The latest Osprey Elite book is on the gear worn by soldiers of the US and Allied nations during the Vietnam War. Aside from Australia, every other nation used US equipment of some sort or the other. Now by equipment, I don't mean hardware, but the gear worn by soldiers as they went about their daily activities and missions.

This includes things like ammo belts, canteens, pistol holsters, cases for flare, packs for additional ammunition, carrying straps, back packs and of course, the belt vests worn by every soldier onto which all this stuff is attached. There is considerably more to all this as the Army is constantly updating and upgrading this materiel. All of it is designated by the year that it was developed so something developed in 1956, for example would be the 1956 entrenching tool cover. I think you get the gist of it.

Each one of these pieces of equipment is covered in some detail and when known, a stock number is supplied. One of the reasons for all this detail is that there are those who collect such items and this book would serve one well as a reference for all this. I should also mention that the cover uses the word 'equipments' and that word is repeated several times throughout the book. Grammatically, there is no such word, as equipment itself denotes an uncounted number of items. Plural of equipment is equipment. Now I don't know everything and it may well be that this is some sort of jargon. I certainly could not find any reference to it being a real work through a Google search. Just to let you know that it isn't a typo.

Bottom line is that though it seems pretty esoteric, it actually is a fairly interesting read. Those who are students of the Vietnam war or just interested in making sure their figure model is accurate will want to add this to their collection.

January 2017

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