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Originally Posted by chico20854
I guess so?
I was in the 28th in the mid-90s. My impression was that my unit (the signal battalion) was very proficient in its technical performance and utterly and totally lacking in tactical performance. When we have the occasional threads here about "what would have happened to you in the war" I always think my answer would be either "killed in an ambush driving around the division rear area" or "killed while sleeping because the guard was goofing off/sleeping/drinking". The battalion was basically a drinking club that wore camouflage and operated a MSE network...
My duties there concerned keeping track of the equipment and keeping the trucks and generators running (and it was post-Cold War) so I had zero visibility into what the wartime employment was supposed to be!
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Is this the same 28th that the PA National Guard belongs to and trains at The Gap? When I was in the 4th/92nd FA (Reserve), we had an ORE where a bunch of grunts from the 28th (PA-NG) aggressed our RSOP/Advanced Party while we were surveying a new firing position and we mopped the floor with them. I guess they thought we'd be pushovers even though EVERY NCO on our Advanced Party was a Vietnam [COMBAT] veteran.
We had 26 souls and were aggressed by a Company and we won with only 4 killed & 8 casualties. To this day, I HATE carrying the Pig... right up until the bullets start to fly. NEITHER the M249 nor the M240 are guns that you can advance and fire with very easily. They are too long and have a forward weight distribution in their balance. The Pig, however, is pretty compact with the weight just forward of the gun body, and with the bipod legs swung forward past the muzzle brake, doesn't snag on brush. additionally, the forward bipod legs allow you to set it "muzzle down" for loading without plugging the bore. Muzzle-down loading also helps get the belt moving on the feed tray because gravity holds the belt forward as you close the cover. The 550 rpm rate of fire is also very controllable at a slow walk in the brush. We just laid out a wall of suppressive fire to pin their own base of fire down and went toe-toe with their maneuver element in some dense scrub brush on the edges of our RSOP site. I was impressed with how accurate the M60 is if you just give her 6-round bursts on man-sized targets at about 50m. You could hold those bursts on target FROM THE SHOULDER!
It probably didn't hurt us that EVERY 5-Ton in our Battery (we had just converted from tracked SP 8" M110s to 155mm/6" M198 towed Howitzers) had a .50 Caliber machinegun mounted on it. It was like the Depot Commander at First Army was just standing there watching us load when a Corporal said to him "Hey Sir, what are supposed to do with all these extra M2's over there?" and the Depot Commander said: "Give them to those guys. They have a bunch of 5-Tons with ring mounts on them." We LITERALLY HAD 2 40mm M203s, 2 M60s, 2 M2HBs, and 2 M9's (for the drivers, in place of our Grease Guns) IN EVERY GUN SECTION. In addition, Maintenance (our supply, commo, NBC, and mess sections) had either a .50 Caliber or a MK19 Grenade Launcher, an M60, and a 40mm M203 per section as did our three motor pool trucks, our two FDC trucks, and our three Headquarters/Command vehicles (hummers). We had so many belt-fed MGs that half our ammo draw wasn't even 5.56mm.
But now I know we weren't the only ones who the Army did this for, because I watched the Chieftain's Hatch video on the M1 abrams and those lucky bastards even got a Mossberg 590a1 12 gauge. I'd have been bird hunting while I was deployed if they had issued me a shotgun during RESTORE HOPE (although we did shoot a wild boar that wandered into our battery area once).