May 2nd, 1968. Target area Oscar 8, just inside the border of Laos. Six men moving in a column through the elephant grass. They are not supposed to be here. Officially, the United States has no ground troops in Laos. Officially, this war stops at the border. But the six men of Recon Team Illinois are not official.
They are running black, carrying sanitized uniforms, sterile weapons, and no identification tags. If they are killed, their existence will be denied. If they are captured, no diplomatic channels will open to save them. The point man, an indigenous brew mercenary named Sao, stops. He does not raise a hand. He does not speak.
He simply freezes, his body becoming one with the chaotic geometry of vines and bamboo. Behind him, the one zero, the American team leader, feels the stop rather than sees it. The silence of the jungle has changed. The background hum of cicas and tree frogs has been severed, replaced by a vacuum of sound that screams of human presence. They are being hunted.
Tracker teams from the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, are less than 50 m away. They have dogs. They have RPD light machine guns, and they have numbers. A standard NVA counter recon company numbers over 100 men. RT Illinois has six. The math is simple. If the shooting starts, the Americans and their indigenous allies will be outgunned 20 to1.
If the NVA can pin them down for more than 10 minutes, that ratio will shift to 50 to1 as reinforcements pour in from the hidden way stations of the Ho Chi Min Trail. The one zero reaches to his hip. He does not draw a rifle. His car 15 is slung across his chest, taped and silenced. But that is for precision. This situation requires something else.
It requires a weapon that acts as a force multiplier, something that can convince a h 100red men that they have walked into an artillery barrage rather than a patrol skirmish. His hand grips a devastatingly modified piece of hardware. It looks like a relic from a frantic workshop, a jagged, ugly brute of a weapon.
It is an M79 grenade launcher, but it is unrecognizable to the ordinance officers back in the Pentagon. The long, graceful walnut stock has been hacked off, leaving only a pistol grip wrapped in black electrical tape. The long aluminum barrel has been sawed down to a stub, barely covering the length of the 40mm round inside.
It hangs from a D-ring on his web gear, swinging like a oversized chaotic pistol.Mying A twig snaps ahead. A dog barks, a sharp, ragged sound that tears the tension apart. The NVA point man steps through the bamboo, his AK-47 rising. The one zero does not aim. There is no time to align sights. There is no stock to brace against his shoulder.
He points the muzzle of the saw-off launcher like a large flashlight and squeezes the trigger. The sound is not a crack, but a hollow pneumatic thud, a bloop. The 40mm high explosive round travels the 30 m in a heartbeat, spiraling lazily through the humid air. It strikes the tree directly next to the NVA soldier.
The detonation is deafening. A sphere of jagged steel fragments shreds the vegetation and the man standing within it. The concussion knocks the breath out of the jungle. Contact. Break left. The one zero breaks the barrel of the weapon open, the spent casing flying out over his shoulder. In a fluid motion practiced a thousand times, he grabs a fresh round from a canteen pouch on his belt and slides it into the brereech.
He snaps the weapon shut with a flick of his wrist. He fires again and again. He is essentially firing a handheld mortar, hip shooting high explosives at a cyclic rate that rivals a boltaction rifle. The sawed off M79, known in the clandestine world of Matt Vogg as the pirate gun, turns one man into a mortar section.
It is the great equalizer. It is the only reason RT Illinois might make it to the landing zone alive. This weapon does not exist in any field manual. It is strictly prohibited by Army regulations. Destruction of government property is a court marshal offense. Altering the ballistics of a launcher is considered reckless and dangerous to the operator.
But out here over the fence in the denied areas of Laos and Cambodia, the rule book is just paper that rots in the damp air. The only law is survival. And survival dictates that when you are outnumbered, surrounded, and miles from help, you do not need precision. You need chaos. You need the pirate gun. To understand why a soldier would take a hacksaw to a perfectly good grenade launcher, one must first understand the terrifying calculus of the mission.
The men of the studies and observations group or a massive VSog were fighting a war that was fundamentally different from the rest of the Vietnam conflict. While the big army was fighting for hills and hamlets in South Vietnam, SOG was conducting secret operations across the borders targeting the logistical juggernaut of the Ho Chi Min Trail.
The trail was not a simple dirt path. By 1968, it was a complex logistical gridcomprising thousands of miles of roads, tracks, bypasses, truck parks, fuel depots, and anti-aircraft imp placements. It was the artery that fed the war in the South. The NVA defended it with a ferocity that bordered on fanaticism.
They established a dedicated security force, the 559th Transportation Group, which included infantry battalions, anti-aircraft batteries, and specialized counter recon units whose sole purpose was to hunt down SOG teams. The SAG mission was primarily intelligence gathering, locate the truck parks, wiretap the communication lines, snatch a prisoner for interrogation.
But to do this, they had to insert small teams of six to eight men directly into the hornet’s nest. They were flies buzzing around the head of a giant. And when the giant swatted, it swatted with overwhelming force. The tactical doctrine of SRG was built around a single terrifying truth. You will be outnumbered. You will be outgunned.
You cannot win a sustained firefight. If a team made contact with the enemy, their only hope was to break contact immediately. This meant unleashing a sudden, overwhelming volume of fire to stun the enemy, suppress their heads, and buy the team a few seconds to peel away and vanish back into the jungle. This was the immediate action drill, or IAD. In an IAD, volume of fire was God.
Every man on the team carried as much ammunition as his body could stand. But bullets, even the high velocity rounds of the car 15, have limitations in the jungle. The thick vegetation of Laos absorbed bullets. Vines deflected them. Tree trunks stopped them. You could fire a thousand rounds into a bamboo thicket and hit nothing but wood.
The enemy, meanwhile, was often invisible, hidden behind the dense screen of foliage. You couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see. Unless you had explosives. Explosives do not care about visibility. Explosives do not need a direct line of sight. An explosion creates a casualty radius. It turns the jungle itself into shrapnel.
It breaks the enemy’s momentum, creates confusion, and deafens the trackers. For the Sagcon man, high explosive was not a luxury. It was the difference between life and death. This brings us to the M79 grenade launcher. Introduced in 1961, the M79 was a singleshot breakaction weapon designed to bridge the gap between the hand grenade and the mortar.
A hand grenade could be thrown perhaps 30 or 40 m by a strong arm. A 60 mm mortar had a minimum range of about 100 m and was heavy and slow to set up. The space between 30 m and 100 m was a dead zone where the infantry squad lacked indirect fire capability. The M79 filled this gap perfectly. It fired a 40mm cartridge roughly the size of a giant shotgun shell.
The standard high explosive round, the M406, traveled at a muzzle velocity of 250 ft per second. It spun through the air, armed itself after 14 meters of travel, and detonated on impact, possessing a lethal radius of 5 m. It was simple, rugged, and reliable. The troops called it the Blooper or the Thumper because of the distinctive sound it made when firing.
It was widely loved by the infantry in the south. But for the Isi Commando operating in the deep bush, the standard M79 had a fatal flaw. It was too big. The M79 was nearly 29 in long. It weighed roughly 6 12 lb loaded. It had a wooden stock designed for shoulder firing and a long barrel designed for accuracy out to 350 m.
In the open rice patties of the Mikong Delta or the scrub brush of the central highlands, these dimensions were fine. The grenadier was a specialist who hung back and lobbed rounds onto enemy machine gun nests. In the triple canopy jungle of Laos, however, 29 in of wood and aluminum was a liability. SOG teams moved through vegetation so dense it was often referred to as wait a minute vines because the thorns would snag your gear and hold you back every few steps.
A long weapon barrel acted like a hook, catching on vines, banging against bamboo stalks, and making noise. Noise was death. Furthermore, the Saji Grenadier was not a specialist who stood in the rear. In a six-man team, everyone fought. Everyone was a rifleman first. The pointman, the tail gunner, the interpreter, everyone carried a CAR 15 or an AK-47 for immediate defense.
The grenade launcher was a secondary weapon, a heavy artillery piece carried in addition to a rifle. Carrying a full-sized rifle and a full-sized grenade launcher was physically impossible in the tangled hell of the Anomite Mountains. The sheer bulk made moving silently impossible. The weight sapped the energy of men already carrying 80 lb of gear in 100° heat. The dilemma was stark.
The teams needed the explosive power of the M79 to break contact, but they could not carry the M79 in its standard configuration without compromising their stealth and mobility. The solution came not from the R&D labs of the Springfield Armory, but from the garages and team rooms of the forward operating bases in Daang, Kantum, and Banme Thu.
It was a solution born ofAmerican ingenuity colliding with the brutal reality of jungle warfare. They decided to cut the damn thing in half. The modification was crude, irreversible, and effective. A recon man would take a hacksaw to the beautiful walnut stock, sawing it off just behind the receiver tang. He would then sand down the rough wood and wrap the remaining stump in black electrical tape or green duct tape to create a makeshift pistol grip. Next came the barrel.
The standard barrel was 14 in long. The reconmen would measure just enough length to cover the 40 mm round, perhaps four or 5 in, and saw the rest off. They filed down the jagged aluminum edges to prevent cuts. The result was the pirate gun. It was barely 12 in long. It weighed less than 3 lb. It looked like a oversized flare gun or a weapon from a dystopian future.
The front sight was gone. The rear sight was useless. The shoulder stock was a memory. This radical surgery transformed the weapon’s role. It was no longer a precision instrument for placing a grenade through a window at 200 m. It was now a close quarters devastation device. It could be carried in a custom leather holster on the hip or attached to a D-ring on the commando’s web gear with a bungee cord.
It hung ready at the waist, instantly accessible, leaving the hands free to operate a rifle or clear vines. But this modification came with a price. The physics of ballistics are unforgiving. By removing the stock and shortening the barrel, the operators were altering the fundamental behavior of the weapon.
First, there was the recoil. The M79 is not a high recoil weapon compared to a high-powered rifle, but it still generates a significant kick. The standard stock transfers this energy into the shooter’s shoulder and creates a pivot point for control. With the stock gone, that energy had to be absorbed entirely by the wrist and forearm.
Firing a pirate gun was like catching a fastball with a bare hand. It required a firm, locked grip. If the shooter held it loosely, the weapon could fly out of his hand or snap his wrist back violently. Second was the loss of velocity and accuracy. The barrel of a firearm serves to contain the expanding gases of the burning propellant, pushing the projectile faster and faster until it leaves the muzzle.
It also imparts spin to the projectile via the rifling which stabilizes it in flight. By chopping 10 in off the barrel, the SOG men were robbing the round of velocity. The grenade left the tube slower. It had less spin stabilization. At ranges over 100 m, the pirate gun was erratic. The round might tumble. It might drift off course.
But SOGs were not engaging targets at 100 m. They were fighting at 10 m, 20 m, maybe 30. At these spitting distances, the loss of velocity was irrelevant. The grenade still had enough punch to travel the required distance. The third and most dangerous issue was the arming mechanism. The M406 high explosive round had a built-in safety feature called a setback arming fuse.
The round had to spin a certain number of times, traveling roughly 14 to 28 m before the fuse armed. If the round struck an object before that distance, it would not detonate. It would simply bounce off the target like a heavy rock. This safety distance was designed to protect the shooter from blowing himself up.
But for a SU team being charged by NVA infantry, 14 m was a long way. If the enemy was 10 m away, the grenade was a dud. The saw-edoff barrel exacerbated this issue slightly by reducing the spin rate, potentially extending the arming distance by a few meters. This meant the pirate gun was strictly a mid-range tool. Too close and it was a club.
Too far and it was inaccurate. But in that sweet spot between 20 and 50 m, it was the voice of God. The decision to carry such a weapon reveals the psychology of the Soji recon man. These were not soldiers who followed regulations blindly. They were problem solvers who operated in a moral and tactical gray zone.
They understood that the systems designed by the military bureaucracy were created for a different war, a war of front lines and logistics, not a war of shadows and silence. They were willing to risk court marshall for defacing government property because the alternative was a body bag. They were willing to risk a broken wrist from the recoil because the alternative was being overrun.
The pirate gun was not just a weapon. It was a statement. It said, “We are alone. We are adapting. We are playing by our own rules.” Let us zoom out from the specific mechanics to the wider context of 1968. The war in Vietnam was reaching its boiling point. The Ted offensive in January had shattered the illusion of imminent American victory.
The American public was turning against the war. In the White House and the Pentagon, the focus was shifting toward Vietnamization, handing the war over to the South Vietnamese. But along the borders, the war was only intensifying. The North Vietnamese saw the wavering American resolve and pressed theiradvantage.
They poured more concrete on the Ho Chi Min Trail. They laid oil pipelines. They moved heavier trucks. The traffic on the trail increased from a trickle to a flood. Intelligence estimated that thousands of tons of supplies were moving south every month. To stop this, the US Air Force unleashed a bombing campaign of biblical proportions.
Operation Commando Hunt turned the sky over Laos into a conveyor belt of high explosives. B-52 Stratafortresses, F4 Phantoms, and A1 Skyraiders drop millions of tons of ordinance. But air power has a limitation. You cannot bomb what you cannot find. The jungle canopy hides everything. A truck park looks like a forest from 10,000 ft.
An ammo dump looks like a hill. To make the air strikes effective, the Air Force needed eyes on the ground. They needed someone to go down into the green darkness, find the trucks, and say, “Here.” That was the job of the recon teams. They were the bait. They would insert into a target area, find the enemy, and then often by getting shot at, fix the enemy’s position for the waiting aircraft.
It was a mission profile that practically guaranteed contact. A typical mission would begin at a forward operating base or FOB. The team would spend days in isolation studying maps and aerial photos. They would sanitize their gear, no letters from home, no cigarettes with American brands, no Zippo lighters, nothing that could prove they were US soldiers.
They would fly in on King B helicopters piloted by fearless South Vietnamese or Taiwanese crews. The insertion was a moment of supreme vulnerability. The helicopter would hover over a bomb crater or a small clearing. The team would jump 10 ft to the ground and the bird would lift off, the noise fading away, leaving them in the silence.
From that moment on, they were ghosts. They moved slowly. A team might cover only 500 meters in a day. They stepped heel to toe to roll their weight and avoid snapping twigs. They communicated with hand signals. They slept in a wagon wheel formation, feet touching in the center, claymore mines set up in a perimeter. But no matter how quiet they were, the enemy was good.
The NVA had counter recon units that knew the terrain intimately. They tracked broken branches, disturbed moss, the smell of American soap or insect repellent. They used tracker dogs. When the contact came, it was usually initiated by the NVA. An ambush, a sudden burst of AK-47 fire from the brush. In that split second, the SRG doctrine took over.
Volume, volume, volume. The team would instantly transition from stealth to maximum violence. Every man would dump a magazine from his rifle on full automatic. The goal was to make the NVA duck to make them hesitate. This is where the pirate gun shown. While the riflemen were spraying the tree line, the one zero or the 1, the assistant team leader would draw the sawed off M79.
He didn’t need to shoulder it. He didn’t need to acquire a sight picture. He just pointed the hand cannon toward the muzzle flashes and pulled the trigger. Thump. Two seconds later, an explosion would rock the enemy position. Thump. Another explosion. The psychological effect of incoming artillery, even smallcale artillery, cannot be overstated.
It triggers a primal instinct to take cover. When things are exploding around you, you put your head down. That momentary hesitation from the enemy was the window of escape. Move, move, move. The team would peel back, one man covering while the others ran, leapfrogging backward. The grenadier would reload on the run, jamming fresh rounds into the brereech, firing blindly behind him to keep the enemy heads down.
The pirate gun allowed him to run full tilt and still deliver indirect fire. He couldn’t have done that with a full-sized M79. The barrel would have tripped him. The stock would have been unwieldy, but the pistol-sized launcher was an extension of his arm. It was a terrifying dance of fire and maneuver. The team would retreat to a defensible position or a landing zone, calling for prairie fire, the code word for emergency air support.
Within minutes, the sky would fill with the roar of fast movers. F4 Phantoms would drop Nepal and cluster bombs. A one sky raiders would make strafing runs with 20 mm cannons. The Cobra gunships would arrive, pouring rockets into the jungle. But all that firepower relied on the team surviving the first 5 minutes.
And the team survived the first 5 minutes because they carried enough firepower on their belts to hold back a battalion. The prevalence of the cut down M79 grew as the war dragged on. It wasn’t just an American trick. The indigenous troops, the Montigards, the Nungs, the Bruss loved the weapon. They were generally smaller in stature than the Americans, and the full-sized M79 was awkward for them to carry through the brush.
The cut down version was perfect. It gave a 90 lb soldier the punching power of a tank. The legend of the weapon grew. Stories circulated in the NCO clubs and the teamrooms. Stories of one zeros who carried two pirate guns, one on each hip, like a gunfighter from the Old West. stories of teams that broke ambushes by firing flesh rounds, thousands of tiny steel darts from their sawed off launchers, turning them into giant shotguns.
But we must look closer at the ammunition itself to understand the full versatility of this system. The M79 was not just a high explosive delivery system. It was a multi-tool. There was the M406 high explosive H round, the standard killer. There was the M576 buckshot round filled with 27 zero buckshot pellets in a saw-off launcher.
This round was devastating at close range. It turned the pirate gun into the world’s most powerful shotgun. If an NVA soldier charged from the bushes 5 m away, inside the arming distance of the H round, the buckshot round would cut him in half. There were smoke rounds for marking landing zones.
There were CS gas rounds for breaking contact. A team fleeing an ambush could fire CS gas behind them, creating a wall of choking chemical agent that the enemy could not run through. There were white phosphorous rounds, Willie Pete, which burned with an unquenchable fire and created a thick screen of smoke. The recon man could carry a mix of these rounds in a canteen pouch or a claymore bag.
He could select the right tool for the job instantly. A tracker dog team closing in. CS gas, a sniper in a tree, high explosive, a mass charge, buckshot. The sawed off M79 gave the individual soldier a tactical flexibility that was unprecedented in modern warfare. He was his own artillery battery, his own smoke screen, and his own heavy weapons squad.
However, this innovation was not without its critics. Army purists were horrified. Armorers complained about the damage to the weapons. Officers worried about the lack of safety. Without the trigger guard, which was often cut away to allow use with gloves or simply to reduce profile, the weapon was prone to accidental discharge if it snagged on a branch.
And a 40mm grenade going off at your waist is a catastrophic event. There were accidents. Men blew their own feet off. Men broke their wrists. But the consensus among the SOG teams was unanimous. The risk was worth it. The jungle was a place of absolutes. You were either quick or you were dead. The pirate gun made you quick. It is May 1968. The team in Laos is still moving.
The one zero has fired three rounds. The jungle is smoking. The NVA trackers have pulled back, stunned by the ferocity of the response. The team is moving fast now, running in a crouch, sliding down the muddy slope of a ravine. The one zero reloads his saw-off launcher. As he slides, he checks the breach.
The gold primer of the fresh round glints in the twilight. He snaps it shut. He is breathing hard, the adrenaline coursing through his veins like battery acid. He knows this isn’t over. The trackers will regroup. They will circle around. They will try to cut them off. But he has 12 more rounds in his pouch. 12 more explosions.
12 more chances to buy a minute of life. He pats the rough taped grip of the weapon. It is ugly. It is unauthorized. It is dangerous. But right now, it is the most beautiful thing in the world. As we dig deeper into the mechanics of this modification, we have to look at the specific engineering challenges the soldiers faced in the field.
This wasn’t a factory production line. This was six guys in a hooch with a hacksaw and a file. The first challenge was the front sight. The standard M79 had a blade sight at the end of the barrel. When you cut the barrel, you lost the sight. Some men tried to weld a bead onto the new muzzle. Others glued on makeshift sights, but most realized that in the panic of a contact, you never looked at the sights anyway.
You pointed and fired. It was instinctive shooting, a skill honed by firing thousands of rounds on the range back at the FOB. The men would practice hip shooting until they could drop a round into a bucket at 30 m without looking. They learned the arc of the projectile. They learned to compensate for the drift.
They became artists of trajectory. The second challenge was the latch. The M79 opens by pushing a lever on the top of the receiver tang. When the stock was sawed off, this latch had to be preserved and kept functional. If you cut too close, you ruined the locking mechanism. If you left too much wood, the grip was uncomfortable.
It was a delicate surgery. They would strip the weapon down, remove the fore end assembly, remove the stock bolt, then the cutting began. The wood of the stock was American walnut, tough and dense. It took sweat to cut through it. Then the barrel. Aluminum is softer, but cutting a straight line with a handsaw is difficult.
A crooked muzzle could throw off the ballistics even more. They would file it flat, then use sandpaper to smooth the edges so it wouldn’t snag on the holster. Finally, the tape. Black electrical tape was the universal fixall of the Vietnam War. They would wrap the pistol grip until it fit the hand perfectly. Some would build up palm swells with tape.
Some would tape a piece of foam rubber to the back of the grip to absorb the recoil. Each pirate gun was unique. It carried the personality of its owner. Some were painted with tiger stripes. Some had names scratched into the receiver. The judge, Thumper, Bad News. This personalization speaks to the intense bond between the saj soldier and his gear.
In the isolation of the jungle, your weapons are your only friends. You clean them before you clean yourself. You protect them from the rain. You check them a 100 times a day. The saw off M79 was a symbol of the SOG mindset. Unconventional, aggressive, and focused entirely on the practical reality of the mission.
It was a rejection of the parade ground mentality of the regular army. In the regular army, you shined your boots and kept your weapon stock. In Saji, you painted your face green and cut your weapon in half. This distinction is crucial. Saji was a secret organization composed of volunteers from the special forces, the SEALs, and the Force Recon Marines.
They were the elite of the elite. They were trained to think independently. They were told, “Here is the mission. We don’t care how you do it, just get it done. This culture of innovation flourished in the isolation of the Ephabs. Without the prying eyes of conventional commanders, the Oji men were free to experiment.
They modified their rucks sacks, they modified their radios, they modified their uniforms, and they modified their weapons. The pirate gun was the most visible and dramatic example of this culture. It was a physical manifestation of the SOG motto, you can’t cheat. Which really meant you can’t cheat death, but you can cheat the rules to stay alive.
But the story of the pirate gun is not just about the weapon itself. It is about the enemy it was designed to fight. The North Vietnamese army was a formidable adversary. They were disciplined, patient, and tough. They had spent years turning the jungle into a fortress. They built bunkers that could withstand 500 lb bombs.
They dug tunnels that ran for miles. They camouflaged their positions so perfectly that you could walk within 5 ft of a machine gun nest and not see it. Against such an enemy, precision rifle fire was often ineffective. You could shoot at a bunker slit all day and not hit the men inside. But a 40mm grenade lobbed through the slit or detonated against the log roof would silence the gun.
The pirate gun allowed the point man to engage these hardened positions instantly. He didn’t have to call for a weapon squad. He didn’t have to wait for the machine gunner to move up. He had the power of a bunker buster on his hip. This capability fundamentally changed the tactics of reconnaissance. It allowed a six-man team to punch above its weight class.
It allowed them to initiate contact with a level of violence that confused the enemy commanders. When an NVA captain heard the rapid thump thump thump of multiple grenade launchers, he might assume he was facing a platoon or a company, he might pause to assess the situation. That pause was everything. That pause was the difference between the team being encircled and the team slipping away into the shadows.
We must also consider the sensory experience of using this weapon. The sound, the recoil, the smell. When you fire a standard M79, the sound is a dull pop. But when you fire a saw-off version, the muzzle blast is closer to your face. It is louder, sharper. The recoil is sharp and jarring. It slams into the web of the hand.
After a long firefight, a grenadier’s hand would be bruised and swollen. And the smell, the acrid stench of the burning propellant, the sulfurous smell of the exploding warheads in the humid, stagnant air of the jungle, these smells lingered. They became the scent of survival. But perhaps the most haunting aspect of the pirate gun was the intimacy of it.
This was a weapon used at ranges where you could see the enemy’s face. You could see the fear in his eyes. You could see the result of your shot. A 40 mm grenade does terrible things to a human body. It does not make a clean hole. It shreds. It concusses. It destroys. The men who carried these weapons were not psychopaths.
They were professionals doing a job in a hellish environment, but they carried the weight of what they did. They saw the carnage up close. The pirate gun was a tool of necessity, but it was also a tool of horror. It was a jagged piece of metal designed to turn the lush green jungle into a charal house.
As the sun begins to set over the Asha Valley, the team finds a night defensive position, NDP. They move into a tight thicket of bamboo. They do not dig in. The noise would give them away. They simply lay down in the mud, forming a small circle. The one zero checks his team. Everyone is tired. Everyone is scared, but they are alive.
He takes the sawed off M79from his belt and lays it across his chest. He runs his thumb over the taped grip. The metal is still warm from the firefight. In the distance, he can hear the drone of an NVA truck convoy on the trail. The war goes on. The machine keeps turning. But for tonight, the pirate gun has done its job. It has bought them one more night of breath, one more night of life in the kingdom of death.
This is the reality of the SoG war. No parades, no headlines, just six men, the jungle, and a saw-off grenade launcher against the world. And the world was about to get a lot louder because the NVA were not just reacting anymore. They were learning. They were adapting. and they were bringing in their own heavy weapons to hunt the hunters.
The era of the pirate gun was at its peak, but the enemy was preparing a counterstroke that would test the limits of every weapon and every man in the studies and observations group. To understand the pirate gun, you must first understand the economy of weight. In the surreal mathematics of crossber reconnaissance, weight was not measured in pounds or kilog.
It was measured in seconds. Every extra pound on a man’s back cost him a fraction of a second when he tried to dive for cover. Every extra pound cost him a heartbeat of stamina when climbing a 4,000 ft carst ridge. And in the Asia Valley, seconds and heartbeats were a currency of survival. A standard factory issue M79 grenade launcher weighs 6.45 lb.
A standard M16 rifle magazine fully loaded with 20 rounds of 5.56 millm ammunition weighs roughly 1 pound. The math was brutal and undeniable. By taking a hacksaw to the stock and barrel of the M79, the SOG operator could shave off nearly 3 12 lb of wood and aluminum. 3 12 lb does not sound like much to a civilian, but to a recon man, 3 and 12 pounds equals three and a half extra magazines of rifle ammunition.
That is 70 rounds. 70 chances to kill the enemy. 70 chances to suppress a rushing squad of NVA regulars. The trade-off was absolute. The operator sacrificed the longrange accuracy of the grenade launcher, a capability he rarely used in the dense jungle to gain the sustained lethality of his primary rifle. He was trading a hypothetical advantage for a concrete reality.
He was trading the ability to hit a window at 300 m for the ability to survive a firefight at 10. This was the SOG modification. It was a triumph of function over form. It was ugly. It was jagged, but it was lighter. And light meant fast, and fast meant alive. Let us zoom into the specific loadout of a typical 10 in late 1968.
Take Master Sergeant Jerry Shrivever, the legendary mad dog of MAC VSRG. Shrivever was known to carry a cut down M79 in a holster functioning as a massive pistol. But he didn’t just carry the weapon. He integrated it into a system of overwhelming violence. A typical loadout for a mission over the fence defied the laws of physics. 400 rounds of 5.
56 mm ammo. 12 to 20 M67 fragmentation grenades. Two claymore mines. A suppressed 22 caliber pistol. A survival radio. three days of rations, usually stripped of their heavy packaging, four quarts of water, and the pirate gun with 20 to 30 rounds of 40mm ammunition. The 40mm rounds themselves were heavy. A bandelier of six rounds weighed nearly 3 lb.
To carry enough to be effective, the Soji men had to become pack mules. They utilized modified canteen covers to hold the grenades. They cut the dividers out of claymore bags to create grenade dumps on their hips. They wore WO2 era bar belts because the pouches were big enough to hold the bulk of the 40mm shells. The ammunition mix was an art form. It was not random.
It was a carefully curated playlist of destruction. The first round in the chamber was almost always the M576 buckshot. This round transformed the pirate gun into a blunderb. It contained 20 heavy lead pellets roughly the size of 24 caliber bullets. When fired, the plastic sabotage shattered and the pellets spread out in a lethal cone.
At 10 meters, the spread was about the size of a man’s chest. It was a get off me round. If a tracker burst through the elephant grass right in front of you, you didn’t have to aim. You just pointed the big muzzle at his center of mass and pulled the trigger. The kinetic energy transfer was massive.
It didn’t just kill. It knocked the target backward, clearing the lane of fire behind the buckshot. The loadout varied. High explosive H for reaching out to 30 or 40 meters. CS gas for breaking contact. And then the exotic rounds, the rounds that weren’t supposed to exist. So G had priority access to experimental ordinance.
The naval research labs and army arsenals would send small batches of prototype ammunition to the Fobbies for field testing. The recon teams were the guinea pigs. One such prototype was the XM594 fletchet round. Instead of lead pellets or explosives, this shell was packed with hundreds of tiny steel darts like nails with fins.
When fired, it turned the air into a wall of flyingrazors. Against troops in the open, it was terrifying. It could pin a man to a tree. It could shred through light vegetation that would stop a bullet. Then there was the buck and ball concept. Operators manually modifying rounds, mixing projectiles to create custom ballistic profiles.
They were alchemists of lead and powder, constantly tweaking their formula to find the most efficient way to stop a human heart. But while the Americans were refining their weapons, the enemy was refining their system. The North Vietnamese army of 1968 was not a ragtag guerilla force. In the chaotic geography of Laos and Cambodia, they operated as a high functioning conventional army.
The 559th Transportation Group was a massive bureaucracy dedicated to one thing, keeping the trail open. They had engineers, they had signal corps, they had anti-aircraft battalions equipped with 37 mm cannons and radar guided guns, and they had the counter reconnaissance companies. These hunter killer teams knew the American tactics.
They knew about the pirate guns. They knew that SOG teams relied on shock and awe to break contact. So the NVA adapted. They began to employ hugging tactics. When a firefight started, the NVA soldiers were trained to close the distance immediately. They would sprint toward the American muzzle flashes, getting inside the 20 m safety radius of the air support and the artillery.
If they were close enough to grab the Americans, the Cobra gunships couldn’t fire rockets without killing their own men. This tactic neutralized the massive advantage of American air power. It forced the fight into a phone booth. And in a phone booth, a saw-off grenade launcher with a buckshot round is the king.
The pirate gun became the primary counter to the hugging tactic. When the NVA rushed in, the 10 didn’t call in an air strike. He fired the M576 buckshot. He cleared the immediate perimeter. He created a bubble of space, a death zone that forced the NVA back just enough to allow the team to move. It was a chess game played with high explosives.
NVA move, rush to 10 m. Sog move, buckshot to push them to 30 m. NVA move, flank to the left. Sog move, high explosive behind the flanking element. NVA move, heavy machine gun fire from the rgel line. SGE move, smoke rounds to obscure the vision. This back and forth dynamic drove the development of the weapon.
It wasn’t just about killing, it was about controlling the geometry of the battlefield. Let’s look at a specific incident. September 1968, Target Area Oscar, Recon Team Idaho, led by 10 John Striker Meyer. Though in this instance, we focus on the generic experience of the team to maintain our narrative universality.
The team is inserted into a hot LZ. The grass is beaten down by the rotor wash of the helicopter. As soon as the skids leave the ground, the green wall of the jungle erupts. Green tracers from RPD machine guns unzip the air. The team is pinned on the landing zone. They haven’t even made it to the treeine.
They are exposed, lying prone in the elephant grass, bullets snapping inches over their heads. In a conventional unit, this is a disaster. In Zaji, this is Tuesday. The one zero rolls onto his back. He cannot rise to fire his rifle. The volume of enemy fire is too high. He draws the pirate gun from its bungee cord. He doesn’t aim at a specific soldier.
He aims at the sound. He fires three H rounds in rapid succession, high angle, lobbing them over the grass like mortar shells. Thump, thump, thump. The rounds arc over the 50 m of open ground and detonate in the treeine. Crack, crack, crack. The RPD fire stutters. The gunner flinches. That stutter is the signal. Go, go, go.
The team sprints for the cover of a bomb crater. The one zero reloads on the move, jamming a smoke round into the tube. He fires it at his feet. A cloud of thick white chemical smoke billows up, obscuring the team from the enemy gunners. They dive into the crater. They are safe for the moment, but they are trapped.
The NVA are maneuvering to surround the crater. Inside the crater, the one assesses his ammo. He has fired four rounds. He has 18 left. He looks at his indigenous pointman who is also carrying a cut down M79. Save the H. The one says, “Use the gas.” They wait. The jungle goes quiet. The NVA are crawling through the grass, inching closer, preparing for the final assault with hand grenades. The one zero listens.
He hears the rustle of dry grass. He hears the click of a safety catch. He nods to the point man. Both men rise up over the lip of the crater. Pirate guns leveled. They fire simultaneously. CS gas canisters. The rounds strike the ground 20 m away and burst. A cloud of tear gas far more potent than the riot control.
agent used in the US floods the grass. Immediately the jungle is filled with the sounds of coughing and wretching. The NVA soldiers, their eyes burning, their lungs seizing, lose their discipline. They stand up trying to escape the gas. And when they stand up,the riflemen of RT Idaho, cut them down. This is the synergy of the system.
The gas forces the enemy to reveal themselves. The rifles eliminate the target. The pirate gun is the conductor of the orchestra. But the weapon had a dark side, a physical toll that went beyond the risk of enemy fire. We must discuss the physical cost of firing a weapon that was never meant to be handheld.
The recoil of a sawoff M79 is not a sharp kick like a rifle. It is a violent torque. Because the barrel is short and the grip is improvised, the weapon wants to twist in the hand. The rifling inside the barrel, which spins the grenade, exerts an opposite torque on the weapon itself. When the grenade spins right, the weapon twists left. After firing 20 rounds in a single engagement, an operator’s wrist would be sprained.
The webbing between the thumb and forefinger would be raw and bleeding from the friction of the tape. Some men developed chronic joint pain in their shooting hands. They wrapped their wrists in ace bandages before missions, bracing for the impact. It was a form of self harm accepted as the price of doing business.
And the noise, the short barrel meant that the propellant was still burning when the projectile left the muzzle. This created a massive muzzle flash, a fireball the size of a beach ball. In the twilight of the jungle, this flash was blinding. It ruined the shooter’s night vision instantly. If you fired the pirate gun at night, you were blind for the next 10 seconds. You saw spots.
You were vulnerable. So, you had to fire, move, and close your eyes, trusting your teammates to cover you. Systemically, the widespread use of these modified weapons created a logistical nightmare for the supply sergeants back at the FOB. Sarge, I need another M79. What happened to the one I gave you last week? It broke.
Broke? or did you saw the stock off and then lose it in a river? The supply chain for M79’s in was a black hole. Weapons went in and they never came out in one piece. But the commanders turned a blind eye. Colonel Bull Simons, the legendary commander of Saji, understood the reality. If a man said he needed a saw-off shotgun or a chopped grenade launcher to kill communists, he got it.
The regulations were for the parade ground. SRG was for the professionals. This professional freedom led to even welder variations. Some teams experimented with mounting the saw-edoff M79 under the barrel of their CAR-15 rifles. They used hose clamps and duct tape to attach the launcher to the rifle’s handguard. This was the birth of the overunder concept years before the official M203 grenade launcher was adopted by the US Army.
The M203, which became the standard infantry weapon of the 1970s and 80s, was essentially a formalized factory-produced version of the saw pirate gun. The army engineers saw what the recon men were doing in the field, combining a rifle and a grenade launcher into a single package, and they validated the concept.
The pirate gun was not just a juryrigged tool. It was the grandfather of modern infantry firepower. But in 1968, there was no M203. There was just the hacksaw and the hose clamp. The overunder configuration was heavy. It made the rifle muzzle heavy and slow to point. Most operators preferred the separate pirate gun on the hip. It allowed for faster transitions.
You could empty your rifle, drop it on its sling, draw the thumper, and keep fighting without skipping a beat. Let’s shift perspective to the enemy. What did the NVA think of this weapon? Captured documents and interrogations of NVA prisoners revealed a deep respect and fear for the blackclad men with the hand cannons.
The NVA soldiers were often conscripts, rural farm boys sent down the trail to liberate the south. They were brave, but they were superstitious. To them, the ability of a small group of six men to generate the firepower of a company was supernatural. They called the Soj teams maang, phantoms of the jungle. The sound of the bloop became a psychological trigger.
When they heard it, they knew that death was seconds away. They knew that the vegetation around them was about to turn into shrapnel. This fear caused the NVA to commit disproportionate resources to hunting SOG. By 1969, the NVA had established a bounty system. A SOG operator was worth a year’s supply of rice and a metal.
A captured Isog weapon was a trophy, but few pirate guns were ever captured. If a Sogman went down, his teammates would retrieve his gear. If they couldn’t retrieve the body, they would retrieve the weapon. And if the team was overrun, completely wiped out, the pirate gun would often be found empty. The chamber opened, the last round fired.
It was a weapon that fought until the very end. The escalation continued. As SOG refined the pirate gun tactics, the NVA brought in heavy mortars. They brought in 122 mm rockets. They started shelling the landing zones before the helicopters even arrived. The war became a clash of industrial systemsversus individual adaptability. The US Air Force dropped sensors, igloo white, to detect trucks.
The NVA wrapped their trucks in banana leaves to hide the heat signature. The US developed night vision scopes, starlight scopes. The NVA learned to move under the cover of rainstorms when the scopes were useless. And in the middle of this high-tech, highstakes game of cat and mouse, the SOG recon man stood with his saw-off antique.
It was anacronistic, a singleshot weapon in the age of machine guns. But it worked because it relied on the one thing technology could not replicate, the intuition of the operator. A sensor cannot decide when to fire a buckshot round versus a smoke round. A computer cannot feel the tension in the air before an ambush. The pirate gun was an extension of the man’s will.
By late 1969, the Prairie Fire AO area of operations in Laos was the most heavily bombed place on Earth. The landscape was a moonscape of craters. The canopy was shredded, but the teams kept going in and the pirate guns kept getting shorter. Some operators began to cut the barrels down to just 2 in past the chamber.
These stubby launchers were incredibly inaccurate, useless beyond 10 m, but they were extremely light. They were carried as a lastditch weapon, a suicide piece to be used when the enemy was literally grabbing your harness. At that range, the blast would likely kill the shooter as well as the target. It was the ultimate statement of no quarter.
The existence of these extreme modifications speaks to the fatalism that had set in by 1970. The casualty rates in SOG were exceeding 100% in some years, meaning statistically every man in the unit would be wounded or killed at least once. When you know the odds are that high, safety regulations become a joke.
You do whatever gives you a 1% edge. The pirate gun was that 1% edge. It was the difference between a letter home and a flag draped coffin. It was the difference between missing an action and mission accomplished. We must also touch upon the sterile nature of the weapon. Standard US Army weapons have serial numbers. They can be traced.
If a standard M79 was found in Laos, it was proof of US violation of the Geneva Accords. But a sawoff M79 with the serial numbers filed off with no stock, it looked like a bandit’s weapon. It looked like something a mercenary would carry. It offered a layer of plausible deniability. That’s not an American soldier. That’s just a rogue element.
Of course, everyone knew the truth, but in the diplomatic dance of the Cold War, appearances mattered. The pirate gun was a covert weapon for a covert war. As we move toward the climax of this story, we have to look at how this individual innovation influenced the outcome of specific battles that shifted the strategic picture.
The pirate gun was not just saving lives. It was enabling missions that changed the war. Missions to wiretap the NVA’s main telephone lines. Missions to kidnap NVA officers. Missions to rescue down pilots. In every one of these mission profiles, the ability to break contact was the lynch pin.
You couldn’t snatch a prisoner if you were pinned down. You couldn’t tap a wire if you were dead. The pirate gun bought the time, and time was the only thing that mattered. Consider the bright light missions, the rescue of PS or missing teams. These were the most dangerous missions of all. The NVA would often use a downed pilot as bait, setting up a massive ambush circle around him.
Going into a bait trap requires a special kind of courage and a special kind of firepower. Bright light teams would go in heavy. Every man might carry a pirate gun in addition to his rifle. They would punch a hole through the ambush ring using concentrated grenade fire. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. Six explosions in two seconds. A hole in the line.
Dash through. Grab the pilot. Thump. Thump. Close the hole behind you. It was a tactic of brute force applied with surgical timing. And it worked. Not always, but enough. The legacy of the pirate gun is written in the lives of the men who came back. Men who are old now, living in quiet suburbs, who remember the weight of the sawoff grip in their hand.
They remember the smell of the cordite. They remember the sound of the bloop. They remember that in the deepest, darkest hole in the world, a sawed off shotgun grenade launcher was the only friend they had. But the story doesn’t end with the weapon’s success. It ends with the ultimate test. A test where even the pirate gun might not be enough.
Because in 1971, the NBA stopped playing games. They stopped trying to ambush the teams. They started hunting them with tanks. February 8th, 1971. The Aisha Valley. The game has changed. For six years, the primary sound of the Ho Chi Min Trail was the engine of a Molotova truck or the footfall of a sandal. But now, the ground shakes with a new, heavier rhythm.
The clatter of steel tracks, the roar of diesel engines. The North Vietnamese army hasintroduced armor into the sanctuary of Laos. PT76 amphibious tanks, T-54 main battle tanks. Recon Team Kansas is not looking at a supply convoy. They are looking at an invasion force. This escalation fundamentally altered the calculus of the sawoff M79.
Until 1971, the pirate gun was an anti-infantry weapon. It was designed to kill soft targets, men in cloth uniforms, but a 40mm high explosive grenade cannot penetrate the glasses plate of a Sovietade tank. It bounces off like a tennis ball. The sudden appearance of armor threatened to render the Assaji light infantry tactics obsolete.
A rifleman cannot stop a tank. A grenadier cannot stop a tank. But the Saji mind does not accept obsolescence. It improvises. The operators realize that a tank is blind. It relies on its periscopes and more importantly on the infantry screen protecting its flanks. If you can strip away the infantry, the tank becomes vulnerable to heavier air support.
The pirate gun found a new role, the tank blinder. When a PT76 rumbled through the jungle, the SOG grenadier would not aim for the hull. He would aim for the tracks, hoping to break a link. He would aim for the commander’s Koopa, hoping to shred the optics with shrapnel. Or he would fire white phosphorus, WP, directly onto the turret.
White phosphorus burns at 5,000° F. It creates a dense choking white smoke. If you hit the front of a tank with a Willie Pete round from a pirate gun, the tank commander is instantly blinded. The smoke gets sucked into the air intakes. The crew chokes. They button up the hatches. In that moment of blindness, the tank stops. And when a tank stops, the F4 Phantom circling above can drive a laserguided bomb right down its throat.
The saw-off launcher, a weapon of desperate close quarters combat, became a tool of anti-armour harassment. It was David engaging Goliath, not with a sling, but with a pocket artillery piece. To understand why the pirate gun remained effective even as the war scaled up, we must look at the internal physics of the 40mm cartridge itself.
This is the technical secret that made the sawoff modification possible in the first place. Most firearms rely on a simple explosion. Gunpowder burns, pressure builds behind the bullet, and the bullet accelerates down the barrel. In a normal rifle, if you saw off half the barrel, you lose a massive amount of velocity because the powder hasn’t finished burning.
The bullet leaves the muzzle slow and weak. But the 40mm grenade utilizes a high low propulsion system. Inside the cartridge case, the propellant is not sitting loose behind the grenade. It is contained in a small thickwalled cup at the base, the high-pressure chamber. When the firing pin strikes the primer, the powder burns inside this tiny cup, generating immense pressure, nearly 35,000 lb per square in.
This gas then bleeds out through small vents into the larger empty space of the cartridge case, the low pressure chamber. By the time the gas pushes against the grenade itself, the pressure has dropped to a manageable 3,000 psi. This system was designed to keep the recoil low enough for a soldier to handle.
But for the SAG hackers, it had an unintended benefit. Because the combustion event happens largely inside the cartridge case before the projectile even moves, the barrel length is less critical for velocity generation than it is in a rifle. The grenade gets its push right at the start. This meant that when a recon man sawed the barrel down from 14 in to 4 in, he wasn’t ruining the ballistics as much as he would with a rifle.
He was losing some range, yes, but the high low system ensured the grenade still left the muzzle with enough force to arm the fuse and kill the target. The engineering genius of the M79 inadvertently made it the perfect candidate for mutilation. But by late 1971, physics was the least of Sajji’s problems. The political timeline was collapsing.
The United States was leaving Vietnam. The Vietnamization program meant that American ground troops were going home. But SOG was not going home. They were running black operations until the bitter end, covering the retreat. As the number of American aircraft in country dwindled, the response times for Prairie Fire air support got longer.
In 1968, you might wait 5 minutes for a gunship. In 1971, you might wait 20. 20 minutes in a firefight is an eternity. It is a lifetime. This scarcity of external support placed even more weight on the team’s internal firepower. The pirate gun became the bridge. It had to bridge the gap between the initial contact and the arrival of the Sky Raiders.
We see a shift in loadouts during this period. The heavy teams, some one zeros, began carrying only the saw-off M79 as their primary weapon, abandoning the rifle entirely. They reasoned that in the thick jungle, they would never need to shoot beyond 30 m. They carried a pirate gun and 60 rounds of high explosive.
They became walking mortar batteries. This was the Mad Dogdoctrine taken to its logical extreme. Master Sergeant Jerry Shrivever, who went missing in action in 1969, had pioneered this level of aggression. But by 1971, it was becoming a standard survival strategy. If you can’t outrun them, and you can’t call in air strikes fast enough, you must simply blow them off the face of the earth.
Let us reconstruct a heavy contact from this late war period. Recon team intruder, Cambodia, near the Fish Hook region. They are tracking a wire communication line. The NVA are waiting. This is not a chance encounter. It is a mechanical ambush. Claymore mines detonate. The team is slammed to the ground. The NVA assault wave rises from the bamboo.
They are wearing gas masks. They are throwing tear gas grenades at the Americans. The one, a man who has survived three tours, is carrying a modified M79 with the pistol grip and a vertical foregrip welded to the barrel stub for control. He is coughing, his eyes streaming from the gas. He cannot see his sights.
He cannot see the enemy clearly. He sees only shapes. He starts firing thump. He is not firing he. He is firing fchet rounds. The beehive. Thousands of tiny steel darts shred the foliage. They puncture the gas masks of the NVA. They pin the assault wave to the ground. The rate of fire is frantic.
The one zero is reloading by feel. His hands slick with sweat and blood. He burns his fingers on the barrel but doesn’t feel it. He fires 12 rounds in 60 seconds. That is one round every 5 seconds. Break, load, snap, fire. Break, load, snap, fire. It is a mechanical rhythm of death. The pirate gun gets so hot the tape on the grip starts to melt.
The adhesive turns into a black sticky goo that binds the weapon to his hand. This is the final protective fire. The NVA attack stalls. They cannot push through the wall of steel darts and high explosives. The volume of fire from one man with a sawed off tube has broken the momentum of a platoon. The team pulls back.
They drag their wounded. They leave the one zero to cover the rear. He fires his last round, a smoke canister, and runs. He runs with the weapon still taped to his hand. He will not let it go. It is part of him now. This intense reliance on the weapon also led to a psychological dependency. The pirate gun became a talisman. Men would sleep with it.
They would clean it obsessively, polishing the aluminum bore until it shone like a mirror, believing that a clean bore meant a faster reload, and they customized the ammunition itself. The grenade vest became a common sight, a mesh vest with 20 or 30 pockets, each holding a 40mm round. A recon man wearing this vest looked like a suicide bomber. And in a way, he was.
If a bullet struck one of those grenades in the vest, technically the modern fuses were designed not to detonate from a bullet impact. They utilized a spinning safety, but technically doesn’t comfort you when you are wearing 40 lb of high explosives on your chest. They wore it anyway.
The fear of running out of ammo was greater than the fear of blowing up. There is a specific anecdote from late 1971 involving a hatchet force, a larger SOG reaction unit operating near the Sea San River. They were pinned down in a bomb crater. The NVA were lobbing grenades down into the hole. One American, a Grenadier, had his M79 stock shattered by a bullet.
The weapon was useless as a shoulder-fired launcher. He took his survival knife, cut the remaining wood away, wrapped his bandana around the tang, and kept firing. He invented a pirate gun in the middle of a firefight. It wasn’t a choice, it was an adaptation. He held the barrel with a gloved hand to aim.
He fired it like a hand cannon. He survived. And when he returned to base, he didn’t ask for a new stock. He asked for more tape. This improvisation highlights the core thesis of the SOG weapon philosophy. The weapon must serve the man, not the other way around. In the regular army, you adapt to the weapon.
In SOG, you force the weapon to adapt to the reality. But as 1972 approached, the reality became grim. The NVA had adapted, too. They stopped bunching up. They spread out. They used sniper fire. They used mortars from distance. The pirate gun, with its limited range, could not touch a mortar tube 500 m away. The teams felt the noose tightening.
The phantom of the jungle was being cornered. The loss of the air armada was the death nail. By the Easter offensive of 1972, the NVA were invading South Vietnam with conventional divisions. The era of the small secret recon team was ending. The war was becoming a massive industrial meat grinder. In a battle between divisions, a saw-edoff grenade launcher is irrelevant. But Saji didn’t stop.
They were disbanded in early 1972. Their assets turned over to the South Vietnamese. But the men the men carried the lessons and the weapons with them. The influence of the pirate gun rippled outward. The Navy Seals operating in the Makong Delta adopted it.
They called itthe Hush Puppy, a misnomer, but the idea was similar, a close-in tool. The concept traveled to other conflicts, to Central America, to the Middle East. Anywhere soldiers needed portable explosive power in a confined space, the standalone grenade launcher re-emerged. But nowhere was it used with the same desperate intensity as in the twilight of the Vietnam War.
The image of the Saji operator in 1971 is iconic. Tiger stripe uniform, face painted black, rucks sack overloaded, and hanging at his hip, the short, ugly, taped up tube of the M79. It looks like a toy. It looks ridiculous until you hear the thump. We must also consider the soundsscape of the extraction. The most dangerous part of any mission was the extraction.
The helicopters coming into a hot LZ. The NVA would wait for this moment. They would set up heavy machine guns to shoot the birds out of the sky. The team on the ground had to suppress those guns for the 30 seconds it took the chopper to land. Rifles were not enough. You needed to shake the earth. The one zero would stand up, exposing himself and fire the pirate gun as fast as he could load it.
Thump, crash, thump, crash. He was creating a corridor of noise and pressure. The door gunners on the KingB helicopters would look down and see the little puffs of smoke from the pirate guns. They knew that those men down there were fighting for every inch of air. There is a recorded radio transmission from a CVY forward air controller rider during a hot extraction in 71. I see them. They’re on the null.
Looks like looks like they’re throwing rocks at him. He wasn’t seeing rocks. He was seeing the 40mm grenades arcing through the air at point blank range. From the air, the desperation was visible. The range was so short the grenades were barely clearing the team’s own perimeter. That is the definition of danger close.
The pirate gun was the final argument of the recon man. When the radio was dead, when the air support was gone, when the rifle was empty, there was the thumper. It was the period at the end of the sentence. And as the Americans pulled out, leaving their bases and their allies behind, thousands of weapons were left in piles.
rifles, machine guns, and in the mix, scattered like artifacts of a lost civilization, were the saw-off M79s. The NVA collected them. They studied them, and they likely wondered at the mindset of the men who made them. What kind of soldier saws the stock off a grenade launcher? A soldier who expects to be surrounded? A soldier who expects to fight alone? A soldier who knows that in the end, the only thing that matters is the blast radius.
The story of the pirate gun is a story of shrinking horizons. In 1965, the horizon was the border. In 1968, the horizon was the tree line. In 1971, the horizon was the end of the barrel. The war had compressed down to a single point, a 40mm point. But even as the unit disbanded and the men went home, the echoes of those shots remained.
The concept of the force multiplier for the individual soldier had been proven in blood. The pirate gun was not just a weapon. It was a prophecy of modern warfare. Special operations forces today carry standalone grenade launchers. They carry shortbarreled rifles. They carry the spiritual descendants of the SOG hacksaw jobs. But for the men of RT Illinois, RT Kansas, and RT Intruder, it wasn’t about the future.
It was about the next 10 seconds. And in those 10 seconds, the pirate gun was the only god that listened. The final chapter of this story isn’t about the mechanics or the tactics. It’s about the memory. What happens when the noise stops? What happens when the thump fades away? Because for the men who carried them, the pirate gun never really stopped firing.
To fully grasp the legacy of the pirate gun, we must step back from the mud of the Asha Valley and look at the weapon through the lens of history. The existence of the sought-off M79 is not just a footnote in a weapons manual. It is a damning piece of physical evidence. It is a metal and wood testament to the fact that the American military machine did not understand the war it was fighting.
The standard M79 as issued by the Pentagon was a weapon designed for a war of lines. It was designed for a conflict where supply trucks could drive up to the front where soldiers stood in foxholes and where engagements took place at respectful distances. It was a weapon for the plains of Europe, not the vertical jungles of Laos. The pirate gun was the soldier’s rejection of that fantasy.
By taking a hacksaw to the stock, the Soji operator was physically cutting away the doctrine that didn’t work. He was shedding the weight of a bureaucracy that was thousands of miles away. This brings us to the central irony of the weapon, the turning insight that reframes every scene we have witnessed so far. The M79 was designed as an offensive weapon to lob grenades into enemy trenches, to root out machine gun nests, to project power forward.
But in the hands of SAW,the pirate gun was almost exclusively a defensive weapon. It was not used to take ground. It was used to deny ground. It was not used to attack. It was used to escape. Every time a recon man pulled the trigger of a saw-off launcher, he wasn’t trying to win the war. He was trying to buy space. He was trying to create a temporary wall of fire and shrapnel between himself and the enemy so he could vanish.
The pirate gun was not an instrument of conquest. It was an instrument of survival. It was the ultimate exit strategy carried on a belt. This reversal of purpose, using artillery as a shield rather than a sword, is the key to understanding the special forces mindset. They realized early on that they could not win against the NVA in a conventional slugfest.
The enemy had too many men. The enemy had the terrain. So, the saw mission shifted from destroy the enemy to disrupt the enemy and survive to report it. The sawoff M79 was the technological enabler of this shift. It allowed a team to be discovered, to be surrounded, and yet to refuse the engagement.
Thump, thump, thump. We are leaving. That was the message of the weapon. Let us look at the before and after of infantry tactics. Before the pirate gun, if a small patrol was ambushed, they had to rely on rifle fire to suppress the enemy. But rifle fire requires line of sight. If the enemy is hidden in the brush, rifle fire is just noise.
The patrol gets pinned down. They get flanked. They get wiped out. After the pirate gun, the patrol carries its own pocket artillery. They don’t need to see the enemy. They just need to know the general direction. They saturate the area with high explosives. They break the ambush instantly. The delta between pin down and breaking contact is the 4-in barrel of a modified grenade launcher.
This innovation was so effective that it arguably kept the SOG reconnaissance program alive for two extra years. Without the heavy firepower of the pirate guns, the casualty rates, already astronomically high, would have been total. The NVA would have simply overrun every team that inserted. The intelligence would have stopped.
The air strikes would have stopped. The war effort along the border would have collapsed. In 1969, the hacksaw bought the United States military two years of operational time. But what happened when the war ended? April 30th, 1975. Saigon falls. The helicopters push off the roofs. The ESA compounds have long been shuttered. The files burned.
The black operations disavowed. The pirate guns were left behind. Thousands of them. They rusted in the damp earth of the central highlands. They were collected by the victors and stored in warehouses. Some were used by Vietnamese militias for decades afterward. But the idea, the concept of the standalone shortbarreled power did not rust.
It went underground. In the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, the US Army tried to correct the anomaly. They introduced the M203. The M203 was the bureaucratic answer to the pirate gun. It was an underbarrel grenade launcher attached permanently to the M16 rifle. On paper, it was perfect.
Every squad could have a grenadier who was also a rifleman. It eliminated the need to carry a separate weapon. But the veterans of SOG shook their heads. The M203 made the rifle heavy. It threw off the balance. It was slow to reload. And most importantly, you couldn’t hand it off. with a pirate gun. If the grenadier was wounded, another man could snatch the weapon from his belt and keep firing.
You can’t snatch an underbarrel launcher without taking the whole rifle. For 20 years, the M203 was the standard. The lesson of the pirate gun seemed lost. The military favored uniformity over the chaotic adaptability of the commando. But war has a way of circling back. Enter the global war on terror.
Iraq, Afghanistan, urban combat, house-to-house soldiers once again found themselves in tight spaces where a long rifle was a liability. They found themselves needing breaching tools. They found themselves needing instant indirect fire. And so, the standalone launcher returned. The M320, adopted by the US Army in 2009, can be mounted on a rifle, but it is frequently used as a standalone weapon with a retractable stock.
Look at a modern Navy Seal or Delta Force operator today. You will often see a short specialized grenade launcher clipped to their belt or backpack. It is made of polymer and advanced alloys, not wood and tape. It has a holographic sight, not a filed down stump, but it is in its soul a pirate gun. It is the direct descendant of the weapon Jerry Shrivever carried into the AA valley.
The lineage is unbroken. The ghost of the sajji grenadier walks in the streets of Ramadi and the valleys of the Hindu Kush. But we must return to the men who created it. We must look at the human cost of this innovation. Using a pirate gun was a traumatic physical event. We spoke of the recoil. But there is also the flinch.
When you fire a weapon thatexplodes 10 m away from you, your body learns to anticipate the shock. Veterans speak of the M79 flinch. Decades later, a loud noise, a car backfiring, a door slamming can trigger the muscle memory. The right hand clenches for a grip that isn’t there. The body braces for a recoil that never comes. There is a psychological weight to the weapon as well. A rifle is a precise tool.
You aim, you select, you fire. There is a disconnect. A saw-off grenade launcher is a blunt instrument. It is a tool of obliteration. To use it is to accept a level of violence that precludes mercy. You are not shooting to disable. You are shooting to turn a patch of jungle into a dead zone.
The men who carried these weapons had to harden themselves against the reality of what 40mm high explosive does to a human body at close range. They had to become in a sense as chopped and modified as their weapons. They had to cut away the parts of their humanity that hesitated. They had to tape over the parts that felt fear.
They became sterile just like their uniforms, unmarked, deniable, deadly. And yet, in the interviews with these old warriors, there is a profound affection for the weapon. They don’t speak of the car 15 with the same love. The rifle was just a rifle. But the thumper, the pirate gun, that was the magic wand.
It got me out, they say. It got us home. There is no higher praise for a piece of hardware. Let us resolve the narrative by looking at the numbers one last time. One recon team, six men. One pirate gun, three pounds. One standard loadout, 30 rounds of H. Casualty ratio. SG teams inflicted casualties on the NVA at a ratio of roughly 100 to1.
This statistic is often cited as proof of their elite training, and it is. But training alone does not account for 100 to one. Firepower accounts for 100 to one. The ability to generate a mad mini of explosive dominance allowed six men to fight like 600. The pirate gun was the equalizer that made the math possible. But the final resolution isn’t about the kill count. It’s about the silence.
The war in Southeast Asia ended in silence for the Americans. The helicopters flew away. The radio channels went to static. The SOG men returned to a country that didn’t know they existed and didn’t care about their war. They hid their medals. They hid their stories. And they hid the memory of the pirate gun.
It was an illegal modification to a government weapon used in an illegal war in a neutral country. It was a secret inside a secret inside a lie. For years, the only place the pirate gun existed was in the nightmares of the NVA veterans and the quiet gatherings of the SAG associations. It was a myth, a tall tale.
Did you really saw the stock off? Yeah, I did. It took decades for the photos to declassify, for the books to be written, for the truth of the black war to come out. And when it did, the pirate gun emerged as the symbol of the entire Assaji endeavor, improvised, lethal, unauthorized, and absolutely necessary. We close our story back in the jungle, but not in 1968.
We are there now. The Asia Valley is peaceful today. The jungle has regrown. The bomb craters are ponds filled with lotus flowers and fish. The triple canopy has closed the wound in the sky. But if you dig in the red clay near the lay ocean border, you might find something. A piece of aluminum tube, corroded, pitted, a rotting piece of walnut wood wrapped in the fossilized remains of black electrical tape.
It looks like junk. It looks like debris. But pick it up. Feel the weight of it. This is not just scrap metal. This is a crystallized moment of human desperation. This is the physical form of the will to survive. The story of the Vietnam war is often told through the lens of helicopters, napalm and politics.
But the story of the soldier is told in the modifications. It is told in the things they changed to stay alive. They didn’t win the war. The maps were redrawn. The governments fell. The systems failed. But the men, the men who carried the pirate gun, they made it to the LZ. They got on the bird. They came home, and in the unforgiving calculus of the jungle, that is the only victory that counts.
Not through the precision of the general’s map, but through the chaos of the sought-off barrel. Not through the perfect plan, but through the jagged adaptation. War is a machine. The pirate gun was the wrench thrown into the gears to make it stop. Just for a second, just long enough to breathe.
