Authentic Viet Cong /NVA helmet?
Article about: Hi , I need some help. I recently picked up this helmet at a show. I was told it was a Vet bring back from the Viet Nam war. I know very little about these helmets and I was hoping someone c
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FWIW - I'm not comfortable with it. My thoughts are,....a US vet wouldn't go to so much trouble to paint a NVA flag......and a NVA vet wouldn't do what appears to be an "english" time and place. Likely tourist trade stuff,....but I am far from an expert.
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Lots and lots of these were made for tourists after the war and continue to be sold in Vietnam today. Personally I would not take it as period 1965-75 NVA helmet, but it is likely that it could have been done anywhere from January 1975 to last year. These are really hard to date and continue to pop up with " vet art".
Morris
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it's a real PAVN sun helmet from Vietnam, but definitely not a war time battle used piece, it's a common street vendor's souvineer helmet made to sell to tourists, it probably shows age just from storage and the tropical climate sitting in a street side gift shop for years until some tourist buys it or brings it back to the US to resell on ebay
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Thanks for getting back to me. I had some suspicions about it as a tourist souvenir. But not until I got it home. I thought it looked unusual, never seen something like this...and of course, I didn't do my homework.
I'm gonna contact the seller and hopefully return it and refund my money. Impulse buying will get you every time.
Thanks for you input.
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i believe that the viet cong would never have show any frontal insignia for obvious reasons ,its still an nice display piece though and im sure period ones have the same inner label as on your example so its in with a chance for originality ,to what year of manufacture though its anybodys guess
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by
James C
i believe that the viet cong would never have show any frontal insignia for obvious reasons ,its still an nice display piece though and im sure period ones have the same inner label as on your example so its in with a chance for originality ,to what year of manufacture though its anybodys guess
They did wear insignia on the front of their helmets.
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Original NVA wartime pith helmets are surprisingly hard to find. They do have painted emblems or insignia on the front.
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by
SteveR
They did wear insignia on the front of their helmets.
I read a book called Inside the NVA and the Viet Cong by Michael Lee Lanning
and US veterans said the NVA would often remove the helmet badges when infiltrating south Vietnam down the Ho Chi Minh trail
to conceal their numbers , identity to the enemy, often they would find the helmet badges inside their uniform pockets or pack of the dead enemy soldiers.
later NVA soldiers probably would have added the badges to their helmet when they liberated the South after the Fall of Saigon
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