That's about what I thought. It's repeated on several of his documents, though, years apart. Do you suppose clerks would just repeat whatever they saw on previous forms, or on some primary record?
They got "a metric crap ton" of M1 carbines from the United States.
Could be the Thompson SMG in .30 carbine
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Me neither. LOVED shooting the M60 ... Ah, memories.
I have lots of M-60 memories, mostly bad. I was 45 Bravo in Germany in 69-70...small arms repair. I spent a lot of time trying to fix broken M-60s; broken because of operator stupidity. Damaged covers because some idiot tried to forcibly close the thing with the bolt in the forward position. Worn sears which made the thing run away . Springs didn't last long. We automatically replaced them on any gun coming in. Soldiers would clean the barrel but not the gas system. Of if they did, they put the gas piston in backwards, which rendered the gun inoperable. It would fire one round and stop.
I doubt it. The gentleman was a tanker, and was qualified on the usual stuff: M14, M60, .45 Auto, etc. It seems pretty unlikely that he would have been trained up with anything out of the ordinary, and the more I think on it, the more I suspect the gun was simply the M2.
I think you are a bit confused, my friend. Adjusting headspace and timing were operations that needed to performed on an M-2HB 50. cal Browning machine gun. The early ones, at least, did not have a quick change barrel Changing the barrel was a time consuming process. The new barrel needed to have timing and headspace adjusted before firing. This was rectified on modern versions.
So when I saw the title of this post on the main page I instantly thought "hmm I bet a 300Blk suppressed 8in barrel full auto M16 would have been a godsend in Vietnam. Especially with the 190gr Hornady SubX bullets.
We were seeing that problem as early as 1969.. Replacing the extractor spring often solved the problem but they were breaking. With a worn or weak spring, the extractor often slipped past the cartridge extractor groove, causing a stoppage. Clearing the feed tray and slamming the bolt forward in an attempt to grab and extract the errant case could often break the extractor, or just hopelessly trash the rim on the stuck cartridge. The way to avoid all of this was to replace every spring on the gun every time it came into the shop. Extractors were often replaced as well.
If he was a tanker then the M2 is the only logical choice. I thought maybe the M3 and somebody just misremembered the caliber, but you suggest this is written in his service record…
