Vietcong Pincer ICV

The Vietcong Pincer ICV is the fast, amphibious, anti-infantry light tank of the Viet Cong that it will be a Vietnam War variant of Pincer ICV.

Tactical Analysis

 * Claws of Justice: The Pincer is a fast, amphibious, anti-infantry light tank. While not as good as its ARVN competitors in a straight firefight, its mobility allows it to perform hit and run attacks on targets, often retreating into a river to escape.


 * Guns Blazing: Armed with a pair of burst firing machine guns, Pincers will have trouble dealing with vehicles, but none whatsoever picking off small groups of infantry. They can also fire their rack of bolt-on missiles to hit more armoured targets outside of retaliation range.


 * Cobbled Together: Poor armour, helplessness against aircraft, lowered speed while swimming and the lengthy reloading time, minimum range and poor accuracy of its rocket rack are all major weaknesses of the Pincer.


 * Triple Clawed: Pincer crews will sometimes salvage 30mm autocannons from destroyed Beagles and weld them onto their vehicles for some anti-vehicle firepower. Doing this, however, usually takes a fair bit of experience.

Background
For the Vietcong, equipment is not always easy to come by, so they have to make do with whatever they can find. French MAT-49 submachine guns are used alongside Soviet PPSh-41 submachine guns, snipers must make do with temperamental SKS rifles, and homemade mortars are mounted on on rusting pickup trucks.

In particular, vehicles are rather hard to come by for the Vietcong; as a result, Vietcong forces which do manage to salvage or otherwise acquire military vehicles do whatever they can to maximise their effectiveness. This can be seen in the case of the Pincer ICV, an obsolete model of infantry combat vehicles that the Soviet Union sold off to the North Vietnamese when they replaced them with newer models.

To make the best use of these vehicles, Vietcong forces have mounted additional weapons or given them other upgrades, such as screw propellers that allow them to traverse water or welded on 30mm autocannons that add some additional firepower. Vietcong Pincers often sport highly effective jungle camouflage (though this is in part due to the fact that moss has grown all over the vehicles), allowing them to blend into the jungle better than NVA Pincers, though this camouflage is admittedly ineffective outside of the jungle.

One of the most notorious modifications that the Vietcong have made to their Pincers was to strap on a rack of Katyusha rockets, salvaged from abandoned BM-14 trucks, to the roof of the vehicle, turning it into an improvised artillery piece of sorts. While the rockets take up the space that would normally be used to transport infantry, this modification gives the Pincer the ability to lob a devastating amount of high explosives on a target area and quickly retreat away, though accuracy is abysmal and reloading is a long, tedious, process.

Of course, following the Tet Offensive and the arrival of Allied forces in Vietnam, thousands of vehicles had to be abandoned by the NVA in their retreat, including countless Pincers, something which proved to be a major boon for the Vietcong. As the Vietcong were to discover in the subsequent weeks, a good number of these vehicles were still in good condition, having been abandoned after getting stuck in mud, running out of fuel, or some other problem that could be easily fixed. Before long, the Vietcong had dredged out dozens of Pincers, as well as other vehicles, and restored them to operational condition with a few repairs.