Original Items: Only One Available. Genuine USGI bringback from the Vietnam War. This cotton flag measures 45 inches wide by 32 inches tall and is a three-piece construction. Has a pocket on the hoist edge for a pole. 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.

The flag is in very good condition, and looks like it was most likely captured before seeing much use. There are some small tears along the edge, and also some dark stains which look to be from grease or dirt. The stitching is still in great shape, with no pulling. The central star appears to have been made of parachute silk and felt victim to tearing. In the lower corner there is a capture date that reads as:

Captured By PRU
Quang Ngai City
21 Jan 68

The Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) were South Vietnamese special paramilitary units, led by U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. The PRU was the tasked with finding and neutralizing the Vietcong (VC) cadre and their political leadership of under the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. The PRU’s preferred method was to capture and interrogate Viet Cong insurgents.

Quảng Ngãi province was one of the first provinces in central Vietnam (together with Quảng Trị) to organize self-defense units in March 1945. The Ba Tơ Guerrilla Unit mobilized tens of thousands of peasants. It was known as a Việt Cộng stronghold during the Vietnam War and was the site of the purported Bình Hòa massacre and the My Lai Massacre. The province produced famous war literature on both sides of the conflict including the wartime diary of Viet Cong medic Đặng Thùy Trâm was written here, and from the US perspective, the setting of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Comes more than ready to 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 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.