“Bloop!: A Marine grenadier fires an M-79 round into a sniper’s position in Hue as 1st Marine Division Leathernecks advance toward the Citadel.” 22 February 1968
Official USMC photo by Lance Corporal R. J. Smith. From the Jonathan Abel Collection (COLL/3611), Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections.
The Philippine Marines have been busy doing hearts and minds type missions in the Sulu area for the past several months and have managed to get 246 weapons turned over (with a little help from martial law.)
About half are vintage M1 Garands, followed by a decent haul of M14s and M16s, as well as a smattering of other hardware to include M79 bloop tubes, 81mm mortars and 90mm recoilless rifles.
Dig the M79s, with one using a boot top as a pad…also the fifth gun up is a suppressed M1 Carbine with a homemade wooden pistol grip…
Yes, that is a Vietnam-vintage Colt XM177 in the foreground, followed by (likely Manila-made Eslico) M16s. You never know what you are going to come up with in the PI
3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, “the Golden Brigade,” arriving for their time in Vietnam in early 1968. Note everybody taking advantage of “smoke em if you got em,” as well as the camo M1 covers, M16A1s, several 173rd ABN Brigade combat patches, and heavy distribution of M79 bloop guns.
U.S Army photo. Typically held back as part of the U.S. Army’s very slim strategic reserve during the war, the 3,650 paratroopers of the Golden Brigade was rushed was to Vietnam in February 1968 as an emergency measure in response to the Tet Offensive.
Reminds me of this passage from a book that I was pleased to see on my son’s reading list, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,
In addition to the three standard weapons–the M-60, M-16, and M-79–they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C4 plastic explosives.
Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather’s feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine–3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades–14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade–24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
That 40mm M79 Bloop Gun, though…known in Australian service lovingly as “The Wombat Gun” and the plot device to at least one Gus Hasford novel about Vietnam.
Photo by Jason Florio. By the way is that an RPG-2 (made in the PRC of course) or an RPG-7?
Jason Florio, perhaps one of the most talented photojournalists in the business, has traveled the globe in recent years to places like Silafando, Mogadishu, and Makasutu. On a trip to Burma he took a series of amazing portraits of Karen National Liberation Army freedom fighters.
Photo by Jason Florio The old “in the white” M16A1 is great as is the 20-round mag on the AK overfolder.
For those who don’t know, the Karens have been fighting the Burmese government since 1949 pretty much non-stop. Located in the Golden Triangle, their equipment runs the gamut from captured French Lebels left over from Colonial Indochina, to Japanese WWII equipment, 1960s era U.S. gear left over from Vietnam, and (slightly) more modern Chinese kit.
Photo by Jason Florio Can you dig the Karen Bloop gunner? What is the shelf-life of a 40mm fuse stored at 99% humidity in the jungle? What that TD though.
One of oddest weapons ever carried by the US military looked like a massive sawn-off shotgun. With the improbable nickname of the ‘bloop gun’ this handy little grenade launcher has had an impressively long life.
After World War 2, the Army decided to usher in a new series of weapons. During the previous war, soldiers had carried rifle grenades, simple handheld bombs that could be fired from a cup attached to the standard M1 rifle out to about 150 yards with sloppy but effective accuracy. Three soldiers in each squad were trained to carry and use these devices, and the Army thought they could do better. Originally called Project Salvo, then finally Project NIBLICK, the concept was that a dedicated grenade launcher that could fire faster and more accurately than the WWII rifle grenades, would just tie down two soldiers per squad rather than three, and still be more effective.
Project NIBLICK begat the weapon later designated the M79 Grenade Launcher.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com
