1969 M-16 night sights

[Spade5]

I was at Fort Benning the fall of 69 waiting for a school to start and volunteered for some weapons testing. I believe it was for NATO but that isn't important.

We fired the prototype XM-103 or 203 which was the M-16 with the grenade launcher underneath which was pretty cool. We never saw them in service in Nam. I think they went to ARVN. We carried one M-79 per platoon.

We also tested night sights on the M-16. There may have been more than one version but what I recall was a small square rear sight that glowed in the dark and a corresponding front post. I tend to think it was the same technology as the compass illumination.

We were shooting close range at night to see how accurate we could shoot with no external lighting. I cannot remember how you were supposed to align the sight.

I mostly remember it being pitch black outside and very cold for a south Texas boy. I cannot tell you what the accuracy was. I probably shot thousands of rounds and may not have hit anything.

Did anyone else ever hear of these sights? I never saw them in service but that doesn't mean much. Everything we had was old and pretty much worn out.

 

[basicblur]

Can't help you with night sight history, but AR night sights are out there - I added an XS 24/7 Tritium Stripe to my HD AR. I also added a Troy Folding Rear Battle Sight with Tritium inserts.

I like the front sight stripe - hate the rear Tritium inserts.
Night sights on a rifle ain't like a pistol - I like 3-dot night sights on a pistol, but with a pistol you're possibly waving it around a bit when getting on target.
With a rifle, you're probably closer to the ideal shooting position as you have more contact points when mounting the gun, so I don't know that the rear Tritium sights are necessary, but the thing that's really annoying is the darn rear sights are so close to your eye that the Tritium dots look like rings of balls (multiple dots in a circular pattern).

With a pistol, the rear sights are farther away from your eye, and while not in focus, I don't have the multiple image problem.

I'm tempted to cover up the rear Tritium dots on the AR as they distract more than they help.

 

[Averageman]

I removed some tritium sights from our M16's in the early 80's in Germany.

 

[herrwalther]

I always remember reading about tritium inserts in the front sight post of M16 in the manual. Yes that thing. But I never saw a rifle with them, just the standard black post sight. Now there is not much use for them with night vision and all that fun tech stuff.

 

[kBob]

Unlike Averageman my unit in Hanau W. Germany was trying to insure all the tritium front posts had been removed in late 1981. We were required to run annual surveys of the arms room especially the rifle racks and mark date and record how much radiation was at any "hot" point. My arms room had several such rifle racks marked with data.

No it was not much, but the point is that it was there after the sights had been removed. We were told that the hot spots were from broken capsules leaking. I found this odd as the hot spots were all up on the top of the racks near and usually above where the front sight was.

When I was an enlisted man earlier we would put a bit of the "Ranger Eyes" tape on the front sight post or an M16 A-1 or an M60 GPMG. Of course as the night wore on the tape lost its light.

We used the AN PVS-2 NVS and it attached to the carrying handle of the rifle though did not block the iron sights as some experts have recorded in published works. The mount clamped between the tunnel for the charging handle and the bottom of the carrying handl and gripped the sides of the handle much like the M203 "you will break me and get a gig" sight system, which also did not block the iron sights. The scope hung just far enough over to the left to make it a pain to use with either eye. On patrol when we had one it was usually in a bag that I believe was just an M60 spare barrel bag and used as an observation device rather than as a weapon sight. Sometimes the designated night vision guy mounted the thing and bore sighted it and then removed it from its rail mount leaving the rail portion of the mount attached to the rifle. It was easy to slip the scope back on the rail when needed and mush easier to handle the scope in the bag.

The AN PVS 4 of the end of the 70's was a much better scope but it did attach directly to the carrying handle using the gutter and hole and did block the iron sights. The bore sight was carried out with the upper off the lower and the aiming point of the scope aligned with the view through the barrel at some distant point......the same way I still bore sight at home with a new scope and rifle combo.

Neither was anything like what the troops use now as they were big and bulky and had short areas of focus that is not pretty much infinity focus with the AN PVS 14 based stuff. They ate batteries like M&Ms.

The only one of the older Night vision decices I liked was the called NOD (Night Observation Device) and I used it on the tripod from the M2 aiming circle then used by artillery survey. There was supposedly a mount to use it on the M2 HB .50 Browning but I never got to use one.

My first use of the AN PVS 2 was on an M-14 while looking back at how nasty those first generation scopes were is easy now, at the time I was dully impressed.

-kBob