Thread: Field modifying service weapons

Originally Posted by Sh00ter

Heres a bit from "On Patrol with the SAS, Sleeping with your ears open." by GARY McKAY. About SAS operations in Vietnam


THE AUTOMATIC ‘LIGHT-BARRELLED’ SLR.

The SAS pride themselves on their individuality and this was often expressed in the way they dressed for combat, their weaponry and ammunition load. It all came down to—if you want to carry it, it is your problem. The 7.62 mm Belgian-designed FN semi-automatic (self-loading rifle—SLR) was often favoured because it fired a very powerful .308 calibre bullet. The standard issue rifle was carried by most riflemen in Viet Nam in the infantry battalions but didn’t fire fully automatic—that is, when you pull the trigger the weapon fires until you release the trigger. Normally it would fire only one shot every time you pressed the trigger but would automatically chamber another round so when you released the trigger and pressed again it would repeat the firing cycle. However, soldiers—as is their wont in combat zones—take extraordinary steps to try to give themselves greater firepower on the field of battle.

One SAS patrol scout on his first tour explained how he dealt with his weaponry and ammunition load: I carried a ‘light-barrelled SLR’, but it was fully automatic. The SLR was actually designed with a holding open device so that on the last shot of the magazine it held open and so you could carry out an immediate action drill really easy, but that’s no good for a parade ground, you can’t have people messing around on the parade ground like this. So, the hierarchy of the Australian army said remove the pin. Our armourers put a pin where it was supposed to be in the hold-open device so when the magazine was empty the working parts were held to the rear— just like an M16. So we would take the empty mag off, put it down your shirt, put on a full mag, release the working parts by hitting the holding open device, bang! Away you went again. So, that was a very easy operation to change the SLR to fully auto—it was just inserting a filed change lever and jigging around with the return spring plunger on the trigger. I had a Claymore pouch with the 30-round magazines in them. It was quite a good set-up. When you look back it was cumbersome to be a scout with that weapon, but it was all right. It was good in a shitfight.

The ‘light-barrelled SLR’ is an in-joke for the soldiers, as there was a heavy-barrelled SLR which went by the nomenclature of the L4A4 automatic rifle which was an SLR with a fully automatic firing mechanism and a heavier barrel to withstand the higher operating temperatures. It also came with folding bipod legs and could be used as a light machine-gun using 30-round box magazines. Another man who liked the hitting power of the SLR was Peter Schuman: ‘I had seen a guy hit with an SLR through a rubber tree and I thought that was pretty impressive—so I liked that.’

The expression that ‘bullshit baffles brains’ is very true in the SAS notion of throwing as much lead at the enemy to get him to keep his head down while the patrol took off. The other thing that also helped was the reports from the weapons. The 7.62 mm SLR, or a .308 calibre rifle, was a noisy beast which didn’t go bang, it went boom! It was often referred to as ‘the elephant gun’ by the Diggers and it was by far the noisiest rifle and probably the hardest-hitting weapon in the war that was not a machine-gun. But when you get these beasts firing on automatic and in unison, the noise level was dramatic: The sound of an SAS contact is just awesome. There is no, ‘Bang’—I wonder what that was?—‘Bang’—a few more shots. Whatever is happening? If we got away the first rounds, it would be automatic and it would be a full magazine, maybe if there were unders and overs— we would have grenades going off, and rapidly joined in by the other patrol members. So it would rapidly escalate into a huge amount of fire by five people putting down automatic fire and grenades and so on. So we could recognise when one of our own patrols had a contact, and knew it was an SAS patrol. It could not be anybody else.

The patrol members all used 30-round magazines wherever they could as it gave a longer burst of fire, lengthened the time between magazine changes and allowed more ammunition to be carried loaded. Nev Farley ran through his patrol’s SOP on the initial burst of fire: We used 30-round magazines, and most of the blokes carried a 30-round magazine on their weapon. Because the idea was that when you had a contact, you deliberately fired as much ammunition as you could, and if you had those bloody SLRs on fully automatic, firing a 30-round magazine, and if the flash eliminator was taken off it, you would think, ‘Fuck! What have I hit here?’ Because it sounded heavy, and fast, and automatic, and it would just make old Charlie think, ‘Shit, I’ve hit something big here’ and it would stop them, rather than race in and try to take you out. Because they think they have hit so much firepower, it’s at least a bloody company, and by that time we’ve got ourselves on a back bearing and fucked off out of there. But, once that first magazine was gone, from then on that was our rules, you fired well-aimed, single shots. But it was quite okay to fire a full mag for the first part of it in the initial contact. It’s pretty bloody scary when five blokes all open up at once. There’s a lot of noise and if you’ve got three SLRs on fully automatic with a 30-round magazine, shit flies everywhere.

The SAS patrol SLRs were converted to automatic by the squadron armourer, who also removed the flash eliminator to shorten the weapon’s length thereby making it easier to move through the vines and branches of the thick rainforest: The back sight was set so that it couldn’t be lowered, so it was up at all times.
The armourer fixed it up and put it on fully automatic for us, and with the flash eliminator taken off, took off the bayonet boss and all that shit. They were pretty nasty weapons. It creates a long flame. You could shoot and cauterise the wound at fifteen paces!

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Thank you mate, that’s good reading and better coming from someone who used it!
Cheers