Arsenal in Action

As the big kill at Tay Ninh demonstrated, the arsenal of American weapons in Viet Nam is the deadliest ever developed for man-to-man combat. The U.S. infantryman in Viet Nam today shoulders six times the firepower of his Korean War counterpart; behind him stand rank upon rank of mobile mortars and howitzers that can be called in by air as quickly as he needs them. Overhead hover helicopters bristling with machine guns, rockets and automatic grenade launchers; above the "gunships" circle jet fighter-bombers armed with searing napalm, white phosphorous and bomblets that can unleash deadly patterns of tiny steel pellets. In no other war has American weaponry so quickly matched the demands of a difficult tactical terrain. From the swamps of the Mekong Delta, where 30-ft. patrol boats packed with unsinkable plastic foam whisk along on water jets, to the shell-pocked "Rockpile" below the Demilitarized Zone, where six-barreled Ontos tracked vehicles rumble, the arsenal last week was in awesome action.

Bloody Mush. Basic element in this lethal complex is what the Viet Cong call "the little black rifle"--the light, fast-firing, plastic-stocked M-16 automatic rifle carried by most of the combat troops in South Viet Nam. At 7.6 lbs., the M-16 is scarcely the size of a farm boy's "varmint" rifle; yet it can spray short bursts at the rate of 750 rounds per minute, though reloading time cuts the effective rate to a far lower figure. Its muzzle velocity is so great that within 100 yds.--the range of most Viet Nam fire fights--an M-16 bullet generates supersonic shock waves that can collapse internal organs into bloody mush, shatter bone or leave arms and legs dangling drunkenly.

The M-16 does have drawbacks. Its lightweight, plastic butt is liable to shatter in hand-to-hand combat, where the infantryman often clobbers his enemy with the stock. Moreover, its high sight --necessitated by the carrying handle that serves as the rear sighting plane-means that a dug-in rifleman must expose his head and chest to aim carefully. But the rapid rate of fire more than compensates: in Korea with the slow-firing Garand, less than one-quarter of the troops fired their weapons in battle; in Viet Nam with the M16, everyone fires copiously. Many riflemen lug 600 rounds into battle (v. 72 rounds per man in Korea).

Knockout Punch. Behind the rapid-fire left jabs of its M16s, the infantry squad carries a knockout punch in the blunderbuss-shaped M-79 grenade launcher. "Beautiful little seventy-niners," the Marines call them, particularly when a 40-mm. grenade--spring-loaded with half-inch steel barbs --pops in the middle of a Viet Cong position 385 yds. away. The M-79 has two drawbacks: it is only a single-shot weapon (good grenadiers get off 16 rounds per minute), and its grenades are armed only after a flight of 30 meters through the air--in order to protect the grenadier from their fragments. A multishot M-79 is currently being tested in Viet Nam, and to solve the problem of close-in fire fights grenadiers are now issued 40-mm. "cannister" rounds whose heavy loads of Double-O buckshot blast out of the barrel as if from a sawed-off shotgun, cutting down everything within a 20-ft. radius. "If you used it on skeet," says one veteran, "you'd take down the skeet tower too."

A third infantry weapon--almost conventional in concept--is the belt-fed M-60 light machine gun, which in its contours and chatter (maximum rate of fire 550 rounds per minute, average rate 250) is reminiscent of the World War II German Maschinengewehr. Earlier American machine guns were usually fired from a tall tripod and employed pistol grips; the M-60 has a low bipod and a rifle stock that permits the gunner to lie low and traverse rapidly. "It doesn't jump at all when you fire," adds a Marine "gunny." "You can keep a tin can moving at 300 yds."

The Men from ACTIV. Beyond the basics, U.S. troops in Viet Nam have come up with a number of innovations and adaptations that have also altered the firepower of the war. Marines around Danang and Chu Lai have no better close-support weapon than Ontos --a thin-skinned, wide-tracked antitank vehicle that can splash safely through paddies that would mire down a man.

The most interesting innovations are the ones handled by ACTIV (for Army Concept Team in Viet Nam), a prowling, 55-man think tank. Says ACTIV's Colonel George Lutz, 46, who has been evaluating new devices for the Army since 1938: "In ground combat, the only real thing of value is human life, and nobody has yet put a price tag on that. Our effort is oriented exclusively toward the grunt on the ground."

Combat Cooties. Most of the new developments in the Viet Nam war--many of them not yet beyond the testing stage--are aimed at disproving the old proverb that "the night belongs to Charlie." One such gadget is the portable "people sniffer," a device that can detect any enemy emanation from cooking fires to what Lifebuoy used to call "B.O." Already U.S. planes are carrying magnetically sensitive electronic devices aloft to ping in on concentrations of enemy weapons; heat-sensitive "eyes in the sky" have long been prowling the Ho Chi Minh trail in search of Red campfires. But the weirdest innovation of all is the "combat cootie." Some months ago, researchers discovered that bedbugs might be useful in Viet Nam. Placed in a box, three sides of which are insulated, a blood-seeking bedbug will "sniff out" men lurking in ambush along a jungle trail. When the bedbug senses human blood, it lets off an insect-scale "scream," which is picked up and amplified to its carrier. Result: a withering hail of fire into the adjacent bush concealing the enemy.

Gas Attack. The enemy in Viet Nam has been working on his own arsenal as well. Most of it is derivative: the Reds for years have employed captured American Claymore mines -- 41-lb. shaped charges topped off with shrapnel --which can be triggered electrically for ambushes. Even in U.S. Special Forces camps where Claymores are mounted for perimeter defense, the Reds find agents to turn the Claymores inward and spread their fans of steel on the defenders before an attack. The mortar has become a Communist weapon in Viet Nam for the simple reason that Allied camps are permanent and hence subject to bombardment; Red camps, under Allied pressure, change from week to week.

One key weapon in flushing the enemy from his tunnel cities has been non-toxic CN tear gas--the use of which has brought screams of protest from critics in the U.S. Military men argue that gas is the only way of safely separating noncombatant Vietnamese hiding underground from Viet Cong. Often the gas is pumped into the tunnel complexes by means of long hoses attached to gasoline-driven pumps, but gas grenades are usually used. Last week U.S. troops in Tay Ninh were hit by Communist gas grenades. With that, the argument against U.S. use of nontoxic gas went up in a puff of smoke.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.