If you’ve served in the U.S. military in the last 60 years, you are quite familiar with the M16 rifle – intimately so, if you were in the Army or Marines.
Now, civilians have a chance to learn the details about why this weapon, and its lighter successor the M4 carbine, has been the main armament carried by American warriors for more than two generations.
At noon on Friday, Sept. 12, at the Cayce-West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Public Library at 1500 Augusta Road in West Columbia, Ben Battiste – curator of history and archives at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum – will deliver a detailed and informative lecture on the history of the M16. It’s another installment in the Relic Room’s roving Noon Debrief series of free, live programs.
And Ben knows exactly what he is talking about. Ben served in the U.S. Army before getting into the museum game. He carried the M16’s cousin, the M4 carbine, in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as a marksmanship instructor at Fort Jackson, he taught recruits how to use both that and the M16.
He delivered this lecture back in the spring at another location, and while the audience may not have left with their marksmanship badges, they knew far more than they had about why this weapon was adopted, how it worked, and why it has been in service for so long. Even the veterans may have learned a thing or two.
The M16 eventually replaced the legendary M1 that did so much to win the Second World War, the weapon General George S. Patton called “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” But by the 1950s, that eight-shot, semi-automatic device had had its day. The military tried briefly to replace the M1 with the M14, but that wasn’t what was needed for combat in Vietnam – especially with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong carrying the light, versatile, 30-round AK-47.
The long, heavy M14 was not something you wanted to carry around in the soggy heat of Vietnam. Nor would its superior range be much of an advantage on battlefields where the enemy was likely to be on top of you by the time you saw him.
The military needed something that could perform the same classic-rifle functions as the M1 and M14, but have the full-automatic capability of the M3 “grease gun” that had served well as a cheaper, lighter substitute for the Thompson submachine gun in World War II. Soldiers needed a standard, all-purpose weapon that enabled them to carry and quickly fire more ammunition, with greater deadly force.
That weapon turned out to be Colt’s M16. It was first released in 1959, but then quickly went through several generations of improvements over the coming decade or so. It fired a bullet that was more or less a .22-caliber slug with a high-powered rifle cartridge behind it. That made for a small projectile, but a fast-moving one that could penetrate a GI helmet at 500 yards, and tumble around inside its target, wreaking horrific damage.
It was a fearsome weapon, but it had problems at first. For instance, Ben will explain, its barrel initially wasn’t lined with chrome, which meant it easily rusted, and fouling from gunpowder was a serious problem. But problems like that were addressed as the Vietnam marathon wore on, and by 1975 it was a fully functional weapon that would meet the needs of U.S. infantry for next few decades, gradually giving way to its even lighter cousin, the M4 carbine.
Come hear him tell the story of the weapon he and many thousands of other Americans carried in war and peace, from Vietnam until today.
A U.S. Marine aims an M16 rifle out a house window during the Battle of Huế in 1968.
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