Wow! Impressive!
You received a compliment of sorts from my wife.
When I showed her the pictures, our conversation went this way:
Susan: "What are they standing on?"
Bob: "Corks."
Susan: "Corks? Corks aren't that big!"
Bob: "No, that's true. They're corks, I assume, from wine bottles."
Susan: "But...." And then the light dawned. "Oh! I thought they were actual men dressed like Viet Cong!"
I am quite sure that my epitaph will say, "He could never paint model figures so they look real." On the other hand, if I were to try to paint a model Viet Cong figure, he wouldn't look like your Viet Cong.
I was in South Vietnam, with the U.S. Marines, early in 1966. My battalion was soon engaged in combat, at first taking light casualties, and arresting Viet Cong POWs, like these I photographed:
They were thin, poorly dressed and poorly armed. The only armed VC I saw, before I myself was wounded by a rifle bullet and evacuated, was killed by a Marine in my squad. He was just a kid wearing dark trousers and a white singlet and armed with a bolt action Mosin–Nagant carbine, probably dating back to a Finnish model produced in 1938. The images above are included in my photo essay, "37 Days in Vietnam: Photographs by a Marine Corpsman," at https://www.ephemeraltreasures.net/imgs/vietnam-war-slideshow.pdf.
Bob
On the bench: A diorama to illustrate the crash of a Beech T-34B Mentor which I survived in 1962 (I'm using Minicraft's 1/48 model of the Mentor), and a Pegasus model of the submarine Nautilus of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas fame.