Life of a Machine Gunner
The next day we were issued our jungle fatigues, which are different than your basic fatigues that you have here. You’ve probably seen the camouflaged fatigues that are pretty common in the street today, and they’re similar to that. And Buy purinethol online then we were issued our jungle boots, which are different than the regular boots that we had.
I went to the armorer and he issued me my machine gun. You tell the armorer—he asks you, ‘What’s your MOS?’ and he’ll give either the M16 or the M60, and I told him, ‘Well I’m a three thirty-one.’ That’s a machine gunner. He handed me the machine gun—the M60—and he looked at me and said to me, ‘You have seven seconds to live.’ And I looked at him and I didn’t quite understand.
What he was trying to tell me is the average life span of the machine gunner in Vietnam was seven seconds from the moment you pulled the trigger. There were three individuals that the Viet Cong would shoot for. Of course the officer, the radio man, and the M60 machine gunner. The officer you could understand. The radioman you could understand—there’s no communication. But the man who has the most firepower is the machine gunner. So the average lifespan is seven seconds.
What they would do is—if you were in a patrol and you got ambushed or you were in a firefight, you would open up and right away they would know where the M60 was because of the rounds and the rapid fire of the machine gun. They would spot you right away. So what you would have to do is once you were in a firefight, you would shoot, and then you would have to move if you could. If you couldn’t move, then you stayed where you were. But we would open up, shoot some rounds. I had an aide gunner with me, my assistant gunner. He was also trained as a machine gunner. One carried the machine gun, the other carried most of the ammo. And the ammo for the M60 was bandoliers.
You’ve seen pictures of bandoliers strapped across people. I would carry two bandoliers, my aide gunner would carry two bandoliers, and then he would carry the box that has the extra rounds. In a squad, there were, maybe, depending on the size, eight to fourteen [marines], and each marine would carry a bandolier. They never begrudged carrying the bandolier because they knew it was needed. I would use all the bandoliers that I had, use the aide gunner’s, and then the rest of the squad, as we needed, would throw the bandoliers to us so that we had sufficient rounds in the case of a firefight.