Frank Brown with an original, Uocally produced M203 — an Improvised combination of the M 1 6 and the M79. The idea Originated in the mid- 1 960s in Vietnam. (Courtesy of Frank C Brown,) By this time, though, it \ Communists, Lansdale said. "Their homemade weapon which impressed me the most was an exact copy of our big Browning M2. Looking at an issue gun alongside their copy, it was impossible to tell them apart," he told me. He said the Vietnamese got parts from government arsenals and other raw materials, like steel, by foraging the countryside. He said they showed him a large stockpile of steel rails from a nearby railroad track that had been dismantled. "It was for French growers, so we thought it best we convert their train track into our arsenal,' Trinh Minh Th6 told me," added General Lansdale. is obvious that North Vietnam was arming itself and its insurgents in the south with weaponry from China and the USSR, General Lansdale told me. Yet, while the North Vietnamese stock of modern Weapons was finite, their homemades were bound only by scrap metal and ammo until China came to their aid. With the hope of taking pressure off Korea, she committed herself as a base area for the Viet Minh and a source for weapons, munitions, and schools for the Communist officers. Shortly after the close of the Korean War, the Viet Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, and that phase Was over. It happened then that a hundred or so American advisers were sent to Vietnam to try to recapture the Western flag of colonialism. One of the advisers of the late 1950s