Original Items: Only One Available. This is a very nice leather map case, Captured from an NVA / VC soldier during the Vietnam War, and brought back home by a USGI. The North Vietnamese Army were equipped with a wide variety of different styles of field gear, supplied by sympathetic communist states such as Russia and China, as well as items left over from WWII and the French Colonial period. Often their equipment was rather poorly made, however this map case is definitely not. It shows very high quality leather construction, and is made of a lovely brown textured leather.

The case measures 7 1/2" W X 10 1/2" H, and has a multitude of pockets and pouches for maps and tools. Inside it has THREE transparent slots for maps, one of which even still has some red oil pencil markings on it. There are slots for pencils and erasers, and there are also large pouches on both the front and back of the case. The case also still retains its leather shoulder strap.

Inside one of the pouches is a small note that reads: Maj Richard Wessler Captured 1972  U.S.A.F.. We have not been able to find information on this officer, so we leave this as a great research opportunity.

A very nice Vietnam War map case, ready to display!

The Viet Cong also known as the National Liberation Front, was a mass political organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia with its own army – the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) – that fought against the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War, eventually emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the regular North Vietnamese army. During the war, communists and anti-war activists insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958.

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front on December 20, 1960, to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Việt Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the early 1960s. The NLF called for southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists" and to make "efforts toward the peaceful unification". The PLAF's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, a gigantic assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The organization was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.