Grenade Launchers

The misidentification of the M203 from Pew Pew Tactical, for some reason, has reminded me of something.

Somethings...

We had two experimental weapons changes to our M1A1(HA).

The first was a single tank in the company that General Dynamics Land Div. had changed the coaxial MG from an M240 to an M134 mini-gun.

We took turns with it at gunnery, giggled like little kids, got debriefed by the GDLD reps and they took it away and nothing appears to have come of it.

The second was to replace the Ma Deuce on the wing tanks with a Mk.19 automatic GL.

Again, we took them to Graf and did a couple of full CALFEX with them.  Finding room for the more bulky ammo was an issue and we weren't really certain when to use them.

The .50's were back on the tanks when I left the unit.

Funny story about our first range trip with them:

The guy training us didn't effectively communicate to us that the flight time of a 40mm grenade is a LOT longer than any other weapon we used.

It didn't really show up until we tried to fire at the hulk of an old APC at a decently long range though.

What happened was we lined up the sights, fired a round and, in our minds, nothing happened down range.  Figuring we missed, we carefully aligned the sight again and fired another round.  Nothing.  In frustration, we let loose with 10 rounds.

All of the above did not take very long at all, but it seemed like a long time subjectively.

About the same time as the last of the 10 rounds had left the barrel, the first round hit the M114 we were using as a target.

"COOOOOOOOOOL!" we says!

While we were admiring the explosion, the 10-round string started to arrive and range control starts screaming for us to stop shooting.

"We haven't been shooting for a while!" we protest.