70 • Zips, Pipes, Captured Vietcong weapons included myriad homemade, fabricated, and modified firearms, along with the usual US weapons captured in fighting or bought on the black market. These were gathered during Operation Chinook north of Hue in 1 967. (Courtesy ofLCpI. 8.LAxelrodJ He showed the American officer, at the time working for CIA, a very sophisticated jungle workshop, complete with forges, drills, lathes, and a variety of modern machine tools powered by diesel generators. Most of the equipment was German, while the shop foreman and senior skilled machinists were Chinese, driven out of their homeland by the Communists in 1949. Even so, it was tough to figure who they hated worse, the French or the local