A Case of the Redeye
Say you are a grunt on the 1960s battlefield and a Soviet MiG is coming to ruin your day. Well, you could either run, or give that Russki bad guy a severe case of the Redeye.
After World War 2, when jets replaced propeller driven combat aircraft, the US Army realized that what they did for anti-aircraft artillery wasn’t going to work. The odds of a good old .50-caliber M2 machinegun mounted on a jeep being able to shoot down a supersonic Soviet MiG passing at more than 600 miles per hour were pretty slim.
To catch up with Ivan and keep the boys safe, between 1959-68 Corvair (now General Dynamics) came up with a portable missile launcher. This launcher was clunky at 18-pounds and four-feet long, but it could be carried and used by a single foot soldier on the ground. Inside its tube was a two-stage missile that soft-launched so as to not scorch the Joe firing it as it left the tube. Once outside the launcher the missile would accelerate to Mach 1.7 and carry its 2.35-pound M222 Blast-fragmentation warhead almost three miles…and it worked
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