July 26 Bring Out The Big Guns

Late post due to Army blocking of blogs. I finally found a way.

After a day of review and training, we went to the machine gun range to give each of us a chance to fire the “crew served weapons” that are mounted on the humvees and provide more firepower than our small arms (M4 rifle and M9 pistol).

We disassembled, reassembled and fired the AK-47, one of the most popular rifles in the world, named for Kalashnikov (initials AK) and developed in 1947. Not terribly accurate but effective and maintains easily. We then fired three different types of machine guns, live fire with real ammo.

One was the “SAW” for Squad Automatic Weapon. This can be hand carried and fired on a bipod. It is like our rifles and uses the same ammo, but uses a belt feed of 200 rounds on auto fire rather than the 30 round magazine on the rifles.

We also used the M240B machine gun. This looks like a larger rifle and uses larger ammo. The right kind of rounds can penetrate armor.

Finally, we fired the 50-caliber gun, which uses rounds that are 5 inches long and not quite an inch in diameter. It sounds like an explosion when it fires and rocks the humvee, which weighs over 3 tons.

Some of the rounds were tracers and started a slow fire in the dry under-grass that burned all day. The army instructors seemed unconcerned and it was still smoldering when we returned in the evening for night fire. Previously, we used night vision goggles and laser sighting at night with our small arms. For the machine guns, we used thermal sights and fired at heated targets. A few of our team even spotted some animals with the thermal sights. Really nifty! Downside: The sights were mounted on the weapons and were activated by pressing your face into the sight (so it would only draw power when actually firing). As I mentioned, the 50 cal has quite a recoil and several of us had bruised cheeks from pressing against the sight and then getting smacked as the weapon fired.

I don’t plan to ever use these skills again so it was like being at a large, expensive and very hot arcade.