry the firepower needed to survive. The medical kits themselves were a study in brutal minimalism. The standard army medic carried bandages, iodine, aspirin, and foot powder. The SOG medic, often just a team member with extra training, carried morphine and serum albumin.
They didn’t carry stretchers. You can’t carry a stretcher in bamboo thickets. They carried a 15t loop of nylon rope with a carabiner. If a man was hit and couldn’t walk, you didn’t put him on a stretcher. You tied the rope around his chest, clipped it to your own harness, and you dragged him. Or during extraction, you clipped him to the stabo rig, and he was hauled up bleeding into the slipstream of the helicopter.
This reality dictated the bright light loadout. A bright light mission was a recovery mission. If a team went down, another team went in to get them. These were the most feared missions in SOG. For a bright light, the gear changed again. You dropped the surveillance equipment. You dropped the wiretap kits. You carried maximum ammo and body bags.
But the body bags were heavy rubber. So often they just carried ponchos. The most critical item on a bright light mission wasn’t a weapon. It was the gas mask. The NVA often used the bodies of the fallen as bait. They would leave them in the open waiting for the recovery team. When the Americans landed, the NVA would pop gas grenades or wait for the Americans to deploy their own CS gas.
riot control agent to suppress the area. Standard gas masks were bulky monsters with hoses and canisters. They obscured vision. Saji operators sourced the XM28 grasshopper mask. It was lightweight, sat close to the face, and allowed a cheek weld on a rifle stock. It wasn’t as protective against nerve agents, but for CS gas, it worked.
It allowed the operators to fight in an environment that was unbreathable. They would saturate a landing zone with tear gas, choking the NVA, then run into the gas cloud, wearing their grasshoppers to grab the dead or wounded. The psychological toll of the gear extended to the kill kit. This is the part of the loadout that is rarely discussed in official histories.
Every operator knew that being captured by the NVA or the pathet torture and a show trial followed by execution or indefinite imprisonment in a tiger cage. The SG mandate was no one left behind,but the private mandate was don’t get taken. Many operators carried a last round. Sometimes it was a literal cartridge kept separate from the rest.
Sometimes it was a small grenade. There are unverified but persistent accounts of L pills, lethal toxins carried in a locket or a hollowedout tooth, though this is more common in CIA lore than verified SAG field reports. What is verified is the mindset. The loadout included the means to end one’s own resistance. This wasn’t coordis.
It was a cold calculation of the cost of compromise. If a team member was captured, he knew the radio frequencies. He knew the base locations. He knew the names. His brain was a piece of classified equipment that could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. This brings us to the soi, the signal operating instructions.
This was a booklet of codes. It changed periodically. It told you what frequency to use, what call sign to answer to, and how to encrypt coordinates. The SOI was printed on water-soluble paper. If you were about to be overrun, you didn’t burn it. Fire attracts attention. You ate it or you shoved it into the mud. There was a specific pocket on the uniform designated for the SOI.
It was usually the left breast pocket, buttoned or pinned shut. You checked for it every hour. Losing your weapon was a disaster. Losing the SOI was treason. It endangered every other team in the sector. The weight of that tiny paper booklet was heavier than the 100 lb of ammo. By 1971, the technological cat and mouse game had escalated to absurd levels.
The Americans introduced the Dragon’s Tooth. Tiny proximity mines dropped by air that looked like leaves or animal droppings. The NVA countered by sweeping trails with long bamboo poles before walking on them. The Americans introduced the Starlight Scope, the first generation of night vision. It was the size of a telescope and required the moon to work.
The NVA countered by moving only on moonless nights or under heavy cloud cover. It was a constant cycle of measure and countermeasure. But through it all, the Suji operator remained the constant variable. He was the interface between the primitive and the futuristic. He would use a multi-million dollar satellite connection to call a fast mover jet while wearing sandals made of tires and carrying a knife made of leaf spring steel.
He was a cyborg of the jungle, part high-tech sensor, part Neolithic hunter. This duality is best illustrated by the blood chit. This wasn’t a weapon. It was a piece of silk sewn into the lining of a jacket. On it was printed a message in Vietnamese, Le Oceanian, Cambodian, and Chinese. It promised a reward, gold, watches, protection to anyone who helped the bearer return to US lines.
It was a desperate plea sewn into the fabric of the war. It acknowledged that despite the napalm, the gunships, the radios, and the training, the soldier was ultimately alone in a hostile land. His survival might depend not on his rifle, but on the greed or mercy of illiterate farmer. As we move toward the climax of the SOG story, we have to understand that all this gear, the sawoff guns, the heavy rucks, the strobes was purely theoretical until the moment of contact.
And no moment of contact tested the theory of firepower over mobility like the events of February 1971. The location was Laos. The target was a major NVA pipeline. The team was RT Recon Team Kansas. And the NVA had decided that they were no longer going to play hide-and-seek. They were bringing heavy armor.
They were bringing tanks. A SOG team is designed to fight infantry. It is not designed to fight T-54 tanks. When the treads started churning up the mud of the Ho Chi Min Trail, the men of RT Kansas looked at their sawed off grenade launchers and their hush puppies, and they realized that the game had changed forever. The improvisation was about to meet the industrial iron of the Soviet Union head on.
February 18th, 1971. The AA Valley. The ground is trembling. It is not an earthquake. It is not a B-52 strike. It is a sound that shouldn’t exist in the jungle. It is the clatter of steel treads on hard packed dirt. It is the roar of a V12 diesel engine. For 5 years, the Asagi operator had reigned supreme as the apex predator of the infantry war.
He had stripped his gear down to be lighter, faster, and quieter than the foot soldiers hunting him. He had optimized his loadout for the ambush and the sprint. But you cannot ambush a tank with a saw-edoff shotgun. The North Vietnamese had escalated the war. They pushed Soviet T-54 medium tanks and PT76 amphibious tanks down the Ho Chi Min trail.
These were 35tonon monsters with 100 mm cannons and heavy armor plating. The SRG teams hiding in the bamboo looked at their modified CAR 15s. They looked at their Swedish K submachine guns. They looked at their pirated M79s. Against a T-54, these weapons were essentially toys. The bullet that tumbled effectively in human flesh would shatter harmlessly against sloped Soviet steel.
The light and fast philosophy hit a wall of iron. This moment defined the final evolution of the Vietnam loadout. It forced a frantic, terrifying return to heavy ordinance. The teams didn’t need to be ghosts anymore. They needed to be tank killers. They scrambled for the M72 Law, light anti-tank weapon. The Law was a disposable telescoping fiberglass tube firing a 66 mm rocket.
In the regular army, it was often considered junk, unreliable, with a back blast that gave away your position. For SG, it became the only lifeline. But a single law often wouldn’t stop a tank. So they started carrying them like firewood. Men who were already carrying 80 pounds of ammo now strapped two or three laws to their rucks sacks.
The minimalist loadout was dead. The beast of burden loadout had returned. There are accounts of saw G teams engaging tanks at point blank range, firing a law, watching it bounce off the turret and then having to run through the jungle while a tank crashed through the trees behind them, firing its machine guns.
The adaptation cycle had spun out of control. The environment had changed faster than the gear could keep up. This was the breaking point. The specific unique loadouts of the studies and observations group had reached their physical limit. You cannot innovate your way out of a tank assault with duct tape and canvas. You need an army.
By 1972, the Americans were leaving. The draw down was in full effect. The SG mission was formally disbanded. The teams were broken up. What happened to the gear? It is one of the great tragic ironies of the war. Warehouses full of sterile weapons, millions of rounds of unmarked ammunition, thousands of stable harnesses, and modified rucks sacks were left behind. Some were destroyed.
Thermite grenades were dropped onto piles of expensive transceivers to melt them into slag. But much of it was turned over to the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN. The ARVN soldiers, often smaller in stature than the Americans, inherited rucksacks designed for giants. They inherited weapons they couldn’t maintain.
Within months, much of the specialized gear that Ben Baker and the SISO office had painstakingly developed was rusting in monsoon mud or being sold on the black market in Saigon. But the North Vietnamese found it, too. For years after the war, NVA units were seen wearing US jungle boots and carrying Alice packs.
The enemy recognized the utility of the gear better than the US Army bureaucracy did. They used the enemy’s tools to finish the conquest. However, the physical gear was the least important part of the legacy. The real legacy was the data. The men who survived so didn’t just go home and forget. They stayed in the military. They rose through the ranks.
One of them was Charlie Beckwith, a man who had served with SOG and saw the value of small, highly modified autonomous teams. He would go on to found Delta Force. Beckwith and the Esogi alumni took the lessons of the saw-edoff culture and institutionalized them. They argued that the standard issue kit was a failure. They argued that the operator must be allowed to customize his weapon to the mission.
Look at the modern US military rifle, the M4. It is essentially the CAR 15 that ESOG operators built in their hooches. It has a short barrel. It has a telescoping stock. Look at the modern Molly gear used by every NATO army. It is a modular system of loops and straps that allows pouches to be placed anywhere. An idea born from SOG operators sewing pockets onto their own suspenders.
Look at the suppressed pistols, the red dot sights, the soft sold boots, the illegal modifications of 1968 became the standard operating procedure of 2001. The US military finally realized that the SOG operators were right. One size does not fit all. But there is a human cost to this legacy that no amount of modern tactical gear can fix.
The men who carried those loadouts paid for it with their bodies. In VA hospitals across America today, you can find old men with spines that are compressed and twisted. This is the long-term receipt for the prairie fire load. The human skeleton is not meant to carry 100 lb of dead weight while sprinting over broken terrain.
They paid with their hearing. The shortbarreled CAR-15s and sawed off RPDs were deafeningly loud. Without ear protection, which was non-existent in the jungle, the concussive blast destroyed their eardrums. The silence of the jungle they fought in has been replaced by the permanent ringing of tinitus, and they paid with their nerves.
The rucksack pausy never fully healed for some. The numbness in the hands, the phantom tingling serves as a constant reminder of the straps that dug into their shoulders for days on end. The story of the Vietnam special forces loadout is not a fashion show of vintage militaria. It is a story about the failure of the system and the triumph of the individual.
The Pentagon with its billions of dollars and its whizkid analysts tried to turn war into a mathproblem. They tried to solve the jungle with standardization. They failed. The men on the ground with a hacksaw, a roll of duct tape, and a terrifying will to survive solved the problem themselves. They looked at the standard issue reality and rejected it.
They built their own reality. They proved that in the extremes of human experience, the only standard that matters is utility. Does it work? Does it save my life? Does it kill the enemy? If the answer is yes, you keep it. If the answer is no, you cut it off. Today, if you visit the museums, you will see the pristine mannequins wearing the official uniforms of the Vietnam War. They look clean.
They look uniform. They look ready for inspection. But if you look at the grainy black and white photos taken at the launch sites in Duo or Nakon Phenom, you see the truth. You see a man in black pajamas, face painted green, holding a Swedish submachine gun. He is wearing a rucks sack made by a mountain tribe.
He has a signal mirror in one pocket and a cyanide pill in the other. He is not a soldier of the parade ground. He is a mechanic of death. He realized that the only way to survive the machine of war was to become a ghost within it. Not through the armor he was given, but through the burden he chose to carry.
The wind blows through the AA valley. Today the tanks are gone. The noise is gone. The jungle has grown back, covering the rusted casings of the 40mm grenades and the rotresistant nylon of the Steo rigs buried in the mud. The gear is gone, but the lesson remains. When the system fails, the soldier adapts, and the most dangerous weapon on the battlefield is never the one issued by the government.
It is the one modified by the man who has to use
