From reliable Vietnamese sources, the Soviets had supplied "used" BTR-60PB to the PAVN towards the end of the Vietnam War.
Here are a few video captures of the BTR-60PB moving towards Saigon on the last days of the war. From what we were told, these videos were Vietnamese documentaries that had not been seen outside of Vietnam until recently.
Enjoy!
Very interesting! I stand corrected.
I've had a bit of a search through online on Vietnamese sites and it seems that indeed a few were in service late in the war. There's even a suggestion of a battalion's worth being used in the Ho Chi Minh campaign by the 23rd Mechanised Battalion. The earliest depiction or reference I can find is a photo purporting to be a BTR-60 converted to act as the carriage for Ho's coffin, so that would date usage to 1969. Model can't be identified from the photo but as the PB had only just come into service in the Soviet Union, I'm guessing it's a PA or possibly a converted command variant.
That said the overwhelming majority of published photos on line show Chinese Type 63 (K-63) and BTR-50 variants for the '72 and '75 campaigns so I'd suggest that whilst it seems that BTR-60s were present in 1975 they were still not especially common.
It's funny, in the wake of the Sino-Vietnamese War, Vietnam went to some lengths to publicly down play the extent of Chinese aid during the Liberation war. They even changed the public record to show that a Soviet built T-54 was the first tank to enter the grounds of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, despite contemporary photographic evidence showing it was in fact a Chinese made T-59. Despite that contemporary photos of Chinese built APCs abound.