Why Grunts Stopped Wearing Socks in Vietnam?

In the flooded paddies of the Mekong Delta, many American grunts made a decision that broke the oldest foot-care rule in military history: they threw their socks away. This file gets into what a wet sock actually does to human skin, the jungle boot engineered to drain that the sock kept sabotaging, the disease that pulled more men off the line than enemy fire — and the strange second career the socks had, hanging off rucksacks full of C-ration cans. Sources: Alfred M. Allen, "Skin Diseases in Vietnam, 1965–72" (Internal Medicine in Vietnam, Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army) U.S. Army tropical combat boot ("jungle boot") specifications — drainage eyelets, Panama sole Historical accounts of trench foot in the First World War and immersion foot ("paddy foot") in the Mekong Delta (9th Infantry Division / Mobile Riverine Force) Vietnam veterans' accounts and memoirs of wet-country field adaptations