In November 1967, Private First Class Louis Delgado of the 25th Infantry Division’s First Battalion, 5th Infantry, lowered himself into a Viet Cong tunnel entrance near the Phil Hole rubber plantation with a flashlight taped to his left wrist and a 4-in blade he had ground from a mess kit knife on a motor pool bench grinder.
The tunnel was 30 in wide. He could hear breathing somewhere ahead of him in the dark. He came back up 11 minutes later. The blade was not clean. His after-action report mentioned none of it. At number 14, a chemical weapon assembled from parts bought at a Saigon hardware store that was never supposed to enter a tunnel complex.
And at number three, a weapon so far outside regulations that the man who carried it could have faced a general court-martial except his company commander carried one, too. Before we start, subscribe because this channel uncovers the weapons the military buried in after-action reports and footlockers that never cleared customs.
Let’s count them down. Number 20, the Ithaca Model 37 was a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun issued to point men for jungle patrols. It weighed 6 lb 12 oz with a full-length barrel and was never intended for tunnel operations. That did not stop the tunnel rats of the 1st Engineer Battalion, 1st Infantry Division.
They cut the barrel to 14 in, sometimes 12, and fitted a duckbill spreader choke that fanned the shot pattern into a horizontal ellipse roughly 4 ft wide at tunnel distance. After modification, the weapon weighed just under 5 lb and rode alongside a man’s thigh on a canvas sling made from a rifle cleaning kit strap.
Specialist 4 Thomas Kendrick carried one into a tunnel complex >> >> near Ben Suc during Operation Cedar Falls in January 1967. In a space too tight to aim, the duckbill turned a shotgun into a weapon that cleared 12 ft of straight tunnel in a single pull. MACV Directive 525-14, classified unauthorized weapon modifications as destruction of government property.
Enforcement required paperwork. In the tunnels of Cu Chi, there was no paperwork. The armorer’s inspection report listed every shotgun in the company as unmodified. Most inspection reports did. Number 19, 5 oz. That is all. Sergeant Robert Hale of the 25th Infantry Division’s tunnel exploitation team filled an olive drab sock with eight lead fishing sinkers purchased at the Cu Chi Base Camp PX for 35 cents.
He knotted the end, folded it once, and tucked it inside his fatigue shirt against his ribs. The sap measured 9 in from knot to toe. Hold 9 oz of lead in your fist and swing it at a sandbag. You will understand immediately why the Army wanted these destroyed. In a tunnel where a pistol shot would rupture eardrums and a muzzle flash would steal your night vision for six critical seconds, a sock full of fishing weights swung at the base of a skull made no sound and produced no light. Hale used it twice during tunnel
operations between March and June of 1968. The Geneva Convention’s prohibition on weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering was vague enough that no JAG officer ever wrote up a sock, but MACV’s 1969 review of tunnel warfare equipment recommended removing all improvised impact weapons from the field.
Hale rotated home 3 weeks before the directive reached his unit. He carried the sock in his shaving kit through customs at Oakland Army Terminal. He never told his wife what it was for. Number 18, the standard issue K-Bar Mark II fighting knife measured 7 in of 1095 carbon steel with a stacked leather washer grip.
In a tunnel, 7 in was too long. Corporal James Whitfield of the 1st Infantry Division ground his K-Bar down to 4 and 1/4 in on a belt sander in the maintenance shop at Lai Khe in August 1966. He wrapped the shortened grip in two layers of black electrical tape and tied a lanyard loop from parachute cord to the pommel.
The finished blade weighed 6 oz instead of 11. In a passage where a man could not fully extend his arm, a short blade with a reinforced tip deployed faster and held in the hand more securely in the sweat and mud. Field Manual 5-31, the Army’s 1967 guide to tunnel warfare, made no mention of blade modification because it did not acknowledge close-quarters fighting inside tunnels at all.
That silence was deliberate. The manual was written for engineers clearing tunnels with demolitions, not men fighting inside them on their hands and knees. The regulation assumed one kind of war, the tunnels demanded another. Number 17. The Colt M1911A1 was the sidearm the Army handed tunnel rats who were fortunate enough to receive a sidearm at all.
It weighed 2 lb 7 oz, fired seven rounds of .45 ACP, and had a hammer spur that caught on every tunnel root, every piece of webbing, every loose thread on a fatigue jacket. Sergeant First Class Martin Poole of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s Tunnel Exploitation Element filed the hammer spur flat in a machine shop at Bien Hoa Air Base in October 1967.
He also had the grip safety pinned so the weapon would fire on a dead man’s grip without a full purchase on the backstrap. That modification violated Technical Manual 9-1005-211-12, which prohibited any alteration to the M1911A1’s fire control group. Poole carried the modified pistol through 14 months and 23 confirmed tunnel entries in Binh Duong province.
His grandson found it in a cigar box garage in 2003, wrapped in a handkerchief that still smelled faintly of Hoppe’s No. 9. Number 16. This one was not forged, it was ground. Specialist 5 Daniel Orozco, a helicopter crew chief with the 269th Aviation Battalion at Cu Chi took a 6-in section of scrapped UH-1 rotor blade spar, 6061 T6 aluminum alloy, harder than anything the PX sold, and shaped it on a bench grinder into a T-handled push dagger with a 3 and 1/2 in triangular blade.
The weapon weighed 4 oz. The crossbar sat across the palm so the blade extended between the second and third knuckles. In a tunnel where a man could not swing a knife, a push dagger required only a straight punch. Orozco made at least four between 1968 and 1969, trading them to tunnel rats for captured Viet Cong equipment.
Here is the detail that changes the story. Push daggers were already prohibited under Army Regulation 27-10 as weapons designed solely to inflict injury with no utility function. Orozco listed them in his personal maintenance log as aircraft parts fabricated for rotor assembly inspection.
Nobody questioned it. Today, a push dagger carries a felony possession charge in 11 states. In 1968, it fit inside a shirt pocket and bought you a captured flag. Number 15. This was not a weapon the Army issued. It was not a weapon anyone manufactured. It was a sharpened bamboo stake, 3/4 of an inch thick, 9 in long, fire hardened at the tip.
The same design the Viet Cong planted in punji traps by the hundreds. Sergeant William Rayburn of the 1st Infantry Division’s Tunnel Rat Detachment started carrying two of them after a tunnel operation near the Iron Triangle in April 1967, binding them to his forearm with a strip of inner tube rubber. He reasoned that a weapon requiring no ammunition, producing no sound, and weighing under 3 oz total was the most logical tool for the environment.
He picked them up from collapsed VC positions and sharpened them with his K-Bar. No regulation specifically addressed a soldier carrying enemy manufactured bamboo stakes because no one had imagined a soldier would want to. The 1969 standardization effort for tunnel equipment listed only metal and manufactured items.
Bamboo did not appear on any inventory, any manifest, or any equipment inspection. It did not need to. Nobody inspects what nobody expects. Number 14, this is where the list changes. The Army did not ban this device because it was dangerous. They banned it because it was uncontrollable. >> >> Specialist 4 Gregory Nolan of the 25th Infantry Division’s Chemical Section built a delayed release CS gas delivery system from a modified smoke grenade canister, a battery-powered alarm clock timer purchased for
$2 at a hardware stall on Tu Do Street in Saigon, and three CS powder capsules taken from a bulk supply crate at the Cu Chi Ammunition Point. The assembled device weighed 1 lb 2 oz and measured 8 in in length. The timer allowed a 60-to-90-second delay. A tunnel rat would place it at a junction, retreat, and let the CS gas flood the lower levels, forcing enemy fighters toward exits where a team waited.
Nolan built 11 of these between January and September 1968. Here [snorts] is the part the official history leaves out. Two of them misfired. One released CS gas into a section of tunnel that an American team was still occupying. After that incident, USARV Chemical Officer Colonel Harris Payne issued a verbal order prohibiting improvised chemical delivery devices in tunnel operations.
Verbal, not written. No paper trail meant no enforcement. Nolan stopped building them only because he rotated home. He carried the last unassembled timer in his rucksack to Tan Son Nhut and left it in a trash barrel outside the processing center. >> >> He never talked about the two that misfired.
Number 13, a flashlight is not a weapon. That is what the inspection manual said. The standard issue MX991/U angle head flashlight weighed 7 oz, had a pivoting head with colored filters, >> >> and was carried by every tunnel rat who descended into the dark. But, Corporal Anthony Reese of the First Infantry Division’s First Engineer Battalion replaced the standard bezel ring with a machined aluminum ring fitted with four serrated teeth, each a quarter inch long, ground from a strip of aircraft scrap at a Lycoming maintenance
shop. The modified flashlight weighed 8 oz. It functioned as a light source in the left hand and an impact weapon if the right hand was occupied or empty. Try holding a flashlight with four steel teeth against your palm and punching a sandbag. You understand the modification immediately.
Army property accountability regulation AR 735-5 required that all government-issued equipment be returned in original condition. Reese swapped the original bezel ring back before every inspection. The modification existed only inside the tunnels, where no inspector would follow. The directive was clear. The enforcement ended at the tunnel entrance. Number 12.
The High Standard HDM was never officially a tunnel weapon. It was a suppressed semi-automatic pistol chambered in .22 long rifle, 10 rounds, weighing 2 lb 6 oz with the integral suppressor that reduced its report to the sound of a textbook dropped on a desk. Originally manufactured for the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, a small number were issued through classified channels to MACV-SOG and select intelligence units in 1967 and 1968.
Staff Sergeant Frank Lucero of the 5th Special Forces Group carried one into a tunnel complex during a cross-border operation near the Cambodian border in March 1968. The .22 long rifle round lacked the stopping power of a .45, but in a tunnel where sound discipline meant the difference between clearing a passage and alerting an entire complex, the HDM was the only sidearm that did not announce your position to every fighter in every connected chamber.
Here is what makes this one different from everything else on this list. >> >> It was never lost to history because it was banned. It was lost because it was classified. The serial numbers were struck from official inventory before the weapons ever left the states. His son found the pistol in a false-bottomed ammunition can in 1994 and thought it was a toy. Number 11.
2 ft of communications wire. 2-3 in sections of bamboo, >> >> each carved with a groove for the fingers. Total weight under 2 oz. Sergeant Paul Kitchens of the 25th Infantry Division’s tunnel exploitation team carried a garrote he assembled from scrap WD-1 field telephone wire and bamboo offcuts in his cargo pocket for 11 months beginning in June 1967.
Here is what most people miss about this weapon. It was not designed for killing enemy fighters. It was designed for silence in a tunnel section where a pistol shot would have collapsed an earth ceiling weakened by B-52 strikes during Operation Junction City. In that specific tactical problem, a garrote was not cruelty.
It was structural engineering. MACV’s 1968 review of close combat equipment classified garrotes as prohibited items under the same Geneva Convention language that restricted strangling weapons. The classification arrived in a memo dated November 1968. Kitchens had already rotated home. Today, possession of a garrote constitutes a felony in 14 states.
In 1967, it weighed less than a pack of cigarettes and fit behind a first aid pouch. Number 10. What follows is more dangerous, more illegal, and further from anything the Army was willing to put on paper. How do you carry a submachine gun into a tunnel that is 40 in wide? You cut it down. The MAT-49 was a French-manufactured submachine gun chambered in 9-mm Parabellum 32-round magazine, originally issued to French forces during the First Indochina War.
Thousands were captured by the Viet Minh and later passed to the Viet Cong. Specialist 4 Raymond Tran of the 1st Infantry Division recovered one from a tunnel weapons cache near the Iron Triangle in February 1968. He had a Vietnamese blacksmith in a village outside Lai Khê cut the barrel to 6 in and weld the folding magazine housing in the forward position.
The modified weapon weighed 4 lb 9 oz. It was shorter than the standard issue shotgun, lighter than the Ithaca at number 20, and more concealable than any rifle on any inventory sheet. General Order Number 4, USARV, required all captured weapons to be processed through intelligence channels. Tran processed the holster and the magazine pouch.
The weapon itself never appeared on any manifest. It took a different flight home. Number 9. The M1918 Mark 1 trench knife was a World War 1 design that should have been in a museum by 1967. It featured a triangular 6 and 3/4-in blade with a cast bronze knuckle guard weighing 1 lb 1 oz. Sergeant David Acosta of the 25th Infantry Division carried one that his father had brought home from France in 1918 and kept in a wooden footlocker in their house in El Paso.
Acosta carried it in a custom leather sheath sewn by a cobbler in Cu Chi Village and entered tunnels with the knuckle guard seated on his right hand and the blade extended forward. Heavier than the cut-down K-Bar at number 18, but with a dual function, the bronze guard served as a striking weapon in spaces too tight for a blade arc.
The Army’s 1966 modernization of individual combat equipment officially retired all trench knife variants from inventory, replacing them with the M7 bayonet. A weapon retired from inventory does not exist on inspection sheets. What does not exist on paper cannot be confiscated. He carried it for 12 months.
He never used the blade. He never set it down, either. Number eight. This one is different. The M1956 entrenching tool was a folding shovel issued to every infantryman in Vietnam. It weighed 2 lb 4 oz, measured 23 in extended, and was designed for digging fighting positions. Corporal Nelson Briggs of the 1st Infantry Division sharpened both edges of the blade to a cutting edge on a grinding wheel at the Lai Khe motor pool in May 1967, and carried it folded at 90°.
Locked into an L shape that turned a digging tool into a short-handled axe. In a tunnel junction where two passages met, and a man might face threats from two directions, the entrenching tool had 17 in of reach, five more than any knife on this list. Here is the part most histories omit. The Army knew men were sharpening their E-tools. They had known since Korea.
Field Manual 21-75 on combat skills never addressed the practice, because acknowledging it would have meant acknowledging the kind of fighting the manual was not prepared to describe. The training caught up a decade later. The equipment never matched what the ground demanded. Number seven. This is the one that sounds impossible until you see the photographs.
Specialist four. Jerome Watts, an armorer with the 554th Engineer Battalion at Cu Chi, built a crossbow pistol from a 12-in section of 1/4-in steel cut from a deuce-and-a-half leaf spring, a carved wooden pistol grip, and a trigger mechanism fabricated from a salvaged M-16 selector switch and sear pin.
The bolts were 8-in steel rods with sheet metal fletching. Total weight, 2 lb 1 oz. Draw weight, approximately 80 lb. The weapon was silent. In a tunnel where sound traveled through packed earth and alerted fighters in chambers 200 ft away, silence was not a luxury. It was survival. Watts built three between 1968 and 1969 and traded two to tunnel rats in exchange for captured NVA equipment.
No regulation specifically addressed crossbows because the Army’s weapons classification system did not contain a category for medieval projectile weapons manufactured from truck parts. The weapons were never confiscated because no inspector knew what to write on the form. His daughter found the last one in a toolbox in 1991 and thought it was a piece of shop equipment. Number six.
The Gerber Mark II was a fighting dagger with a narrow double-edged blade measuring 6 and 3/4 in forged from high carbon stainless steel with a distinctive cast aluminum handle featuring a wasp-waisted grip. It weighed 5 oz. Unlike the K-Bar at number 18, which was designed as a utility knife adapted for combat, the Gerber Mark II was designed for one purpose only and its shape made that purpose unmistakable.
Here is what most people miss about this blade. It was not standard issue. Tunnel rats purchased them through civilian mail order from Gerber’s Portland factory for $14.95 shipped to APO addresses in plain brown boxes. Sergeant Kenneth Yamada of the 173rd Airborne carried one in a custom Kydex sheath on his web belt through 19 tunnel entries near Dak To between November 1967 and March 1968.
MACV’s 1969 equipment review flagged the Mark II as a weapon with no utility function recommending its removal from combat zones. The recommendation was never enforced. Today, an original Vietnam era Gerber Mark II with theater markings sells at auction for $800. In 1967, it cost two weeks of combat pay and arrived in the mail like a magazine subscription.
Number five, the M26 fragmentation grenade weighed 16 oz, measured 3 and 1/2 in in diameter, and had a 4-5 second delay fuse. In the open, 5 seconds gave a man time to throw and take cover. In a tunnel, 5 seconds was an eternity. The blast radius exceeded the width of most tunnel passages, and a 5-second fuse gave the enemy time to throw it back.
Sergeant Allen Pruitt of the 25th Infantry Division’s Tunnel Exploitation Team trimmed the M201A1 fuse assembly on three M26 grenades, reducing the delay to approximately 1 and 1/2 seconds. Imagine pulling a pin in total darkness and releasing a grenade into a tunnel shaft knowing you have less than 2 seconds before detonation and no room to retreat more than 8 ft.
That was the calculation. MACV Technical Bulletin 9-1330-200 specifically prohibited modification of ordnance fuse assemblies. The prohibition carried a potential charge under Article 92 of the UCMJ, failure to obey a lawful order. Pruitt used all three during Operation Crimp in January 1966. Nobody filed the report.
Nobody filed most reports. Number four, >> >> 3 oz, a piece of pipe and a nail. Private First Class Raymond Soto of the First Infantry Division built a single-shot slam fire shotgun from an 8-in length of 3/4-in steel pipe, a pipe cap, a roofing nail, and a 12-gauge shotgun shell acquired from an Ithaca’s ammunition supply.
He built it in 20 minutes on a workbench at Lai Khe in July 1967. The weapon had no trigger mechanism. The user loaded the shell, pointed the pipe, and slammed the capped end against any hard surface, driving the nail into the primer. Effective range, 6 ft, which in a tunnel was the distance between a tunnel rat and whatever was in front of him.
Soto built it as a backup for his backup, a weapon to be used only if his .45 jammed and his knife was gone. He carried it in his cargo pocket alongside a single extra shell. The Geneva Convention had nothing to say about a pipe and a nail. MACV’s weapons accountability procedures had nothing to say about objects that did not appear in any catalog.
He carried it for 5 months. He never fired it. He said the weight of it against his thigh was the only thing that let him keep crawling forward. Number three, here is the part the official record left out entirely. The SKS was a Soviet-designed semi-automatic carbine chambered in 7.62 by 39 mm, 10-round fixed magazine, standard issue to Viet Cong main force units.
It weighed 8 lb 6 oz at full length. Private First Class Dennis Matlock of the 25th Infantry Division recovered one from a tunnel cache near Cu Chi in August 1968 and had it cut down by a Vietnamese metal worker to a total length of 19 in with the stock removed entirely and a pistol grip carved from teak. The modified weapon weighed 4 lb 2 oz, lighter than the MAT-49 at number 10, and shorter than the Ithaca at number 20.
It fired a rifle cartridge from a weapon the size of a large handgun. Here’s what most people miss. Matlock’s company commander, Captain Richard Angle, knew about the weapon. He carried a cut-down Mosin-Nagant carbine himself, acquired through the same metalworker. Neither weapon appeared on any property book. >> >> USARV General Order Number 4 was unambiguous about captured weapons.
The order was distributed to every command in Vietnam. The enforcement was something else entirely. Number two. What do you do when your pistol is empty, your knife is gone, and the tunnel ahead of you is not clear? Corporal Michael Savoy of the First Infantry Division reached for a signaling device.
The M8 flare pistol was a single-shot pyrotechnic launcher designed to fire illumination and signal flares. It was made of die-cast aluminum, weighed 1 lb 5 oz, measured 8 and 1/2 in in length, and was classified as a signaling device, not a weapon. Savoy carried one into a tunnel outside Phu Loi in March 1967, loaded not with an illumination flare, but with a star cluster round that would fill a tunnel section with burning white phosphorus fragments for 4 seconds. In a chamber where conventional
firearms risk destabilizing earth ceilings, the flare gun offered a psychological weapon as much as a physical one. The white phosphorus fragments burned at 5,000 degrees and illuminated the entire chamber, eliminating the tunnel fighter’s primary advantage, which was darkness. Army Technical Manual 9-1370-200 classified the M8 as a pyrotechnic device exempt from weapons accountability procedures.
What is not classified as a weapon does not appear on a weapons inspection. His son found it in an attic in Grand Rapids in 2006 and thought it was a cap gun. Number one, the Smith & Wesson Military and Police Model 10 was a .38 special revolver, six rounds, two pounds unloaded, four-inch barrel, blued steel with walnut grips.
There was nothing special about it. Staff Sergeant Michael Cavano of the First Infantry Division’s Tunnel Rat Detachment carried one because his partner, Corporal Alejandro Reyes, told him the .38 was the only sidearm worth carrying underground. The .45 was too loud, too heavy, too slow on the second shot.
They went in together 14 times in Binh Duong province, always the same order. Reyes first, Cavano three body lengths behind, each with a .38 in the right hand and a flashlight in the left. On January 19th, 1968, Reyes entered a tunnel near Ben Suc and did not come out. Cavano went in after him. He found Reyes in a collapsed section, still holding his revolver.
He took the weapon. He carried both .38s into every tunnel for the remaining seven months of his tour. One in his holster, one in his cargo pocket. USARV regulations required a deceased soldier’s weapon be processed through the unit armorer within 72 hours. Cavano never turned it in. In 1997, he drove 1,100 miles to Reyes’ mother’s house in Tucson and placed her son’s revolver on her kitchen table.
She held it for a long time. Then she asked him to keep it. 20 weapons. Some were issued, most were not, some were captured, some were invented on a workbench from scrap metal in desperation. Everyone remembers the M-16, the claymore, the Huey, but the cut-down K-bars, the sock full of lead, the crossbow made from a truck spring, those are the ones that disappeared because nobody filed the paperwork, nobody checked the footlockers, and nobody wanted to explain what the tunnels actually demanded of the men who went into them.
If you are watching this and your father, your grandfather, or someone you knew served as a tunnel rat, I want to hear from you. What was in their footlocker? What did they carry that the army never knew about? Leave it in the comments. Somewhere in a garage in Michigan, in an attic in Grand Rapids, in a cigar box in Bakersfield, the weapons on this list are still waiting.
They have no serial numbers in any system, no line item on any inventory, no mention in any official history. They exist only in the hands that carried them and the stories those hands left behind.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
