Original Items: Only One Available. Genuine USGI bring back from the Vietnam War. This cotton flag measures 26 inches wide by 20 inches tall and is a three-piece construction with silk. Has a pocket on the hoist edge for the pole. This example was captured at “Ba Cuum” Secret Base in 1968.

The writing on the flag reads:

TAKEN “BA CUUM”
SECRET BASE, II CTZ
REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM
JOINT SWEEP OPS
SUMMER 1968

During the Vietnam War, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) defined II Corps tactical zone (II CTZ) as central Vietnam, including both the lowlands and the Central Highlands. It covered nearly half the land area of South Vietnam. “BA CUUM” is an americanized pronunciation of a Vietnamese “Secret Base” in the II Corps Tactical zone.

The flag is in worn shape with some staining on the front. The silk is in fair shape but the flag has been folded a few times. A really stellar piece.

A fantastic captured flag with a ton of history, 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.