I was watching Tour of Duty (its a show about the vietnam war), and now I have a number of questions about the army, and related topics, and to avoid flooding the boards with army questions, I thought I would put them all into one thread. (BTW Tour of Duty is a good show)
In all army shows that I’ve seen, the helmets will have straps, but the soldiers never seem to use the straps, and as a result the soldier’s helmet will often fall off. Is this some liberty with the truth that the movie producers have taken, or do soldiers really not strap on their helmets properly?
Are there many (gernade) throw the pin, and keep the gernade problems in the army?
What professions in the army keep kill counts? It seems like Fighter pilots as well as snipers keep kill counts, but how about tank drivers or boat captains? Are there many modern day aces (pilots with five or more kills in the air), AFAIK it’s been a while since there have been dog fights with modern aircraft. Do snipers, etc get a special name (like ace) when they reach a certain kill count? Do pilots get anything special when they become an ace?
If a bullet passed really close to you, would you be burned by the compression then rarefaction of the air displaced by the bullet?
Unless you’re in a combat area, you need to be havin’ your strap strapped. The reason to NOT have it strapped has to do with the idea that the concussion from a nearby explosion can blow your hemet off. Theoretically, if the strap is strapped, more than just your helmet will come off. I personally think this is BS, but then I haven’t seen this kind of combat.
Daily. But not in the literal sense of your post. I find it unlikely. You are trained to hold the grenade with your throwing hand and pull the pin with the other (NOT your teeth fer chrissakes!). Lobbing the pin would be difficult to do because you’d be throwing with your non-throwin’ hand. Also, it would be of little consequence because you’d still be holding the grenade–which you can do almost indefinitely as long as you haven’t let the spoon go.
Nope. I suppose if it got *REALLY * close, as in “parting your hair” contact, you might get a friction/grazing burn of some kind. “Almost” still only counts for ‘gernades.’
Hmmmm. I’ll take your word for it, but this dude disagrees. Of course, he also says that nobody really follows the rules, so it’s a moot point.
I distinctly recall reading somewhere about how firebases in Vietnam had cases of shotgunst that were illegal to use that were only broken into if the enemy penetrated the fences.
Come to think of it, I also recall that the new XM-8 (or whatever the new standard issue rifle is supposed to be) has an under-barrell shotgun attachment.
The Geneva Conventions have a lot of loopholes. An aquaintance of mine, who had served in the infantry, once told me that you are not supposed to use an M-60 against people, only against equipment. Guess how long that rule lasts once the shooting starts?
Shotguns are probably similar. Some technicality will allow you to bring them into the theater of operations, and then when the battle begins, survival trumps the rulebook.
My dad served in World War II. He told me that everybody with a weapon keeps score. Fighter pilots count dogfight kills, antiaircraft gunners count planes shot down, naval gunners count enemy ships sunk, artillerymen count the number of targets destroyed, etc., etc., etc.
I may be way off here, but I think that shotguns would only work at short range against people. I seem to recall that shotguns are popular for hunting feral hogs, but you have to use slugs and get close before shooting. Smaller shot might take out an eye at 100 yards, but that’s about it.
I’ve got family members that fought in Vietnam who told me about shotguns. You had to go into town and buy them yourself, and then keep them tucked away until you were out on patrol. The need for shotguns was that in think foliage, somebody could be standing behind a bush.big leaves, etc, and you might empty a whole clip from your M16 at them and not hit anything. But one shot from a shotgun would at least hit something.
The Geneva Convention is often mistakenly cited as it has to do with treatment of prisoners of war, not arms or ammunition.
The declaration made at the Hague peace convention of 1899 essentially bans use of expanding bullet ammunition against humans. There is some pretty good information here that goes into controversies such as use of Sierra match king bullets by snipers which are hollow point but not for the purpose of expanding in the target.
Not so. The chin strap on a helmet is meant to come apart if sufficient pressure is applied. It’s (or at least used to be) a small metal ball that clips into a hook aparatus. You can separate the two sides of the strap merely by pulling with a hard tug. It would be impossible to strangle someone with his own chin strap, using the helmet as leverage.
The strap is there to keep the helmet where it can do the most good - on your head. While it won’t stop a direct round, it will deflect shrapnel.
I don’t think it’s shotguns that are illegal in the Hague Convention, its rounds that use fletchettes.
As far as the helmet is concerned, in the rear and on excersize I kept mine straped up. In theater I just left mine off. Pure comfort thing there. The kevlar helmets don’t have the metal hooks like you described, but metal buttons.
Like its already been said, if you throw the pin, but not the grenade you are fine. Just don’t release that spoon.
As far as the automatic shotgun in the link is concerned, the CAWS, its never been adapted into service but the Marine Corp has started to use XM1014.
I have never heard that shotgun thing before, but here is a site that says that “The use of shotgun projectiles sufficiently jacketed to prevent expansion or flattening upon penetration of a human body and shot cartridges with chilled shot regular in shape would not constitute violations of the laws of war.”
It is apparently from a field manual written by the Army Judge Advocate General staff. I’d take that as rather authoritative.
Chin strap on the steal helmet – strap it around the back under all circumstances. The chin strap chafed. It was easy enough to put one hand on top of the helmet to keep it in place if it threatened to fall off. The airborne troops had a chin strap that was a lot like the chin strap on a football helmet. They tended to use the strap. The present coal scuttle helmet looks like it has a reasonably usable chin strap. The old single strip of cotton webbing on the steel pot was a pain.
There were some nice things about the old helmet however. The steel pot made a good wash basin. A little judicial use of a big ball peen hammer would give it a flat spot on top so that it would not fall over while you were shaving. You can’t do that with the new helmet.
Shot guns were issued – generally it was the J.C. Higgins pump action 12 gage with a five round tube magazine. A buckshot load was effective at close range even through heavy foliage. In addition there was a canister round for the 40 mm grenade launcher, the thump gun. Even though the grenade launcher was a single shot weapon some guys, notably engineer officers in charge of the gravel pits that served the road building operations, carried a thump gun with canister as their personal weapon in lieu of a pistol.
The baseball type grenade had a kill radius of some 20 or 30 yards. When you threw one you wanted to be undercover from its shrapnel spray. Pulling the pin did not arm the grenade, it was the release of the lever (spoon) that the pin held in place that lit the fuse. What was a bigger problem than throwing the pin was the people who just sort of hung grenades about their person by the levers. Even thought the pin does not come out easy (it would take a remarkable jaw to pull the pin with your teeth) if one worked out on these grenade festooned commandos the consequences were unpleasant. Many people took the extra precaution of taping the levers down just to be a little safer – if you were going to be in a situation where you might have to use a grenade safety was a relative term.
As a slight hijack: It seems to me that the shotgun would be an ideal close-in weapon, better than a submachine gun or assault rifle. A previous poster noted that if there’s a guy hiding behind some obscuring but not protective cover, the shotgun was preferable. Why wouldn’t it be more widely used (even standard issue)? I recall reading docs from/related to PNAC where the future of warfare was expected to be urban or close-range. Is the continued non-use of shotguns due to potential civilian danger? Training issues (i.e. having to train soldiers in multiple weapon systems)? Those Automatic shotguns seem like they’d be mighty handy even as support weapons (allthough mighty heavy).
