How Navy Sailors Burned Out the Viet Cong: The Flamethrower Boats They Called Zippos

#VietnamWar #ZippoBoats #VietnamVeterans How Navy Sailors Burned Out the Viet Cong: The Flamethrower Boats They Called Zippos They were sailors steering slow landing craft, not flamethrower crews. But when every riverbank in the Mekong Delta could hide an ambush at ten yards, they had to find a way to clear the bank before it fired. In 1967, the Mobile Riverine Force, the 2nd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division and the boats of Task Force 117, carried the war up the canals of the Delta from a floating base. The Viet Cong answered with mines, B-40 rockets and recoilless rifles fired from bunkers dug into the dikes, and a thirty-yard canal could turn into a box in seconds. This is the story of the men who fought back with fire: the improvised flamethrowers lashed to the decks, the versions that failed, the Monitor hulls rebuilt at Dong Tam with two nozzles and thickened fuel, the first ambushes they burned out, the captain who fired before the bank did, and the price the flame boats carried for the villages along the water. Nobody signed the Zippo. The welders and petty officers who built it are in no archive, but a few of the converted landing craft still survive, steel boxes with a ramp and the welds of men working against the clock. #VietnamWar #ZippoBoats #VietnamVeterans #USNavy #MobileRiverineForce #BrownWaterNavy #MekongDelta #MilitaryHistory