First a tip of the hat to Wing Wiper:

     We in the Army also cherished you guys who brought our ammo, dusted us off when we were wounded and gave us good tactical info from the air as you approached and exited our sometimes suicidally dangerous (to you) LZs.  We had the Hueys which were slow but we loved them. With their big rotors you could feel them before you heard them and I still love to see and hear a Huey in the air. Thanks to all you guys that sat up front in those birds with only some thin aluminum between you and Charley while taking small arms, heavy machine gun and RPG fire entering an LZ that we'd just told you was secure.  I saw many a pilot bring that big, slow old aluminum target into an LZ   that was pouring fire at them in order to get one of our guys out who would have died if you'd waited. May you all have an automatic pass to hand to St. Peter when it's your time to be dusted off in your poncho.

     Now on to my Swedish K story.  This is no sh+t! (per Dick's instructions):

     I was in a special operations U.S. Army artillery outfit in 68 and at one point we were dug in near Bien Hoa down south which was a flat delta area with the jungle coming down from the hills to meet the delta.  During daylight hours the delta area was pretty secure but at night the whole area belonged to Charley. We were pretty close to Bien Hoa air base which was like a small American city with lots of support troops, American civilians, a hospital, a casino (run by a Special Forces NCO) etc. Some huge American firm called Philco Ford (none of us had ever heard of them) had dozens of guys running around Bien Hoa in white American pickups who were civilian company reps.  The CIA had people operating in this area who would dress as civilians and also blend in by driving  Philco Ford vehicles.  We referred to them as "spooks" and hated the non ex-military members. They had one slight flaw in their disguise as Philco Ford employees,  they would drive out into the less secure areas near the jungle and would always wear a Browning Hi-Power pistol and holster (probably 9mm although I don't know for sure).  No Philco Ford employee was stupid enough to leave the secure areas and none of them wore pistols (probably had some weapons under the seat but they weren't dumb enough to flaunt them).

     In any event, we began seeing this one pickup in our AO during the day with one guy in it. He'd pass by us and we'd exchange hard looks and an occasional uncomplimentary comment. We'd see him in the small villages, out of the pickup, wearing a Browning Hi-Power in a holster. We'd check with the villagers later and he was buying small quantities of dope. He told them he was CIA and really muscled them.  We assumed that he was an exceptionally stupid, arrogant and incompetent civilian spook gathering some kind of intelligence data under the guise of buying dope.

     Now to the Swedish K. part of this incident.  We'd heard of this mysterious weapon that was supposed to be a state of the art submachine gun and was only issued to CIA  personnel.  Rumor was that it was only issued to spooks and the Air America boys along with the Browning Hi-power. One day our resident genius in the pickup started sporting this strange submachine gun, conspicuously propped up in the corner of the seat where everyone could just see this strange barrel.  We were going to stop him just to get a look at the weapon but he avoided coming near us. Other troops got a look at it and reported that it was one of the mysterious and vaunted Swedish Ks.  This was the premier status symbol weapon in Nam at the time.

     One day on a supply run, one of our guys in a jeep came upon an army engineer cat with a dozer filling in a large hole in the track and being guarded by some   Airborne troops who had the same AO we did. Laying about20 meters out in the jungle was the twisted and burnt remains of a Philco Ford pickup. It seems that Charley had vaporized our resident spook with a command detonated mine of considerable size after he made the fatal error of coming back later in the dusk from some of his forays along the same track. They obviously were concerned that a CIA spook was so blatantly active in their area

     And now for the rest of the story!  A few weeks later our First Shirt (1^st Sergeant for the uninitiated) came back from an intelligence briefing in Bien Hoa and was quite amused. He'd asked one of the CIA spooks in Bien Hoa (ex-military and a good guy) about the incident. The CIA had investigated and it turned out that this guy was actually a real Philco Ford civilian employee with a drug problem and had purchased both the Browning and the Swedish K for huge bucks on the black market. He'd apparently cleverly decided that posing as a spook would let him freely purchase dope at an extorted discount and would eliminate interference from the Army troops in the area. As untrained civilian in a secure area most of the time he had failed to calculate Charley's  input into his equation. I believe the CIA report, as this guy was a real idiot.