17. The Harrowing Tales of the M16
Before long, dramatic tales about the new M16 rifle began to make the rounds among US forces in Vietnam. Entire patrols were said to have been wiped out, their bodies discovered next to their jammed rifles. To heighten the drama, the dead GIs or Marines’ hands were clutching cleaning rods, testimony to the fact that their last harrowing moments on Earth had been spent in feverish but futile attempts to clear stuck cartridges. Whether such tales were actually true or were greatly exaggerated over dramatizations, it was clear that the new rifles had some problems. Chief among them was a tendency to jam – far more often than did its predecessors.
M16s were – and their progeny to this day still are – meant to be well maintained and cared for. Unlike their Cold War opposites, the AK-47s which use a piston to extract empty rounds and chamber new ones, M16s run on a direct gas impingement system. When an M16 is fired, some of the expanding gas from the exploding cartridge goes into a small hole drilled into the barrel. From there, the gas is redirected via a tube back to the firing chamber. There, it hits (impinges) the bolt, forces it back, extracts the now empty cartridge, and chambers a new round. That required new rifle maintenance measures that American soldiers had not known before.