When I arrived at my final destination in RVN I found our team had a couple of wall lockers full of issue, capture and where did that come from weapons. All were off the books. There were plenty of privately owned handguns floating around but not rifles. Shortly after arriving, I made a trip to another LZ where another of our team members operated. When I walked into his hooch I saw a commercial Sako bolt gun with scope. My memory says it was .223 with a 3-9 Redfield. When I asked him about it he told me that it and two others had been purchased at a PX in Japan.
A post from the model 70 thread by MTFalconer:
I gues I am lucky in the respect that equipment and rifles are some of the only stuff he will talk with me about. All of my family get t honestly, my grandfather was a ranger/sniper in WWII...my uncles and father were all ranger/SF/Recon marine in Vietnam and to my generation with myself and two of my cousins being either weapons SGTs, snipers or Scout/snipers. There's a LOT of history there. My grandfather has passed but other than that I can usually make a phone call to verify any of the equipment questions or at least get what they can remember. Back in those days he said My grandfather and a few other family members of soldiers essentially kept his unit running. Either with scopes, mounts...hell even rifles being shipped in from the states as mail. He had the opportunity to call home about once a month and that was usually what they talked about. Equipment list for himself and his men. Then my grandfather would scour the countryside putting the order together to send out. My dad would just send his pay home or put what little money they had together to try and cover some of the costs. The best thing my dad said he ever received was a then new tech called TUPPERWARE.....LOL. The guys in his unit almost immediately fell all over themselves for smaller pieces of Tupperware to use in the field. I always laughed at that. Tupperware, winning hearts and minds....LOL
The above post is what brought this to mind. It is the only other reference I have seen that indicates there were nonissue weapons used by snipers of this era. Does anybody else have knowledge of others?
A post from the model 70 thread by MTFalconer:
I gues I am lucky in the respect that equipment and rifles are some of the only stuff he will talk with me about. All of my family get t honestly, my grandfather was a ranger/sniper in WWII...my uncles and father were all ranger/SF/Recon marine in Vietnam and to my generation with myself and two of my cousins being either weapons SGTs, snipers or Scout/snipers. There's a LOT of history there. My grandfather has passed but other than that I can usually make a phone call to verify any of the equipment questions or at least get what they can remember. Back in those days he said My grandfather and a few other family members of soldiers essentially kept his unit running. Either with scopes, mounts...hell even rifles being shipped in from the states as mail. He had the opportunity to call home about once a month and that was usually what they talked about. Equipment list for himself and his men. Then my grandfather would scour the countryside putting the order together to send out. My dad would just send his pay home or put what little money they had together to try and cover some of the costs. The best thing my dad said he ever received was a then new tech called TUPPERWARE.....LOL. The guys in his unit almost immediately fell all over themselves for smaller pieces of Tupperware to use in the field. I always laughed at that. Tupperware, winning hearts and minds....LOL
The above post is what brought this to mind. It is the only other reference I have seen that indicates there were nonissue weapons used by snipers of this era. Does anybody else have knowledge of others?