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A Marine private first class, eighteen years old, wounded and alone on a hilltop in Vietnam, propped himself against a machine gun and kept firing. His four comrades were dead. The attackers thought he was dead too. He was not. He came to, crawled back to the gun, and fired into the backs of the men who had breached the wire. That gun was the M60. The troops called it the Pig. This is the story of what it gave an American rifle squad — and what it cost the one man who had to carry it. The idea was captured, not invented. At the end of World War II, American ordnance officers studied the German small-arms inventory and found something they did not have: one weapon that could do two jobs. Off a bipod it went forward with the riflemen. Off a tripod it held a line all day. The Germans had it. The Americans did not. So they built one. They took the body and operating system of a German paratrooper rifle, the FG 42, grafted onto it the belt feed of the German MG 42, and after a decade of prototypes they standardized it in 1957 as the M60. Twenty-three pounds empty. That number runs underneath everything else. Every requirement in the specification bent toward one sentence: one man should be able to pick this up and fire it. Not a crew. One man. That made it general-purpose. It also meant somebody had to carry it. And the enemy knew it. Ambush doctrine was built to remove the source of effective fire before it started. The man with the tracers coming out of his gun was the source of effective fire. He was also, because of those twenty-three pounds, the slowest man in the squad to change position. Victor Renza carried one for the Fourth Infantry Division and wrote afterward that the M60 was so feared that the enemy usually aimed their first shots at the machine gunners. Tony Vargas, who carried one for the 101st Airborne, was told the same thing: the officer, the radio man, and the machine gunner were the three individuals the enemy would shoot for. The gun itself was a ledger of compromises. Its barrel had no carrying handle and had to be changed with an asbestos mitten. Pull the barrel and the gun lost its bipod. The safety ran backwards from every rifle they had trained on. The ammunition box jammed the belt, so units wedged a ration can into the bracket to make it feed straight. A firearms historian who has stripped many of them calls it, in the end, basically a disposable machine gun. But it was not built to last thirty years on a tripod. It was built so a man could pick it up and run with it. The bill for that arrived on the back of one man in every squad. Two of those men have Medals of Honor. Richard Pittman heard the column ahead of him get hit, heard men calling for firepower, exchanged his rifle for a machine gun and several belts of ammunition, and ran toward the sound. Melvin Newlin, wounded and left for dead at Nong Son, came to, crawled back to his gun, and fired into the backs of the attackers inside the wire. He was killed at the gun. President Nixon presented the medal to his family in 1969. The improved model that fixed the barrel did not arrive until 1986, twenty-nine years after standardization and eleven years after the last Americans left Vietnam. The Army replaced it in 1995. The gun outlived everything except the argument about it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The Gun You Know
0:51 Melvin Newlin’s Last Stand
1:29 German Lessons, American Build
3:38 Twenty-Three Pounds of Cost
5:21 Design Flaws, Field Fixes
8:56 The Gunner’s Burden
10:50 Two Men, Two Medals
14:43 What Came After
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