Able Archer/ RFR rules - Vietnam in 20mm (part 1) - Terrain and first model

 

Recently Tim King started to make a revamped Able Archer Rules closer to the principles of the (even) faster Rapid Fire Reloaded called Able Archer Reloaded. This fact sparked again my interest on the Cold War period so I started to pile up once more figures, vehicles and aircraft for Iran-Iraq war, Angola, Lebanon and particularly the period I had less stuff, the Vietnam War. 

After some piling up and stash organisation for Vietnam I saw a number of nice videos by Little Wars TV and other wargamers and modellers for the sake of inspiration and took my old books on the subject from the shelves. I had to clean the dust after that as some 20 years already passed since my last raid into Vietnam.

 I had no terrain for South East Asia and my first task was to make some patches of forest that looked exotic enough for Vietnam. The material was already in my stash for years as I used Games Workshop jungle terrain and some nice plastic vegetation I found in  Chinese shops. Another good thing about these patches of forest is its usage in the WW2 TOE of the Pacific.

This one is made only of GW plastic vegetation. Some stones were used for extra weight in all stands. 

The Chinese plastic vegetation was cut into pieces of around 10 cm to 20cm and mixed with the GW pieces. 

This is the "20cm" variant. What I wanted was some vegetation stands with an exotic look that can also be mixed with the European/North American vegetation as Vietnam has a prolific mix of evergreen and deciduous forests to bamboo and mangrove forests, for a total of 1500 types of woody plants (!). 

These are the different types of vegetation that GW offered at least some 10 years ago. Looking on the pet shops is also a good solution as they also have this type of plastic vegetation specially in the aquarium part. 

A view from the lot. What will have to be done, after mixing with the European/North American types, is to make the mandatory paddy fields and bamboo forests. 

This was my first Vietnam build maybe 40 years old but still in good shape, a Matchbox Bell Huey AH-1G Cobra that can be used from 1966 on many actions as a support for the other great achievement of Bell, the UH-1 "Iroquois". Recently I took out the figures and painted the canopy from the inside, which gives a good shine to the canopy and doesn´t erase any detail from the frame. 

Next: More Vietnam.