One of my cousins was a Sheridan driver in a cav unit that was involved in the Cambodian Incursion. The VC/NVA rigged a dud 500 lb bomb into a land mine that went off under his Sheridan. He survived, but carried shrapnel next to his spine for the next 25 years until he died. He told me, when I was enlisting for armor to stay away from Sheridans. I ended up being an Artilleryman in the Fire Direction Center.
A few years after that I became a Recon Sergeant/Forward Observer experimenting with the FIST team concept. I was attached to B/1/32 Armor, 3d. Armd Div as the company’s FO. I had to learn how to fight as a tanker and my tank was an M-60A2 that had the same 152mm Shillelagh gun/launcher. By that time, mid-70s, the 152mm HEAT and Target practice rounds had a combustible casing for the shell, thus there was no brass casing by that time, about 5-6 years after my cousin was wounded in Vietnam.
The brass casing was never part of the 152’s basic issue in either the Sheridan or your M60 Starship after early deployment in Vietnam, which is why the Sheridans burned like they did.
As you probably know, the whole 152mm system concept ended up being regarded as a failure and all the active duty M60A2s were taken out of service by 1981. They were either re-turreted with a conventional gun as the M60A3 or converted to bridging vehicles without a turret.
One of my old bosses was at a camp in South Vietnam. He was SF.
He said that there was an artillery piece that was slowly adjusting fire onto the camp.
He said that they went looking for it but couldn’t find it.
They finally went out with metal probes and found it.
It was a captured Sheridan and the enemy had buried it.
They dug it up and found where they had been putting marks inside the turret to use to adjust fire onto the camp.
Thanks for your post #31.