Question for BoomerD and any others who served in NAM.

[amddude]

it wasn't the rifle, but the ammo.

Oh no, it was the rifle. They didn't chrome the barrel or do any real treatments on the metal. The handguards were brittle and broke. This is very well documented. They literally rusted apart, sometimes before they even got to combat.

The ammo powder change made it even worse, but there would have been catastrophic problems either way. Guys who had never been in combat and didn't really know anything about guns raced the prototype-grade ar-15 into the war.

edit: thanks for your service boomer

 

[BoomerD]

IME, you're BOTH right. The M-16 had its problems, some were manufacturing issues,quickly corrected, but most were from ammunition.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/how-reliable-is-the-m-16-rifle/

This much is indisputable: Since the mid-1960s, when at Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s request an earlier version of the M-16 became the primary American rifle in Vietnam, the reputation of the M-16 family has been checkered.

This is in part because the rifle had a painfully flawed roll-out. Beginning intensely in 1966, soldiers and Marines complained of the weapon’s terrifying tendency to jam mid-fight. What’s more, the jamming was often one of the worst sorts: a phenomenon known as “failure to extract,” which meant that a spent cartridge case remained lodged in the chamber after a bullet flew out the muzzle.

The only sure way to dislodge the case was to push a metal rod down the muzzle and pop it out. The modern American assault rifle, in other words, often resembled a single-shot musket. One Army record, classified at the time but available in archives now, showed that 80 percent of 1,585 troops queried in 1967 had experienced a stoppage while firing. The Army, meanwhile, publicly insisted that the weapon was the best rifle available for fighting in Vietnam.

The problems were so extensive that in 1967 a Congressional subcommittee investigated, and issued a blistering rebuke to the Army for, among other things, failing to ensure the weapon and its ammunition worked well together, for failing to train troops on the new weapon, and for neglecting to issue enough cleaning equipment – including the cleaning rod essential for clearing jammed rifles.

A series of technical changes sharply reduced (but never eliminated) the incidence of problems. Intensive weapons-cleaning training helped, too. But the M-16 has struggled over the decades for universal and cheerful acceptance. Some soldiers and Marines have always loathed it, and its offspring, too.

http://www.bobcat.ws/rifle.shtml

From its first introduction into Vietnam in 1962 until 1966 the rifle, now termed the M-16, enjoyed a reputation of an extremely lethal and dependable weapon among the soldiers using it in combat. In 1966 a jamming malfunction with the M-16 rifle began to become commonplace. This malfunction consisted of the failure of the rifle to extract a fired cartridge shell. The extractor would grip the rim of an expended cartridge and instead of pulling the cartridge from the chamber of the barrel on the rearward movement of the bolt, the extractor would pull a portion of the rim from the cartridge as the bolt moved to the rear, leaving the cartridge in the chamber of the barrel. This then required the soldier to take a cleaning rod and insert it into the muzzle end of the barrel and force the fired cartridge from the chamber, thus clearing the weapon so that it could be fired again. [Fighting a modern war with a muzzle loader; Oh happy, happy, joy, joy.] Confidence among combat troops soon reached such a low level that 1/5th Mech. combat troops began arming themselves with whatever other weapons were available. These included rifles, pistols, shotguns, sub-machineguns and whatever else could be scrounged.
Why did a weapon that enjoyed a reputation of reliability in combat suddenly begin to malfunction? Almost as perplexing is the question of why in late 1967, the rifle again began to live up to its old reputation of reliability and the malfunctions ceased.

In May of 1967, after numerous complaints had been received by members of the United States Congress regarding the malfunctioning of the M-16 rifle in Vietnam, a special subcommittee of the Congressional Armed Forces Committee, began to investigate the allegations.
In Vietnam, when the malfunction started to make its appearance and the combat soldier started asking why, he was told that it was his fault because he was not keeping his weapon clean. A further complication at the time was that there were two types of ammunition available. The IMR and the Ball Propellent became mixed as the Ball Propellent was being introduced and the IMR was being used up. Then it was said that the weapon needed a new buffer and that would cure the problem. With the new buffer the malfunction continued, and again the soldier was told it was his fault because he was not properly cleaning his rifle. The Army tried to blame him and the rifle. As it turns out, the blame for the malfunction rested with neither the soldier nor the M-16 rifle. It rested with the manufacture of 5.56 mm. ammunition with ball propellant, because it was cheaper than using IMR extruded propellant, and there was a huge surplus of old artillery powder from which ball propellant was manufactured.