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Did I Ever Tell the Story About How I Found a New Use for...
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Government-issue insect repellent? We had these little, green plastic bottles of it in Vietnam. It was a sticky, oil-based generic product.
One time when I pulled guard duty, we went over and drew our extra weapons (M-60 machine gun and M79 grenade launcher) from the armorer. The M-60 at that time anyway was issued with a spare barrel in its own little plastic bag carrying case. The idea behind this was that in case you got in a sustained fire-fight, when the barrel heated up you could change over to a cool one. The rig even came with a pair of asbestos mittens for handling a hot barrel. That was a thoughtful touch. This way you could protect your hands while AK-47 bullets were whizzing all around you.
On this particular occasion, I took the spare barrel out of its bag and replaced it with a civilian radio. I hoped to sneak some listening to AFVN into the early morning hours -- we were not supposed to have radios with us on guard duty for obvious reasons.
With my partner Private Mercado from Fresno, Calif, we drew first watch. After we were dropped off at our bunker, I set up the machine gun. I always liked to be sure a weapon issued to me would work, so after I put the belt in, I took aim at a wooden fence post off in the distance and pulled the trigger, expecting a short burst to issue forth. One round popped off and that was it. I knew the thing was jammed, so I took it off the ledge and tried to pull the charging handle back without success. Next, I placed the butt of the gun on the ground and stomped on the charging handle with my boot. After several repetitions of this, the charging handle finally gave but no shell case came out. I pulled back the handle and looked in the chamber and there it was, with part of the rim ripped off. Now I started to get nervous. Oh no, I left the spare barrel behind for a lousy radio. Oh man, this is the night that Charlie is going to stage a human wave assault right in front of my bunker.
I decided to take the barrel off and have a look. After taking it off, I noticed that on both sides of the chamber there are identical cut-outs for the locking lug to engage when it is locked in place. Since it only locks on one side, I figured I could turn the barrel upside down 180 degrees, and engage on the opposite side. This way, I could get a purchase on the other side of the cartridge case rim and maybe have a chance at extracting the case. So with the front sight pointing down and the bipod pointing up, I stomped the charging handle again and out popped the shell. Whew. Next, I looked inside the chamber with my little green Army flashlight (with red lens of course on guard duty) and saw that the chamber was full of rust.
I decided that I wanted to make sure this baby would work for sure if I needed it to. Thinking of where I could get some oil (we had no cleaning kit for it; I cannot think why) it dawned on me to try the oily insect repellent. I shot a big squirt of that into the chamber, installed the barrel properly, put the gun back on the ledge, pulled back the charging handle, and loosed a long burst of 7.62 bullets out into the night. The insect repellent did the trick. By this time, the sergeant of the guard was buzzing us on the land line, asking what all the gunfire is about, did we see something out there, etc. The "attack" that I envisioned in my panic never came and "all's well that ends well" prevailed.
(moved from the old YW site)
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