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Yup, I agree... these decks range in price a ton depending on who you try and buy them from... I payed very little for mine.
That would be awesome to own a deck that as actually from vietnam, what a great piece of history.
They're extremely tough to find. They were used as morale boosters by soldiers over there. Many report that the Viet Cong were afraid of the Lady Liberty statue and viewed the Ace of Spades as the death card, and thus a bad omen. The reality was that it gave soldiers a shot of courage, and they used them by spreading them throughout villages they attacked and onto the bodies of dead VC combatants. It became more like a signature - "we were here, and we f#%*ed up your village", that sort of thing. Some units even created crudely made personalized AoS cards so the VC would know exactly who it was that stomped in and kicked butts.
Anyway, as you can see by how they were used, they would be largely used up and spread all over the jungles of Vietnam. Finding an intact deck would be nearly impossible. The reason the request was made to USPC in the first place to make those decks was that GIs were raiding their own playing card packs to the point that there was hardly any decks left that weren't missing the AoS. USPC printed and shipped them to Vietnam, totally free of charge, and the deck box and cards themselves were identical, almost, to the newer version.
The reasons there are so many of these packs from Desert Shield lying around is that 1) Desert Shield didn't take long, and Desert Storm was even shorter, and 2) the Iraqis didn't have the same supposed superstitions that the Viet Cong were thought to have. Lots of decks were made, very few were used. The "Desert Shield" designator on the bottom of the face was to insure that these Aces/packs weren't confused for the genuine article that was used in Vietnam - but at the same time it renders the cards practically useless for magicians, unless they're willing to gamble that the spectators won't notice the extra line of text.
As I see it, they're OK for practicing fans or perhaps for picking food out of your teeth, but otherwise they're just an oddity for collectors and useless to anyone else.
