Chapter 6

The Cold War and Vietnam Era

The nature of the Cold War was determined by the desire of both East and West to avoid nuclear war. The concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) helped to prevent a nuclear war and at the same time promote small scale brush wars and wars between client states of the United States and its enemies. The Vietnam War grew to become the largest and most well-known of these conflicts. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the Caribbean Basin and Latin America, where guerrilla warfare, urban and rural covert conflicts, and revolutions raged all across the southern continent, as well as in Central America and Mexico. Cuban guerillas even deployed to Africa to raise Communist-led revolutions. There were small wars, secret wars, and undeclared conflicts on every continent. Revolution was in the air everywhere.

It became clear to US leaders that unconventional warfare would be the most effective method of engaging a dispersed and elusive enemy. New units were formed, the most famous of which were the US Army Special Forces, popularly known as the Green Berets. As an aside, a Green Beret is a hat, not a person. SF soldiers were, at that time, commonly known as Sneaky Petes or Snake Eaters in the military community. The Navy SEALs were also formed during this period, drawing on the old frogman concepts from World War II and expanding their role.

During all this change and development, it was found, sometimes from tragic experience, that the individual SF soldier had a high likelihood of being separated from his unit in enemy territory. The nature of many of their missions required them to operate for extended periods in small groups with no support or contact with their supply chain. Covert and clandestine agents or operators, who were sometimes recruited from the military, worked without the kind of communications and backup available today and were for the most part on their own. The new units and agents, or operators, needed new equipment and knives.

Therefore, the combination fighting and survival knife concept began to loom large. In World War II, a survival knife was seen as a tool for a downed aviator. A good example of this is the Pilot’s Survival Knife, a five-inch bladed sturdy piece of steel with a stacked leather handle and a sharpening stone in the sheath; it is still in production and makes a good traveler’s or survivor’s knife. The KA-BAR, similar in construction but with a seven-inch blade, was viewed as a fighting knife, although it was also used as an all-around utility knife.

The idea of the survival knife, or the modern tactical knife, that emerged in the sixties was a relatively compact package in which the SF soldier, and certain others, would have a tool and weapon allowing them to rip their way out of a downed helicopter, build shelters, make primitive food-getting tools (such as traps, bows, spears, etc), and serve as a silent weapon. The knife had to be reasonably compact, or it would not be carried at all times. Troops, Special Forces or not, will discard anything that’s not useful, especially if traveling on foot. It had to have day-to-day utility for the same reason. Specialized edged weapons were seldom used and often discarded. It had to be sturdy. It had to be maintainable under field conditions.

Then, as now, top brass and the military supply chain gave little attention to knives for the troops; battles were not fought with edged weapons and hadn’t been for more than a century—with certain exceptions, some of which are mentioned in other chapters. This point of view failed to take into consideration that individual soldiers are not as concerned about the big picture as they are their own survival. Every combat soldier or clandestine agent can visualize a hand-to-hand fight to the death wherein an edged weapon might well save his or her life. They aren’t wrong to do so. Even in today’s high-tech warfare, with batteries for various electronic devices weighing down rucksacks and radios that can call in all manner of destruction from the air, blades can and do save lives. There are many stories today and in the recent past of hand-to-hand combat with naked blades.

KA-BAR with a leather sheath.

As always since World War II, the Marines had their KA-BARs. The Army only had bayonets, which were poor substitutes for field knives, even if the decision makers at the Pentagon thought otherwise. The issue bayonets were of soft steel that was made to withstand impact, not to keep an edge, thus they were virtually useless as utility knives. Quite a few soldiers got their hands on KA-BARs, and that was fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough for the needs of some of the new soldiers. What was a paratrooper, a Sneaky Pete, a covert operator, or clandestine agent to do? We bought our own knives.

I was at Smoke Bomb Hill, the home of Special Forces, in the early sixties and later in the field when these requirements were being defined. I served with the 7th Special Forces Group and the 82nd Airborne Division and was also engaged in nonuniformed service. In many ways, my personal experiences mirrored those of others in the community and perhaps can help explain the development that went on during that period of tactical knife development.

In our group, we bought virtually every commercial knife available. Almost all fell short in one way or another. We learned that there was nothing commercially manufactured that met all our needs in one package. Machetes were awesomely destructive weapons and terrific tools for the tropics but too large to carry at all times. The Scandinavian knives were good cutters but with too little strength, and they lacked handguards or grips that allowed hand indexing, at least one of which is needed if the knife is to be relied on as a weapon.

The KA-BAR was a good all-around utility knife and, as many World War II–era Marines testified, a reliable last-ditch weapon. There must have been fifteen or twenty KA-BARs floating around my small unit. Some were quite strong and worked just fine. Unfortunately, others bent easily, and quite a few broke at the tangblade intersection. Also, the tips broke off or bent on quite a few of them. Many of the KA-BARs in use at that time were of World War II vintage, and I suspect the problems we experienced were partially due to how the KA-BARs had been manufactured by many different companies and quality control varied during wartime. Or it could have been due to the kind of testing we did on our knives. In any event, some of us went off to war with KA-BARs, and I never heard about any of our customers complaining about being rendered hors de combat by a KA-BAR. But many of us were looking for something more.