livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
The Original M16 Manual Was a Vietnam War Comic Book
The introduction of the M16 as the standard infantry rifle for the U.S. military was supposed to be a revolution. After spending a few years with the bulky M14, American soldiers were going to carry a new, lightweight rifle that had a larger-capacity magazine and lighter ammunition that was just as deadly.
Instead of making the lives of U.S. troops easier, it threatened them, almost from the start. The rifles were delivered to troops in Vietnam in 1965 without cleaning kits or manuals on how to clean them. The rifles would stop working in the middle of firefights, spent cartridges would not extract automatically and American soldiers and Marines were found dead next to disassembled rifles.
It wasn’t just the rifle’s engineering that hurt its ability in combat. The new 5.56 round used a dirtier kind of powder as a propellant. It made the weapon more likely to jam. American troops didn’t help much, either; they believed the marketing information of the rifle and thought the weapon was self-cleaning.
