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Thank you for your service. As a veteran myself, I am indeed honored when my fellow countrymen choose to offer those hallowed words. There is an implicit kindness and gratitude that is never sought but always appreciated. Despite our many squabbles, disagreements and warts, we are, at our hearts, all Americans. Ours is the most powerful, most successful country in all of human history. That is because of countless millions of good Americans who have sacrificed so much over the past 250 years to get us to this point.
The Springfield Armory FIRSTLINE reflects the organization’s basic ethos. Springfield Armory is as much a family as a gun company. Early board meetings took place over the dinner table. Nowadays, Springfield Armory is a foundational powerhouse among American arms producers. That’s because they live a patriotic code.
FIRSTLINE is an initiative wherein a large selection of top-quality Springfield Armory firearms is offered to those who serve our community at special discount prices. While this obviously applies to law enforcement and military personnel, Springfield Armory also includes such worthy demographics as firefighters, paramedics, EMT’s, commercial pilots and flight deck officers, judges, corrections officers, and state-licensed security officers, military veterans (and more). In so doing, Springfield Armory has chosen to give back to those who give so much for us.
Sheepdogs
Have you ever noticed how folks tend to fractionate based upon their character? Human beings are tribal. This curious aspect of our genetic makeup shades most everything about us. Certain personalities are inexorably drawn to certain pursuits.
The Internet has provided a vehicle to connect folks with disparate interests in a truly unprecedented way. A few short decades ago, somebody with a passion for West African mud sculptures might have believed themselves all alone in the world. Nowadays entire communities of like-minded souls are seldom more than a few clicks away.
While this aspect of ourselves drives how we spend our free time, it also tends to govern our professions as well. Sheepdogs are those who are drawn to a life of professional service. They are the ones who stepped up on the playground to stop the bully who was picking on the little kids. As adults, they strap on a gun, pick up an axe, or otherwise place themselves in a position of hardship for the betterment of humanity. If you have any questions just look inward for a moment. You know who you are.
Sheepdogs are natural protectors. They don’t protect the sheep to get extra food or special accolades. They fight to defend the flock because that’s who and what they are. They could never be satisfied otherwise. The human sort don’t do what they do for the money. They do it because they cannot do anything else.
Gun People
In my experience, the type of person you meet at the range or the local gun shop is the sort you’d lend your pickup to or ask to keep an eye on your home while you’re off on vacation. Those of us who are immersed in this quirky little sport are, by definition, among the most law-abiding rule followers in American society.
By extension, most sheepdog people like guns. Exercising our Second Amendment rights is what fundamentally separates us from everybody else on Planet Earth. Lots of people talk about being free men and women; Americans actually ensure that is true.
It has been my experience that those called to a lifetime of service tend to be among that overarching pool of gun people.
Guns are simply tools. However, in the right hands, these tools are what free us from oppression, secure us in our homes, and grant us the confidence we need to venture out into the dark places to render aid and offer stability. Springfield Armory recognizes this fact and, via FIRSTLINE, makes it that much easier for the sheepdogs to access the tools they want and need.
The Details
The world is covered in a thin patina of silly gimmicks — bait and switch sleight of hand designed to capture your interest and separate you from your money via subterfuge. This is not one of those.
When Springfield Armory set out to design this, they specifically avoided anything that would make it gimmicky or hard. FIRSTLINE is a straightforward initiative that rewards those who serve without a great deal of ancillary fluff.
FIRSTLINE is administered at the individual dealer level. Dealers become certified through the company to participate, and they handle the details locally. Verification is straightforward and intuitive.
Unlike a great many such things, all you really need is some basic professional documentation that most anyone has handy. There is an interactive map on the Springfield Armory website that will help connect you with one of the nearly 200 participating dealers nationwide. Be sure to check it out and find out the closest dealer.
Who Is Eligible?
Eligible professions include sworn law enforcement officers at federal, state, county, and city levels, both active and retired. Corrections officers, to include parole and probation officers, law enforcement academy cadets, and state-licensed armed security officers are on the list. In each case, verification involves presentation of official ID front and back or enrollment documentation from a recognized LE academy.
Eligible military personnel include anyone either on active duty or in the reserves. Military retirees and honorably discharged veterans also qualify. Certification requires nothing more than an official ID card front and back or a copy of a DD214 along with a driver’s license.
Firefighters, both full-time and volunteer, are eligible with an agency ID (front and back). The same goes for EMT’s and paramedics with the same credentials. These heroes venture forth into some of the worst situations to preserve life — oftentimes at risk of their own. They are made from the same stern stuff as our cops and military veterans.
In the Information Age, court judges and prosecutors find themselves subject to the ire of some of society’s very worst people. Administering justice is a dirty, ugly thing, but it has to be done. Our judicial officials are a critical part of the system that helps protect law-abiding Americans. They make the cut with official employment ID.
Nowadays, commercial pilots and flight deck officers are often authorized to carry firearms. The attacks of 9/11 left a scar on our society that will never fully heal. Arming aircrews is one way that we avoid ever having to repeat those horrible events. Aircrew with commercial airline ID qualify for FIRSTLINE benefits as well.
What Is Offered?
The list of eligible firearms is on the website, and it’s extensive. Hellcats, 1911’s, Echelons, SAINTs, M1A’s, Hellions are included. The list is liberally populated with Waypoint and Redline bolt guns, XD pistols, and Kunas as well. Prodigy? Yep, it’s there as well. Take a look, and I’m sure you’ll find something I overlooked. Seriously, it looks like practically the entire Springfield catalog is represented there.
Concealed carry pistols, home defense iron, patrol guns, precision rifles, competition arms and recreational tools — Springfield Armory can hook you up with whatever you need via FIRSTLINE.
Guns are like insurance policies. You never need them until you actually do. Then, that firearm becomes the most important thing in your universe. Serious applications demand serious iron, and the wares from Springfield Armory are designed for hard use in the real world. These are the guns upon which you can reliably bet your life.
Springfield Armory makes some of the finest firearms in the world. All you need do is heft an Echelon, SAINT, Prodigy or M1A to prove that to yourself. FIRSTLINE gets these superlative guns into the hands of our most deserving citizens at a reasonable cost. Also, all FIRSTLINE handguns come with three magazines.
Ruminations
FIRSTLINE is just one way that Springfield Armory gives back to the community. In today’s world, the threats to public safety are more varied and serious than ever. However, amidst the darkness, the light shines all the brighter. Despite our many well-documented difficulties, good Americans still stand willing to step into the gap and sacrifice for the greater good. FIRSTLINE recognizes them in a real and substantial way.
Head on over to the FIRSTLINE section of the website and see for yourself the sweeping selection of quality firearms that are eligible. Then, locate the FIRSTLINE dealer nearest you. Give them a shout to work through the details and go land some top-flight Springfield Armory iron at a great price. Think of it as a well-earned token of gratitude for a hard job well done.
We welcome Capt. Dale Dye, U.S.M.C. (ret) to TheArmoryLife.com. His article today talks about the use of tanks in the Vietnam War by the United States Marine Corps. Tanks and other armored vehicles were used more in Vietnam than many people realize, and Capt. Dye relates first-hand observations of them in combat.
Back in the summer of ’67, I was having a brutal macho slugfest with my bunkmate in Staging Battalion at Camp Pendleton. I maintained that my buddy, who was a tanker, was a no-load weenie who would never see real combat. As I was headed for an infantry assignment, my buddy thought I was a bull-goose looney who didn’t pack the gear to specialize in something less potentially lethal. We were both headed for Vietnam, so those things were important to us. We might both get blown away, but status while doing so was a greater concern.
My arguments were based on the kind of pre-deployment training we were getting which emphasized guerilla warfare, avoiding booby traps, and winkling out Viet Cong guerillas in dense jungles. What good would big tanks and other armored vehicles be in that kind of fight? 
Six months later during Tet ’68 in the Battle of Hue City, I ran across my buddy scrunched into the turret of a Zippo, an M67 flame tank. At this point, I drastically revised my arguments about tankers and close combat. While those of us more directly exposed to rounds, rockets and ricochets on the mean streets of Hue were taking serious casualties, my buddy and his fellow tankers were also getting banged around seriously by NVA rocket gunners who played whack-a-mole with the tanks.
It occurred to me, watching his Zippo hose down enemy strongpoints with napalm, that fighting in an RPG-rich environment while perched on a 300-gallon tank of napalm might qualify as dangerous duty.
And that was the beginning of my interest in armor as used by U.S. Army and Marine outfits during the war in Vietnam.
As I was mostly around Marine Corps tankers and armor crewmen, what I have to say here will have a distinctly Leatherneck bias. More will come later in another article about my experiences with U.S. Army tankers and other tracked vehicles used in Vietnam.
Leathernecks and Steel
Because the Marine Corps fights as a self-contained combat outfit with all organic supporting arms and logistics under the same command umbrella, I had the opportunity to observe tanks and tankers in combat quite a bit from 1967 to 1970.
Marine tanks were all variants of the Patton design designated M48A3. They carried a 90mm main armament firing a variety of ammo from High-Explosive Anti-Tank (Heat) to High-Explosive (HE) and the grunt’s favorite Anti-Personnel – Tracer (APERS-T), commonly known as a Beehive Round.
Tanks assigned to infantry-support roles in the two tank battalions of the First and Third Marine Divisions, operating in I Corps (the farthest northern AO adjacent to the DMZ) also sported a .30-cal. co-axially mounted machinegun that was sighted and triggered by the gunner using main-gun fire control sights, and a .50-cal. heavy machinegun either in a cupola atop the turret or hard-mounted pintle on the turret roof.
They were 50-tons of bush-bashing beast, but the verdant jungles that severely restricted speed, constant mine threats and low visibility in many areas kept them a bit restricted. They had shock-effect and firepower, but mobility was a drawback in heavily jungled areas. However, as regular formations of the North Vietnamese Army appeared on various battlefields in Vietnam, tanks came to be much more of a valuable asset.
Tanks, armored personnel carriers and related heavy vehicles proved their worth in fights where improved roads allowed them to exploit their mobility and bring heavy firepower to bear on enemy formations battling to control interior lines of communications throughout the country.
An early and powerful example of this came when my unit was based at Con Thien overlooking the Ben Hai River and the DMZ. We ran regular patrols on adjacent roads to keep supply lines open, and one of our biggest assets was the soldiers from 1st Battalion, 44th Artillery, running M42A1 “Dusters” for us in the road sweeps.
These relatively light tracked vehicles based on the M41 tank chassis, sported a pair of 40mm Bofors automatic weapons that raised hell all over the DMZ and surrounding countryside. It got to the point where Marine units wouldn’t consider running a road sweep without a couple of Dusters rolling along in support.
And then came Tet ’68 and the bloody battle in Hue City.
In the Thick of It
In conversation with survivors after the fight in Hue, I learned that Marines were initially reluctant to send tanks into the city. It was basically counter to doctrine that said armor was too often forced into fire-traps on city streets, vulnerable to overhead attacks where their armor was thinnest, and limited turret traverse in narrow confines.
None of those concerns held up when the defecation hit the oscillation in Hue. And Marine tanks were often the deciding factor in street fights that demanded sufficient firepower to blast a stubborn enemy from buildings and concrete strongpoints.
A couple of 90mm AP rounds followed by a stream of burning fuel from a Zippo usually turned the tables against NVA defenders.
One of the most haunting images I retain from the Hue City fight is a pulpy NVA corpse standing upright and pinned to a tree by a swarm of flechettes. It might have been a tank round, or one from an Ontos 106mm recoilless rifle — they were all firing Beehive rounds — but the effect was gruesome. The NVA trooper hung like a scarecrow that had been dive-bombed to death by swarms of lethal wasps.
Hue was also my first opportunity to see the Marine Corps’ M50 Ontos in action. Most Marines were familiar at a distance with the weird-looking vehicles from seeing them parked in static perimeter defense positions around major firebases.
And most had heard the stories about how the Army tried the Ontos out in the late 1950s and promptly decided it was too thin-skinned and otherwise unsuitable for a variety of reasons, notably the need for some poor crew-dog to dismount under fire in order to reload the six 106mm recoilless rifles affixed to the hull.
But the Ontos — “Thing” in Greek — went bang with a six-barreled vengeance, and that was an attractive feature for Marines who had enough suicidal PFCs to sustain the vehicle’s three-man crews. The Marine Corps adopted the Army castoff Ontos and sent it to Vietnam hoping to use it as a mobile fire-support element for infantry.
Despite initial casualties, mostly from AT mines and RPGs which devastated the light vehicles, Marines stuck by the Ontos, using its brace of 106mm recoilless rifles to good effect when terrain allowed it to follow close behind advancing grunts. But the Ontos was mainly relegated to perimeter defense or convoy escorts duties until things went weird in Hue City and the Ontos came into its own.
The small, lightweight and fully tracked Ontos was a regular and welcome sight among infantry Marines bulling and blasting their way through enemy defenses in Hue.
The crews were nimble and canny in roaring up to a hardpoint and cranking away with rec-rifles fired in pairs or broadsides. No warning was given about the horrendous backblast — and none was needed. When an Ontos was about to open fire — or even looked like it might — we knew to be elsewhere under cover until the smoke and debris cleared.
Conclusion
For the most part, the NVA didn’t employ much armor during the fight in Vietnam. The occasional sighting of armored vehicles on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the attack by a platoon of PT-76s on the SF camp at Lang Vei in Feb. ’68, were exceptions.
In fact, until the massive NVA offensives toward the end of the American involvement (Easter Offensive in ’72 and the final push to end it all in 1975), enemy armor was not much of a worry for allied troops on the ground in Vietnam. But our armor undoubtedly worried them.
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Colt New Service 1912 Chapter 2
