Category: War
I was six feet tall and 163 lbs. without a gram of extraneous body fat. Though I didn’t enjoy it, I did a weekly 10k run with my mates in boots with a rucksack and M16. I was in the best physical condition of my life and believed myself to be both bulletproof and immortal. Then I met the Pig.
A proper 15-mile forced march was about the hardest thing I have ever done. On this particularly fateful day, I don’t recall whose dog I had inadvertently kicked to deserve what happened to me. This was, however, the day I got tagged to lug the Pig.
The “Pig” was the M60 belt-fed General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG). Back in my day, we used M60’s as SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons). Nowadays, our 5.56mm SAWs are relatively lightweight, portable and mean. By contrast, the Pig weighed 23 lbs. empty and fired a 7.62x51mm round the size of my little finger. The Pig would cut through walls, chew through ceilings, ventilate cars and reach out to truly serious ranges. It was, however, indeed still a pig. At the end of that horrible road march, I thought I’d died.
Origin Story
The M60 GPMG wanted so badly to be awesome. Rising from the ashes of World War II, the M60 reflected the U.S. Army’s effort at developing a truly state-of-the-art light machine gun. We fought the Second World War with the Browning M1919A4. This beast ran like the Energizer bunny, but it weighed 31 lbs. and was a veritable mass of sharp corners. The M1919A4 was also designed to be fired off of a separate M2 tripod, an awkward piece of kit that itself weighed another 16 pounds. The subsequent M1919A6 tried to morph the gun into something more portable, but it was yet a pound heavier. We could do better.
The M60 began life as the experimental T44. In what has got to be the coolest job in the history of jobs, American firearms engineers took the belt-fed mechanism from a captured German MG42 and grafted it onto the action of an FG42 paratroop rifle. The resulting frankengun served as the basis for the M60 action.
The M60 orbited around a stamped steel receiver for both economy and weight management. The Germans had shown the world with their MG42 that you could indeed stamp out a GPMG that was rugged enough to thrive on the modern battlefield. Though M60 receivers were ultimately found to stretch a bit, this part of the design performed fairly well.
The M60 featured a gas piston-driven action that fed ammunition in M13 disintegrating links solely from the left. The gun fired from the open bolt and was exceptionally simple to operate. Lock the bolt to the rear, put the gun on safe, open the top cover, and place the ammunition belt in the feedway link side up or “brass to the grass.” Close the top cover, point the gun at something you dislike, flick the safety off, and squeeze. Repeat as necessary. As seems always to be the case, however, the devil was in the details.
The M60 was an air-cooled design intended for sustained fire applications. Running lots of belt-fed rounds through a machinegun creates astronomical amounts of extraneous heat. Getting rid of all that thermal energy is the Achilles heel of any sustained fire weapon system. The generally accepted solution on a gun like the M60 is a quick change barrel system.
You can cut spirals or flutes into a barrel to increase its surface area and subsequently its capacity to dissipate heat. However, if you want this thing to shoot for a while you need mass. Making your barrels heavy is one of the reasons the Pig and I got along so poorly that torrid afternoon at Fort Benning. Certain aspects of the M60’s design were just fatally flawed.
The bipod on the M60 was located at the far end of the gun. This location optimized stability and control. However, in the case of the Pig, this meant that every spare barrel had its own dedicated bipod. For the sorts of guys who might break the handles off of their toothbrushes to help conserve weight on a long patrol, any extraneous mass was the unforgiveable sin.
Additionally, certain components of the M60 gas system had an annoying tendency to come apart at high round counts. As a result, the gas cylinders on our guns were always held together with safety wire. In practice that was not a particularly onerous problem, but it didn’t inspire confidence.
Swapping barrels on the Pig was indeed fast and intuitive. Lock the bolt back, throw the barrel release lever, snatch out the barrel using the handy but heavy carrying handle, and lock a fresh tube in place. Easy peasy.
Variations
The M60 was intended from the outset to be everything for everybody. Uncle Sam wanted one gun that could serve in a variety of roles. In the final analysis, there were only three versions that saw widespread service back in my day.
The standard ground gun featured a rubber-coated steel handguard and buttstock with a folding shoulder rest. This weapon served in most conventional roles to include vehicle mounts. In Vietnam, particularly early in the war, helicopter door gunners frequently hung a standard M60 from a bungee cord and used it for suppressive fire. Innovative gunners sometimes chopped the barrels short or affixed a spare pistol grip to the forearm with pipe clamps. It was a common practice to wire a C-ration can to the left aspect of the feed tray to enhance feeding.
The M60C was used in fixed mounts aboard helicopter gunships, most typically in dual fixtures on each side of the aircraft. The C-model was hydraulically charged and electrically fired via solenoid. The C-model guns used the same basic chassis as the ground guns. However, their barrels lacked bipods, front sights, and carrying handles.
The M60D was the standardized pintle-mounted aerial version of the weapon. The D-model dispensed with the forearm and included a spade grip with twin ring triggers in lieu of the buttstock assembly. The M60D included a folding ring sight as well. The barrels on our D-models still carried their own bipods so you could use the gun on the ground in a crisis.
Reliability
I did not have a homogeneously positive experience with the M60. Most of the guns I was issued seemed fairly finicky. We trained to fire five to eight-round bursts and remain ever mindful of barrel heat. I recall having to fiddle with the guns more than I should have to keep them running, particularly in an austere environment.
I was once signed for twenty-four D-model M60s to be used as door guns on my tactical aircraft. Despite being spotlessly maintained and perfectly lubricated there never seemed to be more than about six that really ran well. Failures in training tended to diminish confidence in the weapons. Given that the mission was to provide suppressive fire going into and out of hostile landing zones that always seemed a wee bit disturbing.
Practical Tactical
When the Pig ran, it ran well. The sedate 550-rpm rate of fire encouraged ammunition efficiency, and the heavy .30-caliber chambering carried plenty of downrange thump. Running the gun was both fun and exhilarating. Humping it, however, particularly for a skinny guy like me, not so much.
Running a belt-fed machinegun out of a moving helicopter is an incomparable rush. It also embodies a fair amount of unexpected physics. When the aircraft is in forward flight and the guns fired out the sides each screaming bullet becomes its own little flying machine.
The 22” barrel on the M60 is rifled one turn in twelve inches. The bullet leaves the gun’s barrel at around 2,800 fps. That means it has a rotational velocity of 2,800 revolutions per second or about 168,000 rpm. The bullet turns clockwise as viewed from the firer. When fired in forward flight out the right side of the aircraft the airflow across the bullet creates a low pressure area on the top that actually draws the projectile upward. Smarter folks than I call this the Magnus Effect. On the left side of the aircraft this low pressure area is formed underneath the bullet and pulls it down.
The end result is that to hit a target on the right the gunner aims intentionally beneath it and lets the bullets fly up to impact. The opposite is true on the left with the bullets plunging precipitously toward the ground. The practical effect when doing this for real firing tracers is frankly surreal.
Denouement
The M60 will forever be associated with Sylvester Stallone and John Rambo. The 1982 action movie First Blood established its own film genre. A fun fact is that Stallone co-wrote the screenplays for First Blood as well as the next four sequels.
In the first film, Stallone’s put-upon Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran character eventually takes up an M60 and uses it to shoot the bejeebers out of the small town of Hope, Washington. Along the way, Rambo even runs his M60 one-handed, albeit on a sling. Just punch “First Blood M60” into YouTube if you haven’t seen the juicy bits. However, should this be the case I sure wouldn’t admit that to any of your guy friends.
For the most part, the M60 has been supplanted in U.S. military service by the M240-series of belt-fed guns. Upgraded versions like the M60E6 still soldier on in certain select units, however. Despite its warts, the Pig yet remains one of the coolest looking automatic weapons ever contrived.
On 6 August 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay
to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Col. Tibbets had his mother’s name painted on the plane on the morning of the mission.
Part of medical training involves away rotations at rural clinics so you can get a feel for the practice of medicine someplace other than the huge teaching hospital. The student spends about a month working with a local family physician just to see what real doctors do day-to-day. Mine was a simply magnificent experience.
I was in a really small town under the tutelage of the nicest guy in the world. My time there was one of the reasons I gravitated toward something professionally similar myself. Meeting people was one of the greatest aspects of my experience in that little community. Small-town America is simply rife with characters.
One older gentleman was just eaten up with skin cancers. He was covered in them. When I inquired regarding his history, he said he had developed cancer in the Army Air Corps during World War II. That sounded like an interesting story. Wow, I had no idea.
The B-29 Superfortress was actually the most expensive weapons project of World War II.
This guy was an engine mechanic assigned to the 509th Composite Bomb Group under Colonel Paul Tibbets in the latter parts of World War II. He was responsible for maintaining the four big Wright R-3350-23 Duplex-Cyclone engines that powered the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That job changed his life.
The recent Christopher Nolan movie, “Oppenheimer” orbited around the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. My new friend said he and his buddies had been invited out to watch the Trinity detonation. They stood in a line in the desert and were told to focus on a certain point off in the distance. By way of protective gear, he was issued a pair of tinted goggles.
He said when the bomb went off, the flash was unimaginably bright. He said they had time to laugh a bit about it before the blast wave hit them. The pressure front threw them all back bodily off their feet, though no one was hurt … at the time. He said in the aftermath of the detonation, the air smelled strongly of ozone, like you had been in the presence of a powerful electrical arc.
Here we see Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in the arming trench
on the island of Tinian prior to its being loaded aboard the Enola Gay.
They all picked themselves up, brushed off the dust and dirt, and reveled in the amazing thing they had just seen. He said the first kid in his unit to develop cancer got sick six months later. It would have been sometime in 2000 when I met him. He said he was the only one of those presently left alive.
Staging the bomb into the combat theater was a herculean task. Components of the weapon were delivered to the island of Tinian aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis. Anyone who has seen the movie “JAWS” knows that story.
They delivered the bomb in complete secrecy. However, the ship was subsequently torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sunk, leaving 890 of the original crew complement of 1,195 floating alone in the water. Over the next four days, a further 574 sailors succumbed to exposure and shark predation. Only 316 survived.
On the airfield at Tinian, the Air Corps had constructed a trench in the parking apron. This was the most sensitive weapons project of the war, so security was unbelievably tight.
The plan had technicians assembling the bomb in the trench before towing the Enola Gay in place above it. The weapon was then winched into the bomb bay. My buddy said there were MPs with submachine guns posted all around the plane with orders to shoot on sight anyone who seemed even remotely threatening.
The 15-kiloton atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima was undeniably horrible.
However, the two atomic bomb attacks ultimately saved countless lives.
Early in the morning on 6 August 1945, my friend needed to go over the Enola Gay’s engines one last time. He made his way out in the darkness, serviced each of the big radials in sequence, and then moved away from the big bomber.
Unbeknownst to the security troops posted around the plane, he had tucked a little Brownie camera into the pocket of his flight jacket. As he walked away from the aircraft, he surreptitiously tucked the camera under his arm and snapped a picture of the plane. No one was the wiser. He told me in all seriousness that the MPs likely would have shot him dead had he been seen taking the photograph.
The image captured the big silver bomber at a crazy angle. He later mislaid the original negative. That picture sat in a frame atop his television in his home in rural Mississippi. It is the only photograph on the planet of the Enola Gay with the bomb on board.
On the morning of 6 August, Colonel Tibbets and his crew delivered Little Boy, the first operational atomic bomb, to its target over Hiroshima, Japan. The 15-kiloton blast ultimately claimed around 75,000 lives.
However, the nuclear attacks saved countless more by negating the need for an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands. And I got to touch just a little bit of all that in a tiny little medical clinic in rural Mississippi.
Categories
The Rhodesian Bush War
At 2247 hours on 24 April 1980, a U.S.A.F. MC130 Combat Talon aircraft callsign Talon 1 touched down in the flat desert 200 miles from the Iranian capital of Teheran. U.S. Army Rangers dismounted and secured the landing area, code-named Desert One, for follow-on Air Force cargo planes and Navy helicopters. 93 Delta Force operators and 13 Special Forces soldiers from Detachment A of the Berlin Brigade as well as a dozen Rangers and sundry support troops stood poised to attempt one of the most daring special operations missions in history. The objective was to free 52 American hostages held by Iranian extremists. 
The Rangers secured a nearby highway and stopped traffic as it was encountered. This included a civilian bus containing 43 passengers who were detained on the ground onboard one of the EC130 cargo planes. Minutes after the bus was secured, a fuel tanker ignored the Rangers’ orders to stop and attempted to run through their roadblock. It was later determined that the tanker was smuggling illicit gasoline. In desperation, one of the Rangers unlimbered a shoulder-fired M72 Light Antitank Weapon (LAW).
Sighting the disposable rocket launcher in the dark using its luminescent sight, the Ranger center-punched the heavily-laden truck. Like a milk jug hit with a high-powered rifle round, the truck and its contents erupted in a brilliant fireball that was visible for miles around. A passenger in the truck died in the attack, though the driver escaped in a follow-on pickup. From that point, everything seemed to fall apart.
Prior planning had determined that the mission required a minimum of six operational RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters to be successful. With only five mission-capable aircraft remaining, the decision was made to abort. In the subsequent chaos, a helicopter taxied into an Air Force cargo plane and exploded. Eight American troops died in the inferno, and another four were injured. The mission was a humiliating failure. However, the lessons learned at Desert One helped transform American Special Operations Forces into the most respected and capable on the planet.
Light Anti-Tank Weapon
But what about that LAW launcher? Work on the M72 LAW, or Light Antitank Weapon, first began at Redstone Arsenal in 1959. The mission was to design a more effective and more portable replacement for both the M31 HEAT antitank rifle grenade and the bulky and heavy M20A1 Super Bazooka. American needed an anti-armor weapon to counter the rapidly advancing tank technology developed by the Soviets. 
A design team that included Frank Spinale, Charles Weeks, and Chris Choate developed one of the most enduring weapons in the American arsenal.
The M72 consists of a disposable launcher that fires an unguided 66mm solid-fuel rocket. The basic concept is essentially an arithmetic mean between the American bazooka and the German WWII-vintage Panzerfaust.
The light anti-armor weapon saw a great deal of use in the Vietnam War and has been improved multiple times over the years. The latest M72A7 weighs 7.9 pounds and has a maximum effective range of 220 meters. The point-initiated, base-detonated round travels at 480 feet per second. A mechanical setback feature prevents the warhead from detonating unless it has been fired.
The LAW consists of a single consumable round of ammunition carried within a pair of nested telescoping tubes. The internal tube is aluminum, while the outside sort is fiberglass. When collapsed, the LAW is waterproof and 25” long. Once extended and ready to fire, the M72 is 35” long. The weapon’s minimum arming range is ten meters. The front sight is graduated in 25-meter increments, and the rear peep sight automatically adjusts itself for ambient temperature.
Running the M72 LAW
To deploy the LAW for firing, the operator pulls out the safety pin and pivots the backplate clear. This allows the front cap to fall off of the launcher. You then grasp the launcher front and rear from the top and extend it vigorously. The inner tube telescopes and will lock in place. The front and rear sights are spring-loaded and pop up of their own accord. Now rotate the weapon onto the firing shoulder, taking care to ensure that the backblast area is clear. The backblast is considered dangerous to bystanders out to about 40 meters.
With the weapon pointed downrange, you then pull the firing mechanism forward using the weak hand. The LAW is now armed and ready to fire. Sight the weapon appropriately, support the front with the weak hand, and squeeze downward from the top against the rubber-coated trigger bar to fire the rocket. Once fired, the launcher is considered disposable. No one is reloading these with a fresh anti-tank rocket.
If the launcher needs to be returned to its stowed condition prior to being armed you can press down on the rubber-coated takedown button on the top to release the two tubes. As you telescope the tubes back into themselves, fold the front and rear sights down into the stowed position. Replacing the end caps is fairly self-explanatory.
Staying Power
All military weapons evolve, and Uncle Sam launched a program to replace the LAW back in the 1980s. The end result was the Swedish AT4. The transition was supposed to start in 1983, but the old LAW just won’t die.
The AT4 weighs between 15 and 18 pounds depending upon the variant and is 40” long. That means an operator can carry two LAWs for the same size and weight burden of a single AT4. As a result, the LAW remains in service even today.
The LAW and AT4 were both designed with the antitank role in mind. However, the tactical demands of the Global War on Terror involved relatively few antitank engagements. Dismounted forces actually needed an easily-portable weapon that could handily punch through walls, destroy cars, trucks and similar unarmored vehicles, or obliterate an enemy fighting position without hampering a soldier’s capacity to move quickly on the battlefield.
While the M72 isn’t likely to take out a main battle tank, it can still be used effectively against lightly armored vehicles or as an anti-structure weapon. When faced with an, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” scenario, the LAW clung to life. It’s hard to beat the munition for high explosive rocket that a soldier or Marine can easily carry.
The LAW remains in production in Norway, Turkey, and the U.S.. Unit cost runs between $750 and $2,200 depending upon the particulars. Despite being nearly 65 years old, the M72 shows no sign of being replaced anytime soon. Sometimes LAWs just don’t need to be changed.