Why didn't soldiers in Vietnam wear flak jackets?


 But many grunts DID wear their flak vests even though the were cumbersome and heavy.


The Marines wore the M1955 flak vest.


The Army wire the M1852A and the M69 flak vests.


As tankers we were issued flak vests. I usually laid old vests on the floor in the driver’s compartment of our tank in case of mines but it was more for a safer mindset feeling. Our one inch steel hull bottom held back the VC gunny sack C4 mines but you never knew when a big one would go off underneath you. Those were the ones made with spent artillery shells the VC found.


I received a letter from mom once and she asked if we were issued ‘those vests that stopped bullets.’ I told her yes. She asked me to promise her that whenever I was out of the tank to put it on. I promised her and I did. Anything to make her stop worrying. I even lied and told her we were the tank that guarded Blackhorse Base Camp. I told her it was a safe gig. I lied to my own mother so she would not worry so much. Still bothers me. In reality, we were in a lot of combat. It seemed we’d come back, work our asses off on maintenance, then head back out. Sometimes I wished we were the guard tank.


In the Army, we as tankers wore flak vests. They were mostly for fragmentation from explosions. As I mentioned, they were not designed to stop rifle rounds. Most tankers died more from fragmentation hits from grenades and mortars than RPG rounds entering our tank. The M48A3 was a tough tank. Again, wesring a vest was a piece of mind thing. ‘Maybe it will save me.’ It also saved us from getting hurt on tank hatches, etc. would have had a lot of bruising without them.


Whenever I was out of the tank in a combat zone every so often when deemed safe, I would take off my CVC helmet, put on my steel pot which I hung on my hatch post and put on my flak vest. I had to dismount at times in the jungle to check the tracks for wood pieces and clean them out.


I was once hit in the lower right corner of my flak vest which knocked me off balance. We figure it came from a sniper using a Mosin-Nagant rifle equipped with a scope. A tank driver is a good one to hit. One rarely actually saw the ones shooting at us. It was the dead ones we mostly saw, at least the ones that weren’t dragged away by their comrades.

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