S. Sumner: You're right, I don't know where they got some of those teams. I tuned in late to that one but I did manage to get an eyeful of the squad machine gun competition a couple of nights before on the History channel. As with you Friend, I was a bit dismayed. Some of the targets were hit pretty well but I just had to wonder with some of them. And I wondered about the machine guns - they bore some resemblance to the M-60 of my time but they sure weren't 7.62s, that I could tell.
I also remember using the 1919A4s in 06 on our berms and how you had to hold them down, literally, or bipod them for grazing fire. But I really came to like the M-60 even though a lot of guys didn't (I think they didn't know how to use them well). Lots of guys mis-used them, like rambo and company and all that other nonsense, but they sure were rock solid guns and always worked just flippin' perfectly for me. After a bit I got assigned as door gunner on a huey when we went in after downed pilots or whenever we were cruisin' out lookin' fer charlie. It seemed that one M-60 wasn't enough, and one of the older Engineer Sgts felt the same and made up a double door mount for those guns. You sat behind them the same way you stood behind the mini-guns, and man could you bring fire - whooooeeee and dang, you could smokem bad with two guns. It was amazing. Here, you'd be flyin' along nice and peaceful through those beautiful highlands and all of a sudden you'd see the green stuff arching up at ya - well, when your max effective range on individual targets is 800 meters (2400 feet), you got a major advantage over the bad guys on the ground and you could walk your stuff right in on them.
On my first combat tour I was an E-5 demo Sergeant under a pretty old A-Team Leader - he had been enlisted before being commissioned and had been an old Infantry Company Commander. He knew the value of a good machine gunner and how to use those weapons for what they were designed for and let us know what he expected of us. For us, continued practice at the 600- 1K mark (berm to woodline) was expected, and the application of 'grazing fire' proved too much for many of charlie's human wave assaults. No Hollywood here, just a 1 in 4 tracer combo to direct fire and bring it to bear on the bad guy, and you knew (as did he) that the ones you couldn't see were the ones that were slicin' through his buddies - made for sonm very unnerved bad guys and a lot of, ummmm, 'short lived' masss attacks.
OK, prattle, prattle, prattle. Mikey.
