Why This Toy Sized Swedish Submachine Gun Was SOG's Deadliest Weapon

Everyone remembers the M16, the machine guns, the gunships. Almost nobody remembers the little gun that did the quiet work. This is the story of the "Swedish K," the Carl Gustaf m/45, and why MACV-SOG recon teams and Navy SEALs trusted it more than anything American-made in the Vietnam War. It was small, it fired a 9mm pistol round, and suppressed it barely made a sound. Better still, it came from neutral Sweden, so when a man went down across the fence in Laos or Cambodia, nothing on his body pointed back to the United States. We get into why a silenced submachine gun beat rifles and machine guns up close in the jungle, how the CIA built the integral suppressor, and why a sterile, non-attributable weapon mattered so much on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Then, in 1966, Sweden cut the supply off to protest the war, and America had to build its own copy, the Smith & Wesson M76, which showed up too late to matter. If you love Vietnam War history, MACV-SOG, Green Berets, Special Forces weapons, and the secret war in Laos, this one is for you. Sources & footage: archival film from the US National Archives and US Department of Defense (public domain). Carl Gustaf m/45 and Smith & Wesson M76 photos via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY / CC BY-SA). Some scenes are dramatized reconstructions built from documented recon accounts. Subscribe for more untold stories from the shadow war in Vietnam.