Original U.S. Vietnam War Captured Vietcong Flag with War Trophy Registration Paperwork - Captain LeRoy R. Peters, 199th Light Infantry Brigade - 16 x 24”

Original Item. One-of-a-Kind. This is one of the greatest Vietcong flags we have ever offered, as it comes with a War Trophy Registration form naming it to Captain LeRoy R. Peters, 7th Separate Battalion, 199th Light Infantry Brigade. This cotton flag measures 24 inches wide by 16 inches tall and is a three-piece construction with silk. A very nicely constructed flag with period stitching, this is not one of the cheap tourist or reproduction type flags that flood the market today. There are some stains and small tears and holes, evidence of a nice battle worn flag. The flag has some folds and damage, so it should be properly framed.

The War Trophy Registration Form provides a lot of information about Peters. He served in Vietnam from June, 1968 until July, 1969, service number OF109780, with the 7th Separate Battalion, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, APO 96279. He lived at 4355 N 69th Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The war trophies he brought back included 1 Vietcong flag, this one. The form is dated May 4th, 1969.

We haven’t found any solid information on Peters, but as a Captain, this shouldn’t prove too difficult.

This is a fantastic captured Vietcong flag with solid provenance, ready for further research and display.

The Viet Cong also known as the National Liberation Front, was a mass political organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia with its own army – the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) – that fought against the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War, eventually emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled.

Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the regular North Vietnamese army. During the war, communists and anti-war activists insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958.

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front on December 20, 1960, to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Việt Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the early 1960s. The NLF called for southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists" and to make "efforts toward the peaceful unification".

The PLAF's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, a gigantic assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The organization was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.