Tactical Gear Essentials for Jungle Missions

1. Jungle boots: never wear socks because of jungle rot. Our feet toughened up quickly. • Pants that are either bloused in boots or taped to prevent leeches, etc. from crawling up leg. The belt was a cargo strap from a long haul truck. • Never wear underwear for the same reason as not wearing socks. They chafe and cause blisters and jungle rot. Besides, nothing worse than a wedgie during a firefight. • Shirt with sleeves rolled up. I wore a jungle green undershirt in case I got to hot and took off the shirt. I always had a large medic sling cloth around my neck or head that I used for sweat or a tourniquet. It was also used as a rifle sling on occasion. • One Zero Vest was worn on every mission. I have already described what I carried in that. • Notice the watch on my left arm. It had a black cover that went over it.

2. When the STABO rig came out we all preferred it as our web harness. However, in some of the pictures you will still see a coil of rope dangling from the harness which was the extraction Swiss Seat we used before STABO. The rope had many other uses. • I preferred canteen covers for all my web gear pouches. The front right and left pouches were filled with 5 each 20 round CAR-15 magazines giving me a total of 200 rounds. • I also hung a sawed off M79 on a snap link on my right rear side. The two pouches on my left side were each filled with 5 rounds each of 40mm HE rounds. • There were two more canteen covers; one carried a canteen and the other hand-grenades. • My knife (K-Bar) was taped to my right shoulder web gear strap.

3. Upper left shoulder strap was two saline solution canisters. • In the picture you see what look like white canisters taped to the shoulder straps below the knife and the saline; they are smoke and gas grenades. I rarely used the smoke and gas grenades. This mission photo you would see a lot of them on all the team gear. We used them as a distraction. • Rucksack: I carried the radio as the One Zero along with two canteens on the side of the ruck. • Inside was a block of C4, claymore mine, toe popper anti-personnel mines, black rain gear, poncho with liner, and food.

4. Here’s an example of the black rain gear I mentioned on another page. I was sharpening my K-Bar while we waited out the weather on a trail watch. • As a side note: Notice the vertical lines in the photo? Those were caused by the Pentax EE camera we used. It was all metal, no plastic cameras in those days, and the shutter and film shuttles would rust.

5. When I first arrived in July 1968 we were wearing tiger stripe shirts and pants. They looked cool, but the fabric was to heavy, hot, and didn’t dry easily. Notice the pants weren't bloused because of the fabric, which caused chafing around the ankles. I was happy when they were replaced with the new field uniform. • This is the pre-STABO uniform. Notice the snap link on the upper right shoulder? The Swiss-seat hung from that link. • Also notice the 40mm grenade launcher attached to the CAR-15. I tried it out thinking that having both weapons on one platform would be better. It wasn’t. I went back to the sawed-off 40mm.