Sorry I added an M-79 to a really nice summary on Reilly 4 bores - kind of like unwanted graffiti.
But Actually Galaxie, I did fire an M-79 in Vietnam but never in combat. I had others carrying it. I was scheduled to give a class in the use of the M-79 during the 10th Special Forces Group winter maneuvers in southern Germany set for late February 1968....but the Tet offensive made me call "Mrs. Alexander" at the Pentagon and ask her to get me back to the war asap...orders arrived and I never went on the maneuvers.
Some guys in MACV-SOG cut the stock off at the pistol grip, cut the barrel off just in front of the break, loaded it with a flechette round and carried it around their neck as an "ambush breaker." Well it looked cool but they'd be dead before they could fire a round from the thing in my opinion.
You could use the M-79 as a mortar....there was a method for calculating muzzle elevation by use of the strap. But the best tip was a Montagnard CIDG one. I once asked some hot shot Special Ops guys in Afghanistan how you could get an airburst out of an M-79. They were Mr. Cools and pretty insulting...."Hey guys, listen to this old guy...o-h-k-a-y.... how do you get an airburst?!!" Wink wink sneer haha haha. The answer, "When a PK is singing your hair, fire the M-79 up into a tree over it." Shut them up. In an ambush of a North Vietnamese unit at night in May 1967 about 30 km north of A-233 Ban Don on the Dar Lac Plateau, the claymores going off, the A-6 machine guns firing and the BAR's chug-chugging...the things I noticed most were the explosions going off in the tree branches on the other side of the trail. (That was before Puff-the-Magic-Dragon showed up - long tracer fingers reaching down and walking...)
In about 1967 a Pentagon analyst recommended the M-79 be done away with because it "couldn't fire fast enough in a walking assault." He was quietly transferred to Fairbanks, Alaska to research snowball catapults...such was the esteem the US soldier in Vietnam held for the M-79. They were not "toys."
Last edited by Argo44; 07/07/19 12:59 AM.
