Tag Archives: Military Payment Certificate

GI’s used the MPC for Transactions in Vietnam

One of the first things we had to do in Vietnam was trade our ‘Greenbacks‘ in for MPC currency.

MPCs were paper money denominated in amounts of 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents, 1 dollar, 5 dollars, 10 dollars, and starting in 1968 20 dollars. MPCs were fully convertible to US dollars upon leaving a designated MPC zone and convertible to local currencies when going on leave (but not vice-versa), and were illegal for unauthorized personnel to possess, thus, in theory, eliminating US dollars from local economies.

Military Payment Certificates, or MPC, were used from the end of World War II until the end of the Vietnam War, between the years 1946 and 1973. MPC’s utilized layers of line lithography to create colorful banknotes that could be produced cheaply. Fifteen series of MPC’s were created but only 13 series were issued…