And some of them surely should have been armed. Even at their own home base. Some percentage of them should be on duty and armed 24/7/365 no matter where they are in the world.
@Bigun Unfortunately the regular peacetime army is ran by career Regular Army officers who care about nothing on Earth more than their careers,and are terrified of being blamed if one of their garrison soldiers shoots somebody with a issue weapon,and it gets back to the Pentegram that they weren't controlling their men.
I have had RA officers come up to me while traveling around VN with a sub gun of some sort because they are light and easy to carry,and inform me I am carrying an unauthorized weapon and they have to seize it. Every single one of them changed their minds when I told them "You got THAT shit right!"
This is the prime reason the regular army hated Special Forces. They had no authority over us,and couldn't order us to do a damn thing we didn't want to do. We had a different agenda we were working on than them that didn't involve following rule books,and they hate anybody and everybody that doesn't wear red and march in a straight line. It would really piss them off when they would ask "what are you doing in our AO?",and we would truthfully tell them "You don't have a need to know." If it hadn't been that way we would have never had the time to train any indigenous troops or run any missions because they wanted us under their command to run recon missions for THEM.
There was a USMC General officer relived of his command for refusing orders to send armor and infantry in to keep a remote SF camp in his AO from being overran by the NVA. He flat refused to do it,and Westmoreland flew into DaNang the next morning to personally relieve him of his command and replace him. As a result the camp was overran,several hundred Montagnard civilians were killed by the NVA as a result when the camp was overran. To this day there are still 2 SF guys listed as missing in action. The only reason more weren't missing is because the SF guys from CCN took it upon themselves to fly in the next morning at sunrise with SVN helicopter pilots flying the helicopters,and they rescued the survivors that were still in hiding as the NVA ran off. If that Marine General had flown in a couple of companies of Marines the previous afternoon,the camp would have never been overran. The NVA drove into the camp in freaking Soviet tanks,and the troops there had nothing that would defeat the armor other than mortars,and that would take a direct hit. Something really hard to do with a mortar. IIRC,this was 1969.
