"Air conditioning makes you soft," he says, standing over the short row of fryers, tending the fish. "This is training."

"Training? For what? You're gonna have a stroke, old man. Get inside and give me a turn out here," my father says, miming a few tosses of the fresh beer in his hand to prepare Rawhide for the toss.

"For when they send you to the jungle," Rawhide says, dipping out tiny clumps of cornmeal from the roiling fish fry.

Rawhide is the nom de guerre of a man my Dad has known for years, and I for only slightly fewer. Rawhide had a bad time in Nam, and if you don't know him, you would think he had a chip on his shoulder about it. If you do know him, you know it's OK to laugh when he says things like this, and to laugh harder at the looks on everyone else's faces.

But he's absolutely correct; air conditioning makes you soft. Cars make you soft. Engineered food that presses on the crude buttons of your physiology makes you soft.


The rifle is screaming hot in my hands.

It's best to clean them while they're still warm, before the garbage has a chance to cake on hard, but right now it's so hot that the barrel would probably melt the plastic coating on the bore snake.

So I set it down and let it sit for a few minutes, until I can grab it with cut-down flight gloves without being too worried.

Everybody knows that the M-16 is a hunk of shit. That the direct impingement gas system is the most excruciatingly terrible design in the last 100 years of firearms development. That it will often jam at crucial moments, particularly under sustained combat use. That it is high maintenance and comparatively fragile.

How could a rifle with parts made by Mattel ever be taken seriously as an instrument of modern combat?

But what is it they say? Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach criticize.

The only problem I ever had with mine was that the bullets were too small. The statistics for engagement distance in modern warfare talk about ranges under 200 meters being predominant, and for that, I have no complaints.

But going after someone at 400 meters with what amounts to an even more cut-down M4 is an exercise in frustration.


The Soviets had a problem in Afghanistan: In ways that have filled reams, what they were doing wasn't working.

The standard issue AK-47 was designed around the 7.62x39 cartridge firing a 123 grain projectile with a large steel core. The heavy, highly stable round was originally envisioned to be used on the battlefields of yesteryear against Americans and Europeans, with the potential for the same to be wearing ballistic inserts such as those found in the US M-1951 flak jacket.

Against the lightly built and simply clothed Mujahideen, the 7.62x39 tended to laser-beam right through, leaving a small, clean, through and through wound that was surprisingly survivable.

This led directly to the fielding of the 5.45x39 cartridge and the AK-74, a modernized and revised variant of the AK-47. This new round was smaller and lighter than the 7.62, and was meant to enable Soviet forces to carry the same basic load with less weight and volume. Minor changes to the rifles were not particularly significant but did result in a lighter rifle.

The projectile in the new rounds followed some of the same philosophy as the US 5.56 round developed for the M-16; a small, light, fast projectile with a flatter trajectory, and which was "barely stabilized", meaning that it would tumble on impact to achieve more devastating terminal ballistics at the expense of maximum effective range.

Significantly, the new 5.45 projectile was designed with a hollow space between the lead core and the full metal jacket. This was a clever end-run around conventions of war that prohibited the use of hollow point ammunition, and it meant that the small, fast bullets were almost guaranteed to tumble wildly on impact, tearing large, fleshy tracts where there previously would have been a clean hole just big enough to stick a fingertip in. Initial reports were very promising for the Soviets, who planned to upgrade the entire military as quickly as practicable.


Dagho gulee pa badan ki chadanna ki. Poheghi? Dagha gulee, ka las ya psha wahee, bam ki au las prey ki.

"Those bullets, they were explosive. If they hit an arm or a leg, they would explode and blow off the limb."

The old timer flapped his hand and the tea boy rushed over to refill the cups that sat between us. As the chai settled in the thick glass vessels, the tea boy reached out reflexively with the sugar tongs to load my glass. The old muj slapped him and bellowed

TRIKH!

to remind the boy that I took my tea without sugar.

Tsunga talalli wa? Tsunga dagha hang per zad?

"How did that go? What could you do against it?"

Monj topakan ghla kr. Wakhta na wo che monj nawi topak au gulee tr lasa kr. Monj...

"We stole guns, of course. It wasn't long before we got the new rifles and bullets. We..."

The old muj told me about the first convoy they raided that was equipped with the new weapons, and how much better they themselves liked them.

Kha na wo bandi na hamla wokr, dagha lar jazail kha da ya dreibandi deyr kha da.

"They were no good for shooting from the greenbelts, jazail or the three-line was best for that."


The muj were fond of staging ambushes and directing harassing fire from the cover of the green belts and tree lines which at the time still lined most of the hills and passes in Afghanistan. Hit and run tactics were their best option against the Soviet forces, which tended to roll heavy and deep along established roads and routes, but had difficulty in sustained chases through rough country. Hill to hill engagements across a valley were also common, and in those circumstances and at those distances, the Sovs often found themselves outranged by the even then obsolete Mosin Nagant bolt action rifles and even locally manufactured muskets, known as jazails.

The American occupation resulted in the same situation, and over the course of the war adjustments were made to the equipment and doctrine of US forces.

Certain units began programs to replace or modify the M-16 pattern rifles to extend their effective range. Most well-known among these was the adoption of AR-10 rifles, basically a larger and heavier M-16, issued to small numbers of the riflemen in a given conventional unit, popularly known as "Designated Marksmen". The AR-10 fires the venerable 7.62x51 cartridge, also known as (although there are slight technical differences) .308 Winchester. The .308 is a much more powerful cartridge than the 5.56, with a projectile weighing about three times as much and typically having a much longer proportional cross-section. Aside from the AR-10 pattern rifles, many nonconventional units continued to use or reverted to the M-14, which was more or less a slightly larger, slightly heavier (when accounting for basic load) M1 Garand.

In some cases, nonconventional units began issuing upgrade kits for the M4/M-16 that optimized them for use with a much heavier and more aerodynamic projectile (a 77 grain projectile vs the original 55 grain) by outfitting them with upgraded barrels and relatively high power scopes. These rifles, best known as the Mk12 series or as Special Purpose Rifles, are a compromise among weight, size, and capability. Eventually, the standard issue round for the M-16 pattern across the inventory was changed to the M855 (or later variant) specification, with the heaviest projectile that was able to be reliably stabilized by the original twist rate of standard issue rifle barrels.


The first time I took the sweet rifle out to the range was with Rawhide and my Dad. Both were intimately familiar with the M-16 platform; both had carried them, if decades apart.

"Why the Hell you want one of those things?" Rawhide said. "I sure as shit lost as many of them sonsabitches as I could so I could get a real rifle." In Nam, that meant an M-14 or even a Garand.

My Dad just watched as I counted clicks to mechanically zero the scope.

I had pieced the rifle together over the course of a couple years spent hunting very hard to find parts, including a custom barrel since in those days, the Mk12 or SPR had not yet caught on with the shooting public.

Aside from the giggle switch, it was a Mk12 minus the $10,000 scope and the carbon fiber forend. I had opted for a reasonable piece of glass that was closer to my budget and good enough, I figured, to decide if I really needed anything better. The forend was secondhand and aluminum - significantly heavier than the CF version, but good enough for my purposes and actually obtainable outside of government contracts in those days.

I had never been issued a Mk12, but I'd had the chance to shoot a few of them on slow days in the mountains.

I lit off a slow string of 3 at 25 yards to get the scope roughly zeroed. High and left, but there was only one mostly round hole.

"Well SHEE-OT," Rawhide said.

My Dad just laughed.

A few years later, my brother nailed a Coke can at 400 yards with his first shot out of that rifle, and after the hoot he let out finished echoing, he told me he had dibs on it if I died first.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.