I started to say something about the water cans, but didn’t. When they went into the Parrot’s Beak A.O., they were still using the old style cans that look identical to the gas cans on the outside. The ones for water are enameled in a gloss white on the inside, and will usually have a P.W. or just water painted on the outside. A Cav unit will have little use for non potable water, so you could go either way. Other units used both kinds of water.
The ammo cans on the floor is a nice touch, and quite correct. Usually saw the fifty cal cans up front because they were closer to the fifty cal machine gun. Plus the 5.56 cans give you a bit more head room. A lot of unit laid a tarp over the ammo cans, but still not always. Make no room to sleep inside a track! Folks that slept inside a track often bought the farm inside the track. You usually slept in a trench dug under the track. One small thing you might add is next to the fifty many CAV units had a can full of transmission grease. They’d pour it on the barrel to help cool it down. The ammo box was almost always the big one used on M48’s, but have seen tracks in the rear with the smaller box! Not in the bush. If you add smoke grenades, Make sure to have several colors. Purple, red, yellow, and whatever suits you. Hand held flares were common, but also kept out of sight. You don’t want a flare going off ontop a track! A lot of folks like to leave loose rifles and such ontop the tracks. Not all that good of an idea, unless you can put your hands on it instantly. The M79 was pretty common, and was used to point out something to the infantry moving on the ground. Like telling a machine gunner where to shoot.
I like your build! Brings back memories
gary
2 Likes
Most everybody thinks Vietnam was nothing but red dirt. There was dirt so black that it looked like charcoal, and there was a lot of white sandy areas towards the coast. My base camp alone was half red dirt and half of the black stuff. The more dense the plant life the darker it was. Same way around rice paddies. If by chance you doing a three quarter CAV piece, don’t forget to bend up a lot of stuff. They broke jungle on a regular basis, but not like the 11Th CAV did. My A.O. up north was very similar to Kentucky, and equipment looked better.
gary
2 Likes
I’m glad you finally jumped in here! My dio is a stretch on the plausibilty of all the proposed AFVs being in the same place at the same time. Terrain and appropriate weathering is a study in arrrgh!, I’ve seen red dirt covered tracks, dusty tan tracks and the right color Olivedrab is damn hard to nail down. The 11th Cav is my central focus but I can’t deny 25 ID, 3/4 Cav, 1/4 Cav, Americal, 101st and all the other units their part in the mix, in fact I started out not putting bumper codes or unit markings on the first few models I built. This ACAV will be a culmination of several photos of different M113s, in fact when the completed model is unveiled I’m sure it’ll raise some eyebrows. 
Thanks for your input. 
Cajun
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Side note, I’m generally depicting the area north of Tay Ninh SW of Quan Loi.
Cajun
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I have to post this pic so eveyone will understand why I went with the plastic watercans, this is from a Cav troopers photo collection . . .
. . they’re just so dusty I didn’t notice they’re black, don’t know what year the pic was taken but I suspect it was after 1970.
That’s one very crowded, dusty interior!
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are you talking about “Thunder Road?” My brother in law did his OJT in the rubber plantations down there, before being shipped up my way. He was in the Quarter CAV, and either Alpha or Bravo Troop. must have been a really dusty place as they had to power wash everything when they did a stand down. Note: only photos I’ve looked at down there are freshly cleaned tracks in his possession. Spoke of Thunder Three and maybe Thunder Four a lot.
Be thinking mines and booby traps down there, as that was the real beast you delt with. Funny story about him! Larry had roughly six months in country (maybe just a tick over five months), and they have a big stand down. The Big Red One is headed home! Larry packs his bags to go home with them (think he said you had to have eight or nine months in country.) His Sargent Major takes him out in the middle of Highway One and tells him he headed way up north. He ended up with B Troop, 1st of the 1st CAV right at my back door. Needless to say we never knew each other in country. I married his sister. Well we sat down one day to look at his stack of photos. He had one of an ACAV that belonged to the 17th CAV out on the Thien Phouc Road. I looked at it, and simple said is that a little west of Tam Key? Asked why, and I said said I helped blow it up. Asked me what I was doing on that road, and I told him I made the trip three or four times, and never got used to it. Road was a very pretty drive for the first fifteen miles, then instantly got ugly. I usually walked the second half. Been on two roads that scared me, and the other was the road from Baldy to Ross. Ross was kinda like the end of the world before heading into the Que Son Valley. They like command detonated 500lb. bombs on that road. Another road you walked with your eyes towards the ground. I’d love to see how many of those 100lb. guys it took to plant a 500lb. bomb, and how they move it!
gary
1 Like
Crowed interior? I’ve seen mortar tracks that had the tube removed, and every square foot was stuffed with 81mm or 4.2" rounds. They park it next to a couple mortar tracks and literally feed the other two. When empty, the replace the tube and get a resupply. One that always bothered me was a “zippo”. Avoid getting with in a 150 feet of that thing
gary
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I always enjoy meeting a Nam vet so let me ask you the big three, what year was your tour, where was you AO and what unit were you with? I have a cousin that was with 1st ID, got winged in the shoulder by a sniper sometime in '68.
Cajun
Please tell us more about blowing up that M113 or was it the road that you helped blow up?
I’m an I-Corp Rat. Class of sixty eight, but my tour started on Dec.7th 1967, and ended march first 69. I started out off LZ Gator, about five miles south of Chu Lai on High Way One, and remember saying to myself “I can do this for a year as it’s not all that bad.” I started Tet on an LP about 250 yards north over looking a valley. Literally had the balcony seat watch the whole place blow up in front of me. I could see the rockets taking off and landing, but we were told to never use the radio and only the squelch button! Did not understand what I was seeing right in front of me. Last night out there for about a week, but the next week still runs thru my mind all too well. We won’t go there.
Once things got ironed out we brought half our battery off of Five Four (up by Fat City [ the real Fat City]), Then started doing leap frog strikes to the south with different units. Last two were down at Dragon and Liz near Duc Pho. After being beat up for a couple months we flew all our howitzers to Gator for a complete refit for new adventures in places we’d never heard of. Prior to this we did an OP with the 101st, and that was the introduction the things to come. They were starting their first big push in I-Corp, and the 196th was already there. We did our first OP out thru the Que Son Valley ending up about a hundred feet from Laos working with a MAACV heavy team. From there we set up a base camp in an SF camp based at the foot of the southern end of the Hiep Duc Ridge. Interesting place with zero infantry and about a hundred Strikers. 196th was to the north (five miles to the AO of the 101st). The 17th CAV was east of us in the flat lands, but cleared out in mid August. that’s when B Troop 1st/1st CAV came into the AO. A102 was the last LZ before Laos till they built Siberia and Melon was opened every now and then. We would break up our unit an do OP’s with whoever had something to do. I’ve done OP’s with Marines, 196th, and the 101st too many times. I never got into the Ashau, but got close enough to watch the place. Think that was either with the 327th or 187th infantry. The last OP was with the 327th, but was a total bust. That would be January 69. Things got ugly in Feb. Base camp went under siege till July. NVA in the wire every night and sometimes in the middle of the day. I was the last man out, and lost one of my best friends 22 minutes after I left. Still deal with Tommy’s loss today. From Thanksgiving till I left it seemed like everybody I was close to disappeared on me. Just me an Randy in the end. Some were shot, some were on the wrong end of rockets and mortars, some rotated out.
When I cleared out of the field, I was still drunk from my latest and greatest short timer’s party. The dumped me on the runway about 90% naked, and was dressed when the slick showed up. The place was hit about five minutes later, and it was a big choatic mess from there. The slick went down on it’s next flight back, and everybody out there thought I bought it. Of course I didn’t! So what did they do? They had a wake for me, and I wasn’t invited! Fast forward to twenty years ago, and they have a reunion. The ghost of me shows up and liked to scare folks to death. Kinda funny when you think about it, but did give them hell for not inviting me!
gary
3 Likes
how to make a mess out of an M113! I was learning the fine art of demolition from an SF demo man. He yells for me to assist him in blowing up a track. We get there and they’ve stripped the thing of everything they can (even the powerpack). this ACAV is buried deep in the mud, and they want it gone. I carry a ruck sack with about a dozen blocks of C4. McCloud had the blasting caps and charger plus both of us have a lot of det cord wrapped around us. We set charges made of C4 (he calls it silly putty), and daisy chain the charges with det cord. Get back about a hundred fifty feet and blow it. Not really good enough so we got to do it again. Think we did it three times before the roof was pretty much gone. the side walls seemed bullet proof, but you could look all the way thru it like it was a tunnel. We were supposed to go back again, but never did get back to it. Think they mined the track later as nobody would go near it.
gary
2 Likes
Well it’s been some time since I’ve posted an update on this build, I hit a slump after getting irritated with the kit and painting the accutrement such as guns and ammo, another delay was the decision to convert to laquer paint and upgrade my AB equipment. This kit/build has been an intresting endeavor, the parts detail is exquisite . . . and infuriating, the parts fit is less than accomodating, for example the starboard side rear fender did not fit flush to the hull side because the body’s mateing boss is not milled deep enough to accept the fender, didn’t catch that on dry fit. Another issue I encountered was a problem with the bulkhead separateing the engine bay and crew cabin, for some reason when glueing that part in it wouldn’t recess into it’s receiving channel and I had to compress the part in with a clamp, here began a series of misalignment issues and broken parts and subsequent repairs. Every model is a learning experience and this one is no different, the instructions are (for me) not well executed, they indicate where everything goes but not neccesarily in the best sequential order. This is a trial by error kit, the next one would go more proficiently than this one but I would be hard pressed to tackle that again, this was not a fun build and I’ll take the bullet rather than discredit AFV Club. I finally have the lid nailed down and the base coat squirted on, let me say here this new compressor is friggin’ awesome!, the Iwata AB is just plain fun and the AK REAL COLOR is a dream. I’m at the 85% mark towards completion, here’s some pics, still working on lighting so I apologize for picture quality. As far as the accuracy of stowaage, well you’ll find that I suffer from an uncomfortable phenomenom of discovery after the fact, the field packs are evidently ALICE packs and not period correct even though came from a Vietnam weapons kit, well you’ll have that.
Cajun 
4 Likes
That looks really good! Looking forward to more.
I,m back with a different name as I got locked out when Microsoft did an unwanted upgrade on me at four in the morning. One thing to always remember about ACAV’s in the combat zone is the trim vane, It really takes a beating. Often completely ripped off. I’ve seen many APC’s using sheets of 3/4" plywood painted O.D. 1" plywood was hard to come by, but would have worked better. It wasn’t uncommon to see one with the trim vane opened up a foot or so, and a bunch of junk crammed into the opening. The basket (we called the toilet bowl up north) was prone to digs and gouges from bullets and chunks of steel flying thru the air. Another fairly common addition was to add folding lawn chairs in front of the two rear M60 machine guns. All seemed to be white with a blue stripe. The OEM seats were usually trashed in three or four months! Another oddity was that no matter how well they cleaned one up, there’d still be brass cases all over the place, Everything from 5.56 to fifty cal. 7.62 was the most common. In my A.O. the TC usually had either an M79 or a 12 gauge shot gun close by. If the NVA got within 15 feet of you their plan was a couple grenades in the bowl. A fifty is almost useless, and by that time at least one of the M60’s was offloaded to go with the infantry, but trust me the buckshot round from a 79 usually was your best friend there. The shotguns seemed hard to come by for them, but we could get all we wanted. If you do a shotgun, most ammo was Remington RXP plastic hulled (forest green). They often had a belt made up to hold 25 rounds or more.
gary
2 Likes
just dawned on me that this was not an M113, but an M106 converted over to an 81mm mortar. Been way too long ago
glt
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@Gary_Totty1-M106 converted over to an 81mm mortar.
glt
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That would be an M125. I placed the decals this weekend and started weathering the hull also, for this build I decided to go with minimal damage, one that hadn’t seen too much “jungle bustin’”, haven’t figured out if the added armor on the glacis is aluminum or carbon steel so I’ve got a fairly clean front end.
Cajun
I just triggered a password reset email, maybe you can recover your previous account …
I missed this one!
Looking good realy like the Large Dio set up .
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