By Blaine Taylor

The time was early 1967, the place a crowded square over a body of water on a narrow bridge in downtown Saigon. A 19-year-old American Army gun jeep commander in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade stood at his post in the rear of the vehicle. Both he and the driver wore .45-caliber pistols and carried M16 rifles. Besides the pistols and rifles, the Americans also had an M79 grenade launcher on the floorboards of the jeep, covered with heavy sandbags in case the vehicle hit a Vietcong landmine. The jeep’s principal weaponry that day was the deadly United States Army standard-issue M60 machine gun, which—like the M14 rifle—fired the basic NATO round of 7.62mm ammunition. With the exception of the 1911-introduced .45, the other three weapons had been brought into the NATO arsenal at about the same time, in the early 1960s. The reason was simple, to ensure that all NATO armies were armed with the same weaponry and ammunition for ease of common supply in case a land war erupted in Europe with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Albania.

Surrounded by a Sea of Swarming Humanity

Instead of Warsaw Pact soldiers, however, American weapons that day were being employed against two Communist armies on the other side of the world in Southeast Asia: the North Vietnamese Regular Army and the South Vietnamese civilian guerrilla forces, the Vietcong. As combat military policemen, the Americans in the jeep had been assigned to road convoy duty, getting infantry into and out of the field under fire. The young lieutenant was somewhat alarmed to be surrounded by a sea of swarming humanity, their intentions unknown. On the other hand, he knew that he was armed with one of the best machine guns in the world, mounted on a cast-iron swivel just under his right armpit. If he and his men had to fight their way out, they were ready. As it happened, they were in luck; the Vietnamese allowed them to pass unharmed.

The M60 machine gun was what the military called a “crew-served weapon,” requiring a team of three soldiers to transport, load, and fire it. It was capable of several types of fire: grazing, plunging, flanking, oblique, and enfilading. Aside from vehicular-mounted fire, it could be fired from the shoulder (kneeling and standing) and from a prone position as well. Its available ammunition consisted of ball (for use against light materials and personnel and for range training); armor-piercing (for use against lightly armored targets); tracer (for observation of fire, incendiary effects, signaling, and training); dummy (for use during mechanical training); and blanks (for use during training when simulated fire was desired; a blank firing attachment was required to fire this ammunition).

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