SEALs In Vietnam Observation

In the process of making the 1/35 scale character models I have been reading about how the equipment looked and how it was carried.

The GURPS book has lots of equipment listed that, while it WAS used, was hardly ever used. It makes no mention of how scarce something is, just that it was used at all.

Most SEALs just used the same LBE as the Army and Marines were using. Players, however, gravitate to the things like load bearing vests and special carriers for the radio.

Players also gravitate towards the weird guns. The NWC China Lake pump-action grenade launcher, around 20 made, my group has one. The H&R T223, only ONE documented example of one ever being used In-Country, my group has one. The SEALs loved the M16. Most teams carried M16 or M16A1, the carbine variations were not used near as much, my group has several.

The Stoner Model 63 is famous for being used by the SEALs. There are three versions of the LMG listed in the game. The final version, the Mk. 23 Mod. 0, was the first version to have right hand feed. The right hand feed cured a stoppage called "spin back". The Stoner system, in rifle configuration, feeds from a magazine on the bottom and ejects out the right side, like normal. In the LMG configuration, the receiver is inverted; the ejection port is now on the LEFT side and the feed-way is now on the top. Most belt-fed GPMGs feed from the left, so the guys at Cadillac Gage did the natural thing and fed it from the left too. This puts the feed and the ejection port on the same side of the gun. Spin back is the ejected round hitting the feeding belt and spinning back into the ejection port and being captured by the bolt.

Enter the Mk. 23 Mod. 0; the feed is now on the right side of the gun. An extremely clever box system is developed to keep the belt clean and to make feed smooth. It takes much longer to load than the left side feed so the SEAL gunners convert their guns back to left hand feed by a ratio of TEN TO ONE! They far preferred the risk of spin-back to the seconds lost reloading the new feed-way! It wasn't until there was no longer a war on that the Navy managed to get all of the left-hand feed systems out of the supply chain.

My players are also survivors of the McThag Gamer Training Center where we teach that if there is only one example of a piece of equipment in the party, it will be broken as a plot device. This causes every single player to have an example of every essential item.

Like a lensatic compass. In the real world, just the officers had them, often meaning there was just one in the platoon.

Like a smoke grenade (or two, or three) of each color. Comms and colors were predetermined so that the team knew that red was the color so nobody carried yellow, green or violet.

Like carrying a star flare (or two) of every color...

Then they end up missing things like a couple of LAWS...

And no PC is EVER the machine gunner unless that's the ONLY job left open.