Vietnam Era U.S. Firearms

hey john hickok here today we're going to look at some very cool u.s firearms used during the vietnam war and let's start out by shooting probably the most prominent one the colt m16a1 let's do it right full auto let's shoot the target let's go and do some pot smoking all right it runs smooth of course before i get into this as always we appreciate the support from budsgunshop.com so make sure you check out everything they have to offer over there really great folks appreciate them a great deal also federal ammo will be shooting a lot of federal ammo through these beautiful firearms today and if you're interested in a career in the firearms world or gunsmithing make sure you go to sdi.edu they are fully accredited online distance learning program so make sure you check that out okay so i'm going to try to make this a crash course without going too deep in the weeds of any of these guns uh because we don't want this to be a uh we don't want this video to be as long as the vietnam war was okay we wanted to be pretty pretty short and concise and to the point and uh hopefully pull out smoothly so m16 a1 right is what we've got here m14 308 556 or 223 but you know military context 556 and m14 308 762 by 51 and then we have the ithaca model 37 deer slayer 12 gauge and then we have the m1 carbine in 30 carbine big surprise there right and then we have of course the 1911 a1 chambered in 45 acp and uh my personal favorite the m60 e1 also chambered in 308. so these are common guns that were used during the vietnam war by by the u.s of course um there are some others that are not on this table just because it didn't have them like for example the grease gun was was used um the thompson the m1a1 thompson was used as well as a bunch of different shotguns there was a bunch of different shotguns that were used like the uh the 870 the model 12 in the browning auto five just whatever they could get basically um it was kind of the deal on that i even read that some people were having shotguns sent from home you know and stuff and the shotguns were um were popular during during the vietnam war and you've seen a lot of photos you see guys with shotguns and different things like that so definitely common but there was not necessarily a standard issue shotgun in the u.s military at that time but this was the ithaca model 37 was definitely one of the common ones okay so m16 this is uh what you most associate with the vietnam war right and this is the m16a1 so in a way it is kind of the last it is the last uh vietnam era variant of the m16 and a lot of people get confused on this gun they they think it was unreliable and had all these issues by the time you got to the m16a1 it's essentially mechanically the same as a modern ar that you're going to buy off the rack at your local gun shop just doesn't have the extra rails and bells and whistles and all that kind of stuff it was some of the earlier variants that had issues and even with them some of them were actually pretty good like the one before this the e1 they had fixed several things uh but of course the earliest variants were the ones that had the problems and a lot of people say it was just the ammo and it wasn't even the guns and and and if you want to know more about that you know you got to watch that video that's a that's a whole other video in itself but this so this is the m16a1 um this is what most guys would have been carrying um through most of the war and now this is the m14 this was the uh service rifle post world war ii and kind of at the very beginning of vietnam right so they started using this in like the late 50s and then kind of were phasing it out by the mid 60s as the m16 was taking over because of some of the problems that the m16 had at first i think a lot of guys probably favored this over the m16 and probably some did throughout the entire war but uh one of the problems with this gun in the vietnam war is it is heavy it the wood did not hold up as well to the jungle conditions it would start to warp um but people liked that you had the bigger round the um the the 308 but again ammo is heavy you know these things are very light uh you're talking about 12 pounds basically loaded and you know like nine pounds loaded with this gun and that's not even to mention the weight of the the ammo i mean look at this all steel magazine versus aluminum let's go ahead and shoot this thing before i do also want to remind you uh to check out silencercentral.com they keep us in suppressors i really appreciate their their support they have a really great program for buying suppressors that makes it makes it easy especially if you're new to that field so silencercentral.com make sure you check them out let's see okay one of the fun things about the m14 is loading the magazine is a little bit of a puzzle so you have to you can't just put it straight in you have to go in at an angle because you're hooking that front right there and then you lock it into the bat all right gotta mention this so you might you might remember in a movie called mars attacks where uh where um jack black's character runs up to to shoot the aliens and then his magazine just falls out right because he didn't know how to to put it in correctly all right i had to mention that okay let's take out these orange 2 liters feels like a good bowling pin gun all right let's go over on the hill let's shoot the uh the middle red plate the one that's got the little extra guy in all there looks like dad has the sights on on this thing nice let's crank a few out in the barrel here so this is uh this is dad's lrb manufactured um it's you know it's an m14 clone it's not a you know it didn't come out of the the government arsenal but you know made by springfield armory or i think some of them were actually made by winchester as well it is not select fire you can see right here the cutout the uh make it clear here the original obviously the ones they used during the vietnam war were actually select fire it's one of the complaints was that it was it was difficult to control it was not a very controllable gun under full auto but my thoughts on that are why not have it full auto just don't use it if you can't control it so to me that's a non-issue and then secondly i have fired these on full auto multiple times up at knob creek machine gun shoot and it's really not that bad i mean yeah i'm a big guy but it's more of a technique thing than a size thing it's really not that bad uh but again you know you're trying to train guys quickly you know to you know to be battle ready in the middle of a conflict like that so i understand that it was a problem for a lot of people and not as definitely not as easy to control as the m16 all right uh do we have any shotgun ammo yes so i'll take a few shots with the ithaca what do we got here standard oh all right i'm gonna shoot each one at least once one round don't worry we'll get to the m60 we're going to shoot that too shotguns are a lot of fun um i could see why they would have been popular during the vietnam war jungle jungle combat from i understand you couldn't always see your enemy in the in the brush and uh even though a lot of the fighting was outdoors i mean fighting in thick jungle in a way i guess would be a lot of close quarters fighting because they could be right on top of you before you even realized it i guess okay let's take out this two liter right here plus i i think i think this one slam fires let's try it nope does it i guess i did it wrong okay it does slam fire this one okay yeah this thing is sweet nice big orange side up there i don't know if they had those back in the 60s and 70s but really nice really nice shotgun um okay so the m1 carbine now the m1 carbine was famously used during the vietnam war by the south vietnamese fighting alongside of us it's my understanding that that when the french were there initially they used these and and ended up in the hands of a lot of the south vietnamese soldiers you know they they tended to like them a lot because they preferred the smaller size and that they were they were light guns shots with this and of course these as you know first appeared in world war ii this is a gun that during world war two a lot of like if you're a tanker or a maybe a jeep driver or something like that you know you would have one of these probably little sweet guns and pretty powerful too for what they are okay let's start out on the big red square over there i haven't shot one of these in a long time as you can tell i forgot to put the safety off [Music] all right let's try the plate on the right the far right okay too bad stick out a bunk bin very cool i mean during world war ii the sdg 44 gets all the credit for being kind of the first assault rifle there i say um for being a mid-powered cartridge with higher capacity uh but you know this wasn't this wasn't far off but anyways back on topic these were popular during the vietnam war by the south vietnamese and i'm sure some of our guys use them as well they're nice guns and of course if you had a sidearm it likely would have been one of these uh the 1911 a1 which uh as you know the so the a1 configuration where they made a few changes not gonna get deep into that those videos we have on that uh with the a1 variant of the 1911 came about in around 1924 something like that so it was of course used in world war ii korea and of course vietnam and i believe vietnam would have been the last major american conflict where the 1911 was the main sidearm because we then went to the beretta and the mid 80s but i think they were still used you know pretty long after that all right got a little mag here now i have trouble shooting these because i i prefer the original 1911s the pre-a ones with the flat mainspring housing and most people did too because if you look at modern ones they that's how they're set up something about this it makes me want to pull it low left which ironically i think was the purpose of this to help prevent but we'll see what i can do i'll take my time and this is a remington rand by the way this one's not actually made by colt all right not too bad you gotta love the 1911 i mean it had a long reign in the american military very beautiful beautiful pistol all right so that leaves us with the big boy the pig as it was often called uh an iconic machine gun one of the most iconic uh machine guns ever really i mean it's i mean of course the night the 1919 used the world war ii is you know very well known but this might be the most iconic american machine gun but it does borrow from other designs like for example the mg-42 the fg 42 as well another uh german gun and then also i understand the uh has some similarities with the lewis gun like the way the gas system works and and everything like that so it's a belt fed uh machine gun they've got a top cover uh which this is very mg-42 like this was basically developed in the late 50s and uh saw use all the way through the 60s 70s and 80s and then into the mid 90s uh started being phased out and replaced with the fn mag or as we call it the 240b or uh there's different variants of it but something that maybe a few people don't know is you think of the m60 as being kind of the grandfather and then the the fn mag or the 240 being the new kid on the block but actually the 240 was being developed at basically the same time as the m60 so the designs are basically the same age um but we decided to go with it part of the reason was because after i think it was like 200 to 300 000 rounds these the receivers started to actually uh separate on the m60s where as the 240 they could go like 2 million rounds or something like that and that was a i think a problem that they ran into in vietnam real quick before i shoot at some of the issues with with the gun that we're addressed on later variants of the m60 one of them is people would remove this grip incorrectly they would bend this little retainer spring right here which holds the pins in and the pins are this is all that's holding these pins in for the grip so once that spring is gone or falls off the pins are gonna come out and your grip is gonna be gone and there's nothing to hold back the bolt and it's just gonna be a runaway gun or just a gun that you can't shoot because it has no grip so that's bad but if you take care of it and you put it on right it's really not not an issue one of the other ones is the gas system as you can see here where it's been wired that was an issue where it would just start to come loose and fall off and then you have a single shot or a gun that just you know just won't work basically so that was one of the ways they addressed it was by putting wire up there but again i think to a certain degree that could have been overblown these guns actually had a pretty good reputation and people that fielded them in vietnam usually spoke pretty highly of them it has a nice slow rate of fire but it's it also eats parts that's another one of the one of the disadvantages of the gun the bolts start to wear out i'll show you right here you can see this one's already starting to wear just a little bit just for maybe like a couple thousand rounds or something like that so parts have to be replaced on them uh pretty often but from i understand they did their job pretty well and the guys in the field really really love them especially for their effectiveness in battle all right so let's shoot this thing all right so also in the e so there was later variance but on the e1 the top cover will only go down if the bolt is in in the rear and that was one of the things they also fixed on the later variants where you could put it down with it without doing that basically all right so safety on load this thing up this is actually a brand new top cover so it's a bit stiff and it makes me under appreciate why you see in in the movies they have to hammer that thing on all right let's uh let's see i'm gonna save the the longer belt for the two liters down there let's just take out the barrel right here a couple things we got a water jug all right and what a big advantage of the m60 over the 1919 machine gun that was used of course previously in world war ii is that you had this hand grip right here right where you could easily um you could shoot it standing up like i'm about to you could you could man handle it like a rifle whereas before you had to have the tripod you had to have like a whole team you know to carry that thing around that was a big advantage all right still got this 2 liter right here these things are so much fun to shoot just smooth slow recoil and uh just now i realized brings me to one of the other negatives of the uh of the early variant of the m60 like this one is so i did i forgot to cite this thing in for the video i just realized so i'm not going to shoot anything over there but you do not have an adjustable front sight right so when you change the barrel and they're not all going to be the same so you get it sighted in for that barrel let's say you put a new barrel in there well now it's not sighted in anymore you have to adjust it or whatever and i guess with tracers and everything you can kind of you know get it in relative combat accuracy for a machine gun without too much trouble but yeah so this thing is not sighted in so we're only shooting close range i only recently uh put it in this configuration it was set up as an e3 and i had some nice new e1 parts so all right there we go all right we're gonna have to rambo it you know what i'm gonna do all right this is gonna be fun all right ready here we go oh man oh that is a lot of fun right there well there you go there's kind of a hopefully a uh a good look at the uh some of the various firearms that we used during the vietnam war on the on the american side um it's interesting to note the progression from world war ii to vietnam some of the same guns some different with great improvements not so some not not so much so really cool firearms uh you know about getting into the obviously you know the the war itself was a whole other topic but it's just a very interesting time in american history and especially as it relates uh to the guns and uh they're a lot of fun to shoot and it's cool we live in a free enough country where we can actually own them and experience them without having to have carried them through the muck in the jungle of vietnam which of course we immensely respect those who did that in service for the country so thank you guys for watching and i hope you enjoyed the video and see you next time it's a long walk from where i had to shoot that oh man oh hey didn't see you guys there since you're here i will let you know about our friends over at talon grips and ballistol talongunggrips.com check out everything they have over there you can get lots of different grips the stick on grip textures for your handguns and rifle grips so go check them out also ballistol they're a firearms lubricant or anything else you might need lubricating it's water soluble and non-toxic been using it on the compound and cleaning all of our guns it's a cleaner and a lube for over 10 years so ballistal talon grips definitely check both of those companies out and also while you're on the internet don't forget to go to hickok45.com you can also find us on facebook hiccup 45 twitter hickok45 instagram the real hiccup 45 and also i have an instagram page where i post behind the scenes stuff and different things like that john john underscore hickok45 on instagram and the next thing you have to do is watch more videos

Channel: hickok45

Views: 1,994,958

Keywords: hickok45, shooting range, steel targets, gun safety, second amendment, Federal Premium, Budsgunshop, SDI, Ballistol, Talon Grips

Id: mYxTrcBV73s

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I love hicock45. Life is good. 😎

[u/PsychoPigeonLD]

Makes me remember this video

Rising Storm 2 Vietnam - Gun Recording Session for the game

[u/RagingCatbtt]

How many rpms would you think that M16 is?