Yesterday's Weapons Forums

Moved from the old YW site:

gschwertley
I don't know why I keep returning to this forum; perhaps it is because when my mind was younger and more impressionable, the most fun I ever had with guns was with .22's.
As luck would have it, I am in possession of the first gun I ever fired. This weapon is a Marlin Model 56, I think it is called a "Levermatic". It used to belong to my cousin Rich Kaulen, and it was the first gun he bought back in 1955. I know it is an "early" one, as it has a two-digit serial number (not counting the year designator that Marlin used at that time).
We were taking a family trip to what used to be "the wide-open desert" and my dad borrowed the Marlin Model 56 from my cousin. That was around 1962, I think. That was my first use of a gun.
A few years ago, my cousin decided to divest himself of his many guns and he entrusted me with the job. The ones I didn't buy from him outright, I hauled to the gun show and sold off. At end of the day, the Marlin 56 was sitting forlornly on table, not having had one person pick it up. Let me tell you, this Marlin was made before the days of die-cast receivers. It is heavy for a .22. I lugged the thing home, and decided, heck, for the small amount of money involved I might as well take if off Rich's hands. When we were later talking about this on the phone, I made the mistake of calling it a "clunker .22" and Rich came back with "that gun's no clunker; in its day, the Levermatic was the hottest thing available and was pretty fast." Of course in 1955, the .22 market had not yet been flooded with inexpensive and good .22 autos.
Well, I adopted the my cousin's Marlin and have given it a good home. It shows plenty of external wear from much use over the years. Inside there is not a thing wrong with it. I had to take the action apart to clean up a sticky firing pin (oil had turned varnish-like), but after that it was gangbusters. It was only after I had owned this gun for a while that I realized that it was the gun that I had first fired back in 1962.

mikmarjon
The fact that it was never picked up off the table means to me that it was your destiny to end up with it.I have a couple in my shotgun collection that were just pure mutts,but I got em from friends or family and wouldn't get rid of them for anything.

yockey5
I hate coming to this forum because every time I do I am reminded of the little .22s that I used to have, and they are now long gone.

mikmarjon
Maybe it's good that I'm so anal about my guns.I can't bring myself to let any of my special memories go.I even have a survival rifle that I bought in the early 70's ( the first gun I bought myself) It won't and never has hit the broad side of a barn but I burned alot of bricks of 22's thru that puppy.

gschwertley
Mikmarjon: Is it one of those little AR's that when broken down into the stock floats in the water? The way you guys open one door after the other. When we were in high school in the 60's, my friend Mark C. had one of those. It must have been an original Armalite-made one way back then. Those were neat little rifles, not too accurate as you said, but fun. Was it called an AR-7? I'm not sure. They have been imitated since then. Mark filed down the sear in his so that it was at least part of the time full-automatic; I don't know what happened to it after that.

mikmarjon
That's the one.I haven't had the action out of the stock in 20 years I'm going to have to do that when I go down over Christmas.I saw two of them at the Nashville show.It's hard to tell weather they were originals or not.

You won't be able to buy the first gun you fired, will you???

I have wondered what happened to the rifles that were issued to me in the Army. My BCT rifle was an M14 made by TRW. I didn't learn it until much later, but the TRW's were the gems of the M14's, according to the Army. Better than Winchester, Springfield Armory, or H&R. The one I had shot straight, but as a training rifle was reasonably well-thrashed.

When I was at Fort Lost in the Woods, I had an assigned rifle, but only used it very sparingly. Actually, I had two assigned rifles, first an M14 that I used to fire for record once (Expert); later, they they withdrew the M14's and reissued M16's to us. My assigned M16 I also fired for record once (Expert), and carried around for several days on my pre-RVN training that we took before we went to Vietnam.

When I took my RVN training, I was about the only guy above E2 in the group. Most of the other trainees were still in engineer AIT, whereas I was a permanent party member with the lofty rank of Spec 4. I found myself with a few of these private soldiers trailing me around. The RVN training was 24 hours a day; the day-time instruction was possibly useful, but the night routine was just practice in being miserable, huddling in the cold and wet. The instruction I imparted to the half-dozen or so privates that had latched onto me was how to hide and try to get as comfortable as we could.

Firing expert in those days wasn't too difficult unless a person was just completely clueless. The targets they used had these automatic devices for scoring where the entire target frame would swing down after a hit, then reset by going back up some seconds later. If you fired low and hit the dirt in front of the target, the spray of earth and rocks would cause the target to retract just as if you had gotten a dead-on bullseye.

When I got to Vietnam, I had an assigned M16. It was a Hydramatic Division of General Motors, and worked just as well as a Colt. Since I was in the rear area, we didn't routinely carry assigned weapons when I was there. When we needed them, we would draw them from the armorer. We had little weapons cards with our weapon serial and rack numbers and our name on them. When we withdrew the weapon, we would turn in the card and the armorer would put it in the empty rack where the weapon had been. I still have my Vietnam weapons card around here somewhere. My rifle was Number 36 in our unit rack; it had a white stripe around the stock with that rack number on it.

Who knows where my Vietnam M16 is now. Well, maybe the CIA does. I have mentioned before, that when the Commies took over the south, they captured/inherited all the M16's that we left behind in the hands of the ARVN's. I have read that subsequently, the North Vietnamese sold these all around the world for cold cash. The CIA has lists of this equipment that they use to see "who gets what". They know what M16's were last known to be in Vietnam (and other "allied" countries), and when M16's get captured in guerilla wars around the world they go to this list to see who is supplying whom. Our M16's left in Vietnam have turned up in the middle east, all over SE Asia, Africa, South America, Northern Ireland, etc.