The "Black Pajamas" of the Viet Cong has taken on a mythic status among the portrayal of the Viet Cong in popular culture. It's hard not to think of the guerrilla soldier wearing a black outfit as well as a conical hat and some sort of old-ish weapon in their hands. The black peasant clothing was worn primarily by local and regional VC formations. These units were meant to work in local hamlets and had they worn a uniform, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb. For Vietnamese peasants, wearing black clothing while working in the field was perfectly normal since it would hide all the inevitable dirt that came with working in a rice field. For a guerilla soldier that wanted to blend in with the population, wearing the most common outfit was a natural choice. The association of the VC with the common outfit worn by peasants were present during the war itself and in one case retold by David Hunt in Vietnam's Southern Revolution, villagers started to wear white (usually a sign of affluence, since white could easily get stained while working) since their black outfits made them possible targets. Other local/regional VC guerilla soldiers wore a variety of civilian clothing to mix in with the general population.

Yet it wasn't the local/regional VC that did the majority of the actual fighting against South Vietnam, the United States and their allies. Although these local forces set up booby traps, made tunnels were they could store equipment, weapons and food as well as served as guides and occasional reinforcements, they weren't the mobile, far better equipped forces that took the battle to the enemy. The ones that did were known as the Main Force VC. The Main Force VC did in some occasions wear the black outfit or other civilian clothes depending on their mission, but they also wore North Vietnamese uniforms in the field. These uniforms could range from green like this shirt that was captured in 1965 from a VC Main Force guerilla soldier, to khaki or even blue like these pants that were captured as part of a VC Main Force uniform kit in 1969.

To briefly sum this up, it's worth remembering that if you ever read a book and the author refers to a "VC uniform" as a monolith concept, you need to remember to ask "which one?". Most likely they are referring to the popularized version of the VC guerilla soldier and in many cases, this isn't correct. Unfortunately, many stereotypes and clichés about all different aspects of North and South Vietnam are still repeated to this day by historians, popular and academic alike, and although there have been strides in making this image into a more complicated one, it has yet to entirely catch on in popular imagination. The black peasant outfit, a completely normal outfit to wear if you worked in the field, was worn by certain VC units as a way to blend in with the general population. Other soldiers wore other forms of civilian clothing to blend in. Soldiers that would have laid in an ambush in 1969, fully equipped with their Type 56 assault rifle, might have worn a green or even blue uniform while in wait. There was no one uniform.