Project Eldest Son

[WartHog]

Stumbled across this very interesting read about a Top Secret U.S. S.O.G. Operation during the Vietnam War to wreak general mayhem and cause the Viet Cong and NVA to doubt the safety of their guns and ammunition.

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=61f_1303788297

[Blademan21]

Great article. I got to meet Conrad Ben Baker years ago along with Knifemaker Gary Hicks. Ben had in his den a chrome plated AK47 that was presented to him
by fellow soldiers in Vietnam. He showed us a food pack made in the 60's that had rice and fish heads and still tested safe to eat. Experts had told him his men would be dying in the field. They were wrong. Lots of history made by this man.
It was a pleasure to have met him and his wife.

[smle-man]

BG (ret) John Masters mentions doctored .303 rounds in his wonderful biography "Bugles and a Tiger" about combat on the Northwest frontier of British India. The problem with this sort of scheme is the danger of the doctored rounds escaping into the supply system and ending up in the unsuspecting hands of the good guys.

[GW]

That wasn't a big concern during the Vietnam war given the Vietnamese' use of such a different caliber.

[Lawbitercitizen]

Yes it will always go on and did long before guns. Sabotage often works best when the enemy doesn't even know they were sabotaged and instead thinks something doesn't work properly.
This is a big reason that you need to have the capability of making your own things and not be reliant on others. Why depending on the global economy to provide basic things is foolish, like we are starting to do in the USA with food and other basic necessities, importing a lot more of it and turning our rich fertile locations into housing and more short term valuable real estate. With many of the climates best for growing the most diverse or frost vulnerable foods turning into housing even faster like California or Florida. Just importing your orange juice from Brazil and clearing your own orchards has long term consequences. You not only are more vulnerable to supply, but have far less control over the quality control or what is truly being done to the product even if you mandate certain things from afar. You can pass whatever law you want in your own border but if your products come from abroad you really only have so much control.
Chinese pet food killing millions of US pets by putting small amounts of poison that made it test as having a higher protein content should have been a bigger lesson. They used not quite enough to kill pets a lot more often than they exceeded those amounts and actually killed pets.

Poisoned food or water, guns and mortars that kill the user when used. Its all the same thing.

As others have said though such things will make it back into the population. US citizens were buying surplus ammunition made half a century previously from the Chinese and Russians that were Cold War and political and societal enemies.

You can bet some ammunition not used in war in a third world location would be repackaged and sold to the wealthiest buyers willing to pay the most for it later.
7.62x25 has not even been used much professionally in decades, and they still had so much of it stored up importing it was cheaper than making it.
If not for reclassifying various types of formats of ammunition as prohibited a lot more of our ammunition would still come from China and Russia.
These are all calibers that were previously of the enemy but now enjoyed by many other people.

It would be no different than canning poison food. At some point they would end up going to the needy children for Christmas even if they originally were rations of an enemy nation.

[TurboChrisB]

Good read....

[langss]

Very good read. Personally I never thought of it that way and it really is a good way of looking at things.

[rugershooter]

I think I remember reading about it in American Rifleman quite few years ago.

[Blademan21]

Great article. I got to meet Conrad Ben Baker years ago along with Knifemaker Gary Hicks. Ben had in his den a chrome plated AK47 that was presented to him
by fellow soldiers in Vietnam. He showed us a food pack made in the 60's that had rice and fish heads and still tested safe to eat. Experts had told him his men would be dying in the field. They were wrong. Lots of history made by this man.
It was a pleasure to have met him and his wife.

Found a picture taken a while back of Ben Baker with the food rations he had come up with to feed his men and the Montinards/Montagnard in the jungle. The man was a genius.






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[Sutcliffe]

I remember running across that tactic in fiction

Much later I stumbled across the actual op in a magazine article.