Yesterday I sat at a bar getting drunk with this skinny elderly fellow who used to be in the Army in 1962. He knows that I like history so he started telling me about the P38 can opener. Then, I had a flash of inspiration and asked him about M14s. Apparently he'd had the chance to operate M1s, M14s, and M16A1s.

"Everything I've read on the internet says that the M14 had excessive muzzle climb when fired in full auto. Was that true in your experience?"

He replied, "No, it was very easy to control in full auto! The M16, that was hard to control in full auto! You'd fire it and it would jerk upwards much harder than the M14. They they did something with it and instead of jerking upwards it would jerk to the right. Then they did something more and it was jerking to the left!"


This was interesting because, well, everything on the internet tells you the M14 was fiercely difficult to control on full auto. Also, the old M16A1s must have been really terrible if they were harder to control in 5.56 than M14s in 7.62. This tidbit was particularly interesting to me because someone who was in the Army more recently said that you could hold a M16A2 against your testicles and fire it and get nothing more than a pleasant vibration. The A2 must be a lot better behaved than the old A1s.

The testicle comment is a slight exaggeration. M16A2s are different than A1s in that they only fire burst fire(3 round burst per trigger pull), not full auto. They also implemented a brass deflector to prevent ejected shell casings from flinging themselves down your collar in the prone quite so much. They also use circular hand guards, as opposed to triangular hand guards. There may have been some internal reworkings, but I'm not aware of what precisely those changes may have been.

He may have just felt that M14s were more controllable due to more familiarity with the weapon. Regardless, all of my training on any automatic firearm has been to use short controlled bursts. The only point of laying on the trigger is to convince folks to keep there head down.

Fuck. Mozilla ate my reply. Another run minus all the hard numbers.

Far bigger bullets and more propellant together with a stock well below the barrel, instead of being in line with it like on the M16 rifles, mean the M14 recoils more and force is directed more upwards, ceteris paribus. This person was most likely more comfortable with the M14 to such a degree that he felt more in control of the M14 anyway.

[Edit]The M16A2 is meant to fire 62gr bullets at 3025fps (M855) as opposed to 56gr bullets at 3250fps (M193), and the weapon is 1.4lbs heavier. This makes for about 20% less recoil energy, although the recoil impulse remains roughly the same. That might be too small an effect to be noticed by most shooters, but if (and I have no particular reason to think this is so) there is a trend towards thinking the M16A2 has less recoil than the M16A1, this might be part of the explanation.

The 3-round burst limiter mentioned by Crakkerjakk above would of course also play a role in people's perceptions of the recoil.[/Edit]

The M16 also has a spring inside the stock that the bolt retracts against after firing, when it chambers the next round, after being driven backwards by the expanding gas from the powder. This is the main reason for the light recoil of a M16. It really doesn't have a lot more kick than a 22. A little bit more, but not much. Most folks I know could shoot one all day, unlike my 30-06 which I have trouble putting more than two boxes(40 rounds) of ammo through in a day. I've personally gone through...250 rounds on a m16 in one day. At least. I think we did more at coach's course, but it was a while back. I don't think the M14 has this, given it's wood stock and older tech.

I use the Canadian C7A2, which is essentially an M16 with a retractable stock and the ability to fire full auto, rather than in bursts, and I gotta tell you, after about 4 shots, it actually does get pretty hard to control.

Although that's not my problem. Machine gunners do it defilade.

Wierdest thing about firing the M16 is the slight "sproing" noise you can hear when you have your cheek against the butstock. Can actually hear the spring inside, so it's like, "Bam-sproing, Bam-sproing."

I know several people who have a permanent hearing impairment from firing the G3 without earplugs.

i can give explanation on why the A1 your friend was talking about would go one way and then the other after it was fiddled with. The Original A1's the muzzle break was screwed on and though it wasnt supposed to be adjustable, was. Thus, if the break had its center opening pointing to the left the rifle would jerk right and vice versa as well as up for down and so on. The M14 on the other hand its muzzle break was made with the barrel so it didnt turn giving the same problem

The War Nerd agrees (Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG)

@ Thane

The M16 is an accurate rifle. It may not have as much stopping power as heavier rounds, but most people trained to do so(including myself, and I'm guessing Hullbreach and SgtShellback. Semper Fi guys.) can hit a man sized target at 500 yards with iron sights at least 80-90% of the time. Which is a hell of a lot farther than most folks ever engage a target(outside of "designated marksman" aka snipers.)

Sorry, misread your post.

'Semper fi' is short for 'Semper Fidelis' which is latin for "Always Faithful"

It is representative of our undying loyalty to our nation, and our brother and sister Marines.

Ooh-Rah is somthing we like to grunt and yell at each other. Im not entirely sure why, but like most Marine traditions Im sure its origin involves large amounts of drinking and at least one barfight.

Lets see, unit mottos... 3rd TSB(Transportation Support Battalion) "First in, last out"
8th Comm, Charlie Co, "First to go, Last to know"(unofficial)
Don't know if the 26th MEU had an official motto. Since I'm at liberty to make one up, I'll choose one from the speech the CO gave us before we went in country, "You can have libbo after we kill everyone."(Libbo=Liberty, aka time off, and the best part of being on a Mediterranean float.)

Also, a quick word on the difference between Hooah and Oorah. Hooah is what the army says. It's long, drawn out, and sounds like someone is sodomizing a drugged up pig. Who-ah. Oorah is what the Marines say. It's short, sharp, and vicious, unless we're being ironic or sarcastic when we say it. Oo-rah. Hoorah is something the navy says, I think just because they felt left out. Heavy emphasis on the H. Who-rah.

*Edited to remove multiple posts*

*Edited to remove multiple posts*

In boot camp/basic training my standard firearm was a G3 (the 7.62mm assault rifle the German Army used before the 5.56mm G36 was introduced), later I was issued a G36.

In basic training, we rarely fired full-auto (basically its a waste of ammo and - as it was mentioned earlier in this thread - the job of the guy with the machine gun in your group), single-shots and an occasional 2-4 shot salvo usually were sufficient.
While these short salvos were quite good to control and hit a reasonable small target area, the 5th or 6th shot and everything thereafter didn't (at least with me).

The G36 on the other hand was much more easy to control (perhaps due to the fact that I'd to learn to control the much more brutal recoil of the G3 before I shot the G36), and while the shots went of target in full-auto, too, the first ones stayed almost at the very same spot and you could "keep them together" much more easy.

Unit slogans/callings:
Panzergrenadier-Truppe (German Mechanized Infantry):
Officer/NCO: "Panzergrenadiere!"
Unit: "Dran, drauf, drüber!" (difficult to translate... "Approach, upon, beyond!" maybe...)
[both to be repeated three times]

4th Company, 12th Mechanized Infantry Battalion:
"Klagt nicht, kämpft!" ("Don't moan, fight!")

Greetings,
Nyx

Honestly I think I used 'Oo-rah' like four times when I was in. It just struck me as.... well dumb. Im all for motivation and esprit de corps, but personally I'd rather not feel obliged to act the fool for said purposes.

On the other hand, there are some incriminating pictures of me drunk, wearing a pirate hat, and sitting atop an Air Force missile-on-a-stick. Needless to say the Air Force SF's didn't see the humor in that.

Yeah, I didn't use Oorah too much while I was in in the non-ironical manner. Had to deal with a lot of assholes who outranked me, so there was lots of "Oorah"s that meant "You're a jackass." There were exceptions, though, notably when given the "You can have libbo after we kill everyone" speech. It was also a handy word for when people asked how you were. Instead of telling them "Outstanding, Sir!" or some crap like that, you just throw out a "Oorah, Sir" and even if there's not a whole lot of oomph behind it, they figure you must be moto.(Motivated) But I figured I'd point out the difference between the different services, since most people here probably don't know, and while doing so couldn't resist taking a dig at our brothers-in-arms that all Marines love to hate.(Thats you, army doggies )

But yeah, I'm with Hull on this. Most of the people who were the most vocal about how motivated they were were the pretty boys who spent hours pressing their cammies and spit shining their boots, then looked like you just killed their mother if you told em to crawl underneath a hummer or sling some gear. Not to mention about half of em spent so much time looking pretty that they didn't even know their damn jobs, which is an unforgivable offense in my eyes.

Those kinds of officers are quickly corralled by senior enlisted, and taught the error of their ways. Occasionally, one of em gets high enough in rank that he can be as much of a dipshit as he wants to, but this is somewhat rare. I am speaking only for Marine officers, as I don't have the experience to comment on any other service, really.

That being said, officers sometimes have a skewed idea of what's important. Most of the units I was in, the enlisted ran most of the day to day stuff, the officers just pointed us in the right direction. Most of em seemed to spend most of their time in meetings up at battalion or checking their e-mail. I always got the feeling that officers were kinda like high priests of some obscure god. Seemingly useless, but without em warding off danger from the almighty, some big nasty would swoop down from above and swallow us normal folks whole.

Near as I could tell their main function was convincing higher ranking officers to let us have a mission. Unfortunately, although the unit I was probably in the top five in the US at what we did, our officers sucked at convincing someone to let us go do our jobs, so we spent so much time training that we started to forget what we were training for and it just slipped into mindless fuck-fuck games.

I miss being on float... that was the best part of the Marine Corps. Training your ass off, deploying to far off distant lands, and getting home to stacks of cash saved up.

Sorry, got sidetracked. Ronin: Not that common in the Corps, though it exists. The less a unit deploys, the more stupid crap they make their Marines wade through.

Echo Crakkerjakk for Army officers. As usual, caveat that with my having spent all of my time in intel.

In the Army, you generally get 2 kinds of officers. The good ones, who were enlisted before going officer, and the ones that learned it all in school.

Holy crap I showed up late for the military pow-wow again.

you hear stories about bad officers because the bad ones are the ones you notice. the good officers, in my experience, you don't remember much because they weren't ever really around--they made sure you had what you needed to accomplish your mission, and other than that they left you alone. i didn't meet many bad officers, in my twenty-year-long career in the Army (2000-2004). there were a lot of mediocre ones, and a few good ones.

One thing about BMT is that they shove every little mistake up your ass. If your towels aren't folded right, you end up paying for it. OSC, from what I understand, is worse. Total control environments, such as BMT and OCS are a type of brainwashing. When a person is repeatedly punished for minor things like improperly ironed slacks in basic training, it isn't too surprising when that person becomes terribly uptight about such things.
At least, that's my take on absurdly uptight officers.

Take an E-1, fresh outa boot, stretch boot out to over a year long, and when he's done tell him that he can tell about 90% of the people he meets what to do. Thats how you get a dipshit officer.

The smart ones keep their traps shut for at least their first year in the fleet, and just watch how the upper enlisted run the shop. The dumb ones try to tell my old MSgt what to do, and he tears the boot louie a new asshole, then sends him crying to Battalion about how the mean enlisted man with 25+ years of experience just crawled up his asshole and out his throat. Then the battalion commander tells him to suck it up and stop pissing off the enlisted.

Reminds me of the old joke. Know the difference between a PFC and a 2nd lieutenant? The PFC's already been promoted once.

But yeah, officers may be stupid fresh out the gate, but most of em wise up quick. It's easy to spot the exceptionally good ones and the exceptionally bad ones, but the vast majority of them are somewhere in between, and since the majority of my career was peacetime, it's hard to gauge the mediocre ones without a high stress situation to sift the wheat from the chaff.

[Bah-leted]

Well this turned into a far more interesting thread than I first believed! Wow.

Our officers are pretty good.

EDIT- Aired to much dirty laundry. Officers aren't the only ones to powertrip though. People who make corporeal and Staff Sergant tend to be worse than officers in my experience.