Posted on 11/07/2015 5:57:51 AM PST by marktwain
When in the Boy Scouts going up into the Blue Ridge Mountains for a camping trip our gear was better stowed than that.
Wasn’t his length of “service” FOUR MONTHS
*****************
That’s about how long he was in Vietnam. Gore enlisted in August 1969, spent two months
basic at Ft. Dix, assigned to Ft. Rucker as a journalist, shipped to Vietnam on
January 2, 1971, discharged in May, 1971.
His dress is slightly different in the first picture. Lots of razor wire, so could be a war zone. It looks like he has an ammunition bandolier across his chest, but why no LCE & ammo pouches, first aid kit, etc?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1956_Load-Carrying_Equipment
The correct term is “muzzle brake”. It brakes or retards recoil by redirecting muzzle gases.
For Al’s rifle, from Wikipedia, “...the U.S. military declared the A2 flash suppressor as a compensator or a muzzle brake; but it is more commonly known as the “GI” or “A2” flash suppressor.”
I wouldn’t piss on John Kerry if he was on fire but the analysis of the photo is BS.
I was in RVN in ‘68.
Weapons were not always kept loaded and mags were often carried in bandoleers rather than the issued mag pouches. A junior Navy officer might well have them under his rain jacket.
Might not there be another canteen on the OTHER SIDE of the ruck? I usually had one INSIDE the ruck as well.
I had a US Navy anorak which I had a zipper put into that I wore during monsoon season. I was not the only one and no one ever said anything about it.
In the central highlands we were issued, and needed, down sleeping bags and field jacket liners. It was not hot, all the time, everywhere, in Vitnam.
Wasn’t he supposed to be on a Swift Boat? If I were heading out on a boat, I would probably rig my pack diferently than if I were going to be humping it all day.
Food would be IN the rucksack not dangling around his neck where you could see it.
On a Swift Boat, if there were grenades they would be in a wooden case, not hanging from the skipper’s LBE.
We often wore boonie hats on patrol and left our steel pots behind. On the fire bases we usually left our steel pots on the trails of the guns. We wore soft hats or caps most of the time when not actually engaged in a fire mission or under attack.
His M16 has the shipping cover over the muzzle. A lot of troops did this to keep debris out of the muzzle. It was prohibited but we did it anyway.
If carrying a ruck, the LBE suspenders might not be used, especially if you are just heading down to the boat. If I weren’t heading out into the bush, just taking my gear down to the boat, I would not bother with tucking and rolling the straps.
Even in the Army (And Kerry was Navy) we wore our hair very long by the military standards of the day and that was much longer than troops do now.
Kerry could not have gotten away with dressing like that in any stateside training camp but in RVN it was quite common for troops to wear non-issued clothing, forego weekly haircuts and ignore uniform regulations.
The photo was taken in Vietnam as part of Kerry’s image building program.
>>>>There is no magazine in the rifle, so it is likely unloaded,
>>That assumption has killed innumerable people.
I generally like Dean Weingarten’s columns quite well, and think he missed it badly with that comment.
The M16A1 manual doesn’t say “brake” or “break” that I recall. Also the Marine Corps manual calls them a “compensator”.
I’ve found instances for both but the key is “suppression and compensation” in the FMs.
Regardless, my point besides getting dogged off about what the correct term is, my main point was that you couldn’t tell anything about the “brake/break” because it had the barrel cover over it. You couldn’t tell whether it was a birdcage or what it should have been for that time, probably a three-pronger.
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