M42 Duster

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I took this snapshot of an M42 Duster on Fire-base Candy in April 1970.  The Army was using them close the Cambodian border.  Our infantry company traveled with number of armored vehicles for a few days and this Duster was one of them.  They were also used on Fire-base Buttons as a defensive weapon on the berm.

Each of those two, 40 mm cannons on the turret fired high explosive rounds at a rate of 120 rounds per minute.  Above the 40 mm barrels you can see that it had an M60 machine gun as well.

In 1952, when GM first started building them, it was designed to be an anti-aircraft gun.  They were retired in the late fifties with the introduction of HAWK SAM missile systems.  Only 3,700 were built.  Duster's were sent to Vietnam for low altitude air defense but North Vietnam never did use aircraft.  So we used them on unarmored enemy forces.  I'm surprised we got away with firing the weapon directly at human beings.  I would have thought the Geneva Convention would have had something to say about it.

I was surprised to learn that it required a crew of six men.  The vehicle weighed 25 tons loaded.  It was about 19 feet long, 10 feet wide and 9 feet high.  A 500 horsepower gasoline engine could get it up to a top speed of 45 MPH.  Finally it had a range of about 100 miles on a tank of gasoline.

I never did get to see one in action.

M67 Recoilless Rifle

In July 1970, I was on a fire-base serving temporarily as a supply sergeant.  One day I decided to walk around the berm and pose with some of the unusual weapons we used for defense.  This particular weapon is a M67 Recoilless Rifle.

The M67 weighed a little over 37 pounds and was 53 inches long.  The bore size was 90 mm.  As you can see, it could be fired by a soldier standing up.  The Army has a 106 mm version that was far heavier and was usually mounted on a jeep.

A soldier can fire this weapon without being knocked backward by recoil because some of the gases produced when fired push to the rear as well as to the front.  That is why they call the weapon recoilless.  Being recoilless, it could be dangerous to stand directly behind the weapon when fired due to the back-blast.

The flechette round that is standing up in front of me weighed about 7 pounds.  It had a maximum range of about 300 meters.  Flechettes are small steel darts with fins.  When fired from the berm at the enemy, the flechettes dispersed forward in a cone angle of about 8 degrees.  Flechettes were designed to stop and wound the enemy, not necessarily kill them.  Wounding the enemy is better than killing them because it takes more people in the rear to serve those that are wounded versus killed.

Something about getting hit with a blast of flechettes does not sound very appealing.

Shitters

This snapshot was taken on a small fire-base in July 1970 during the rainy season.  In the immediate foreground is a 105 mm Howitzer, surrounded by a wall of sandbags.
On the far side of the sandbag wall, you can see four wooden boxes called shitters.

Each shitter is about three foot square at the base and six feet high.  Back home, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you generally go looking for a bathroom.  On a small firebase in Vietnam, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you go looking for a shitter.

Each shitter was open in front so they faced the berm to provide a bit of privacy.  Another benefit of facing the berm was the soldier sitting there could keep an eye out for attacking enemy soldiers.  I never did see any enemy soldiers while sitting on a shitter, by the way, during my tour in Vietnam.

There was a platform to sit on with a hole in the middle that emptied into half of a fifty-five gallon drum.  The drum was accessible from the rear of the shitter via a hinged door so when the drum was reasonably full, it could be easily replaced with an empty one by the shit burner.
The shit burner performed his work in the area behind the shitters.   Morning and evening, he mixed kerosene with the shit and toilet paper mix and then lit it on fire.  When the barrel had burned itself out and cooled, the shit burner tipped it over and drummed out the ash.  During the day, when not burning shit, the shit burner could read, sleep, eat at the mess hall, drink beer and smoke ganja (as long as he avoided getting caught).

After spending a couple of months as an infantry soldier living in the jungle for fifteen days at a time hunting Vietcong soldiers,  I could appreciate why someone would take the job.


     

105 mm Howitzer

This snapshot of a 105 mm Howitzer was taken on Firebase Candy in April 1970.  The gunner posing next to it provides a sense of scale.  The diameter (bore) of the gun's barrel is 105 mm or about 4 inches.

The Howitzer was a model 102.  It was about 17 feet long, 6.5 feet wide, 5 feet high and weighed about 1.5 tons.  It was light enough that it could be towed by a small truck or transported by air with a Chinook helicopter.  Even a Huey helicopter could pick one up and deliver it to a new firebase.

A firebase normally had five or six of these guns.  They were used to protect Infantry soldiers who worked the area around the firebase.  When called upon, they could fire a thirty-three pound high explosive projectile a maximum distance of about seven miles.  Once on an enemy target, it could drop projectiles,  one after another, into a tight circle of approximately thirty meters at that distance.

Infantry companies had to know exactly where they were in the jungle at all times to take advantage of these guns.  Gun crews were good at hitting a spot on a map.  Infantry companies therefore had to be good at knowing the spots where they were and where the enemy was on the map to ensure they didn't accidentally call in high explosive projectiles on top of themselves.

On my tour in Vietnam, there was a time when our platoon was in the unfortunate position of being in the wrong place on the map when 105's started lobbing in shells.  We had a man killed and others severally wounded.  When it happens, they call it taking friendly fire.

I don't know where that term came from but I do know there was nothing friendly about it.