Michael has been linked to this website, and commenting on various articles, for some time now. I haven't added the link because I've been lazy about blog maintenance lately, even though I've enjoyed his contributions here and the articles on his own website. You might click on the link and go see what he has to say.
I roused myself from indolent lethargy because he recently wrote about his growing interest in collecting Russian firearms. The article included a picture of a "Makarov" pistol (see the article for a picture).
(H/T lavriccat for the picture) Note that (no disrespect intended to Michael) the pistol I saw that night in Vietnam didn't look much like the Makarov pictures I find on the Internet now. What I saw looked exactly like the Tokarev pisols I find here. But it doesn't really matter. We never knew what we looked like, because we rarely saw them. We had only heard the names of the Russian arms being used by the VC and NVA, and pistols weren't what we usually found on the enemy bodies left on the field of battle. Generally speaking, all we ever saw were AK47's and RPGs.
To continue:
I had to comment because I once had my hands on a Makrov/Tokarev (?) , brand new (still coated in Cosmoline ... or the Russian equivalent) which my platoon picked up after we ambushed a heavy platoon of VC who were maneuvering for a night assualt on an ARVN base camp positioned to defend a village new the 1st Infantry Division's "November 2 Night Defensive Position" (NDP) on Hwy 13, north of Saigon. We were outnumbered four to one, but had the great advantage of surprise and an established defensive position. We had to attack them because the ARVN camp included familys. According to interrogation of the two VC survivors of the ambush, they were tasked with attacking the village defenses to undermine the determination of the ARVN to defend outposts.
("Intelligence" had given us no warning of the impending attack. We were merely positioned in squad-size elements within a couple of miles of the U.S. NDP as part of the normal mid-range security cordon. Part of the Division tasking was to defend friendly Vietnamese military positions and villages, as encouragement to South Vietnamese to be friendly to the current RVN regime.)
The Rest Of The Story is given in the comment I made to Michael's post, and served mostly to provide some historical context to his interest. We took Makarov pistols off two of the bodies ... obviously members of the NVA Cadre, as they were in the forward command group of the VC column ... and the people who found the pistols during the post-ambush search were allowed to keep them as spoils of war.
Unfortunately, we found that we could trust the South Vietnamese to maintain their allegiance as long as we defended them; we could trust the ARVNs to stand their posts to defend the villages; we could even trust the VC to be true to their stated goals of undermining American influence at every opportunity.
We just couldn't trust our own REMF leadership to support the troops they commanded.
The pistols, turned over to the Company First Sergeant for safekeeping, never went home with the men who killed the aggressors.
Go to Michael's blog article, and read the outcome.
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