The HORRORS of the Australian SLR in Vietnam The Rifle That Never Jammed While the American M16 Did

When Delta Company walked into the rubber at Long Tan on the afternoon of the 18th of August, 1966, the ordinary Australian rifleman was not carrying a chest full of loaded magazines. He had one 20-round magazine fitted to his rifle. He had two more loaded and ready in the pouches on his webbing, and somewhere in his pack, slower to reach, slower to use, he carried perhaps another 60 rounds boxed or wrapped in paper.

 Around 120 rounds all told, and most of it not yet in a magazine. Then the monsoon broke over the plantation. The light went flat and gray under the trees. Visibility dropped to the length of a cricket pitch, and the enemy kept coming, not in tens, in hundreds. A man fires carefully when he can watch his magazines disappearing.

 He picks his shots. He listens to the section machine gun chewing through belt after belt and does the arithmetic in his head. How many rounds left? How long until resupply? Whether resupply is even possible in weather like this. Loose rounds in a pack are not bullets you can use. They are bullets you have to stop and load by feel with wet and shaking hands while every sound around you says you do not have the time.

 The weapon in that man’s hands was the L1A1 self-loading rifle. Long, heavy, old-fashioned, and outwardly nothing like the neat little American M-16. But when he pressed the trigger, he expected it to fire. That expectation is the whole story. This channel is trying to reach its first thousand subscribers by putting the practical detail of Australian service back on the record.

What the men actually carried and how it actually worked, instead of the version the films left us with. If that’s worth keeping, subscribe. Start with what the rifle was because the myths grow in the gaps where people don’t know. The L1A1 was Australia’s standard infantry rifle through the Vietnam War.

 Soldiers called it the SLR. It was built at the Small Arms Factory at Lithgow in New South Wales, and it came out of the Belgian FN/FAL family, the rifle that armed a large part of the non-communist world during the Cold War. The Australian and British pattern used inch measurements rather than metric, which is one of those facts that mattered enormously to an armorer, and not at all to the man pulling the trigger. It fired the 7.

62 by 51 mm NATO cartridge, full power rifle ammunition. It was gas operated using a short stroke piston. When the rifle fired, a small amount of gas was tapped off the barrel to drive a piston back a short distance, and that piston threw the working parts rearward to eject the spent case and strip a fresh round off the magazine on the way forward.

20 rounds in a detachable box magazine, and in standard Australian infantry service, semi-automatic only. One trigger pull, one shot. There was no automatic setting on the issued rifle. It was long, a bit over a meter, and it was heavy, getting on for 4 and 1/2 kg before you added a loaded magazine and a sling. It kicked.

 Anyone who tells you a full power battle rifle is gentle has never fired one in a hurry. The muzzle blast was sharp, the recoil was honest, and after a long contact, your shoulder knew about it. The adjustable gas regulator is worth a moment because it explains a good deal of the rifle’s reputation. It controlled how much gas was vented away from the piston rather than used to drive it.

Opening the regulator let more gas escape, which left less energy to work the action. Closing it kept more gas in the system and drove the piston harder. A rifle that was starting to short stroke because it was fouled or cycling weekly could be given more force by closing the regulator down. Close it too far and the working parts took a harder battering and the action turned harsh.

Leave too much gas venting and the bolt could come up short of a full cycle. It did not make stoppages impossible. It was a setting a soldier learned to manage. Like everything else on the weapon, heavy, powerful, semi-automatic, 20 rounds, and adjustable gas system, every strength and every limitation in this story runs straight back to those few facts.

 The title says the rifle never jammed. That needs one qualification, plainly stated. No rifle never jams. The SLR could foul. A dented or worn magazine could fail to feed. A case could separate and leave its front half stuck in the chamber, which is exactly why the Australian cleaning kit carried a tool for pulling a broken case out.

Poor maintenance could stop any weapon ever made and the SLR was no exception. If you want the literal engineering truth, there has never been a rifle that cannot be made to fail, but that is not what the men meant when they said they trusted it. They meant that stoppages were not the defining story of the weapon.

 They meant that a malfunction was a rare nuisance, not a thing that lived in the back of your mind every time a contact opened up. And that distinction between a rifle that occasionally fails and a rifle you are quietly afraid of is the difference this whole video is about. So, why did Australians come to feel that way about the SLR? Not because it was blessed, because of how it lived.

 An infantry rifle in Phuoc Tuy spent its life being abused. It was carried through rain that never seemed to stop. It was dragged through scrub and wait-a-while vine. It got mud in it, plant debris down it, river crossings up it. It went out on patrol after patrol after patrol and it sat with a wet, cold man in a wet, cold harbor position through the night.

 The reason it kept working through all of that was not only the design, it was the routine wrapped around the design. Australian soldiers cleaned that rifle every day, often more than once. They checked their magazines and protected them because a magazine is the part of any self-loader most likely to let you down. They kept the gas system serviced and knew how to adjust it when fouling built up.

 They zeroed the weapon before an operation, so they knew where it shot. They drilled the immediate action sequence, the set of movements you perform without thinking when the rifle stops, until it was muscle memory, so that even a genuine stoppage cost a man a couple of seconds rather than his life. Immediate action drills were practiced until a routine failure could be dealt with almost automatically.

A soldier did not stop to diagnose every minor stoppage under fire. He carried out the taught action and tried to return the rifle to service as quickly as possible. Many routine stoppages could be cleared that way. A separated case was a different problem. It required tools and time, and it could take a rifleman out of the fight.

 On patrol, the rifle was an extension of how a man moved. The lead scout carried his SLR ready, muzzle following his eyes because the first man into a contact had no time to do anything but fire. Behind him, the section spread out, and at a listening halt, the rifles came up and went quiet together while men strained to hear movement over the drip off the canopy.

 In a night harbor, the weapon stayed in a man’s hands or across his knees, not propped against a tree where he couldn’t reach it. Because a rifle you cannot grab in the dark is no rifle at all. The SLR’s length, the very thing that made it awkward in close scrub, also made it steady. A long, heavy rifle sits still on the aim, and a man firing from a supported position in the half-light could hold it on a target he could barely make out.

 Every one of those small habits was part of why the weapon could be relied on. That is the honest shape of the SLR’s reliability. It was a relationship between the weapon, the ammunition, the magazines, the cleaning, the training, and the discipline of the man holding it. The Australians trusted the rifle partly because they had put in the hours to understand it, and because the design rewarded that effort instead of punishing it.

None of that makes the weapon magical. It makes it dependable in the only way a weapon ever really is, in the hands of soldiers who knew how to keep it running. And that, if anything, is a better story than a charm that worked by itself. Then there was the cartridge where the folklore runs thickest. The 7.

62 NATO round was a heavy, powerful projectile, and that gave the SLR real advantages in the kind of fighting Australians did. The bullet carried more mass and held more energy out to longer ranges than the smaller cartridges that came after it. It punched through light cover, thin timber, bamboo, the lattice of scrub with more authority than a lighter round.

 In country where the enemy was often half-seen, a shadow behind a screen of vegetation, a soldier had reason to believe a 7.62 round would carry through the green and still arrive with intent. That mattered to confidence, and confidence matters in a fight. The claims around it run well past the evidence. The 7.62 did not bore through jungle as if it weren’t there.

Any bullet can be deflected by vegetation. A heavy one less easily than a light one, but a stem in the wrong place will still turn it. It did not guarantee a one-shot stop, because no bullet guarantees that. Men are hit and keep fighting, and that is true of every caliber ever fielded. What the round gave the Australian was greater retained energy and more authority through light vegetation, and a justified belief that a hit through scrub would still count.

 That is the defensible claim. Anything beyond it is the gun shop talking, not the battlefield. There is a neat detail people like to repeat that the SLR shared its cartridge with the M60 machine gun, so a section ran on one kind of ammunition. That is true at the level of the cartridge. The 7.62 NATO round was common to both.

 The feeds were not. The M60 ran from a belt of linked rounds, and the SLR from a box magazine. So, you could not simply hand magazine ammunition to the gun, or strip belt rounds into a magazine without work. The commonality was real, and it simplified resupply at the depot. It did not mean a rifleman could top up the gun from his pouches in the middle of a contact.

 Now the bill for all that power, because the 7.62 cartridge charged a heavy price, and the SLR charged it twice. The rifle was long, and the rifle was heavy, and in close country a long rifle is a liability. It snags. It is slow to swing onto a target that appears at 3 m. The recoil that let it punch through cover also slowed a man’s follow-up shot, because the muzzle climbed and had to be brought back down.

 In standard service it fired one shot per trigger pull, which meant that in a sudden close screaming contact, the Australian could not answer a burst with a burst. And the magazine held 20 rounds. 20 rounds sounds like plenty until you were in a real fight. Then it is gone in seconds, and you are changing magazines while the man across from you is still firing, reloading was its own small discipline.

A man learned to feel when the rifle had gone light, to change the magazine without looking down, and to stow the empty rather than drop it, because empties had to go back to be refilled. In a lull, he topped up, pressing loose rounds into part-used magazines, so that every pouch on his webbing held a full one again before the next contact.

 None of that was hard on a quiet afternoon. Under fire, in the rain, with the section’s rate of fire telling the enemy how the fight was going, it was work done with cold hands while a man tried to watch his front. The 20-round magazine made that work more frequent than a larger box would have, and in a long fight, frequency is its own danger.

And the ammunition itself was heavy. This is the part that never makes the films. A 7.62 round weighs roughly twice what a 5.56 round weighs. So, for any fixed weight a soldier could carry, he carried far fewer 7.62 rounds than he would have carried of the smaller caliber. That arithmetic is brutal, and it is unforgiving.

 Because a rifleman does not carry only rifle ammunition, he carries water because in that heat, a man without water is a casualty by a different name. He carries radio batteries, grenades, a claymore or two, a shell dressing, and a field dressing pack, his share of the section machine gun belts, ration packs, a digging tool. Every single extra magazine of 7.

62 competed directly with something on that list. Add three magazines and you take off water, or grenades, or gun ammunition. There is no free weight. There never was. So, the SLR was not better in every category, and I won’t pretend it was. It was a powerful, dependable, heavy rifle that asked its owner to carry a great deal for a comparatively small number of rounds.

Whether that was the right bargain depended entirely on the kind of war you thought you were fighting. The Australians thought they were fighting a particular kind of war and they built the rifle into a section, not into a man. This is the thing the caliber arguments online always miss. The SLR was never meant to do everything by itself.

 In an Australian rifle section, firepower was assistant. You had your rifleman with the SLR delivering aimed controlled semi-automatic fire. You had the M60 general purpose machine gun, the gun throwing out sustained automatic fire that did the heavy suppression. You had grenades for ground you couldn’t see into.

 Claymores for the ambush and the harbor and behind all of it, when you could get it, the artillery and the mortars. In some roles and some periods, you had M16s in the section as well. The SLR rifleman was one instrument in that orchestra and a section’s killing power came from the parts working together and here is something the army itself worked out and it punctures another myth.

Australian fire was not a tidy row of marksmen each dropping a man with one perfect shot. Studies of how soldiers actually fight, Australian work included, found that effective fire came from the section behaving as a team putting controlled volume into likely and concealed positions, not from a fantasy of one shot, one kill.

 The rifleman aimed, yes, and the emphasis on marksmanship was real and useful, but much of the work was volume fire into ground where the enemy was suspected rather than seen. So, don’t let anyone sell you the idea that Australian marksmanship was a national superpower that won fights single-handed. The discipline was real, the system around it was what made the discipline pay.

Long Tan tested that system almost to destruction. Late on the afternoon of the 18th of August, Delta Company of the 6th Battalion, a bit over a hundred men, pushed east of the Nui Dat base into the Long Tan rubber following up a mortar and recoilless rifle attack on the base the night before.

 What they walked into was not a few stragglers. It was a force many times their size and the fight that followed turned into one of the hardest small unit actions Australia fought in the war. The rain came down in the way it only does in the monsoon, a solid drumming downpour that flattened sound, cut visibility to almost nothing under the canopy, and turned the red ground to slick mud.

 Into that the company fought and the ammunition problem we opened with stopped being a quartermaster’s footnote and became the most pressing fact in some of those men’s lives. Accounts of the individual load vary, but the common reconstruction is the one we began with. A rifleman with three loaded 20-round magazines has 60 rounds he can put down quickly.

 After that he is into the loose rounds in his pack and loose rounds have to be loaded into an empty magazine before they are any use. Picture doing that. You are face down in the mud in the rain. Rounds are coming back the other way. Your hands are wet and cold and not quite steady and you’re pressing rounds one at a time into a magazine by feel while the gun beside you screams through its belts and the company’s whole rate of fire is something the enemy can hear and judge.

 The machine guns ate ammunition at a rate no rifleman could match and they were the backbone of the defense. So they had to be fed. The company began to run low and the thing that saved it from running dry was the RAAF Iroquois helicopters flown in appalling weather, the kind of weather that gives pilots every reason to turn back, came in over the position and dropped ammunition to the company below.

Men cut open the boxes in the rain and got what they could forward. It was a near thing, and the men who flew those resupply missions earned every word that has ever been written about them. What the rifle did at Long Tan and what it did not do matters because the rubber is thick with mythology.

 The SLR kept individual men in the fight. It let a rifleman, when he had rounds in his magazine, put accurate, powerful fire into the assaulting waves and make them pay for the ground. But the SLR did not win Long Tan, and I won’t tell you it did. What kept Delta Company from being overrun was the artillery.

 The guns at Nui Dat, Australian batteries, and the New Zealanders of 161 Battery, Royal New Zealand Artillery, firing in support, brought down a wall of shellfire around the company, walked it in close, and broke up assault after assault. American guns added to the weight of fire through the wider fire support net.

 The rifle kept the men fighting, the guns kept the company alive. Confuse those two roles and you have not understood the battle. When it was over, 18 Australians were dead and many more wounded, and a great many of the enemy lay in the rubber, and the army sat down to learn from it, and one of the clearest lessons was about ammunition.

And it was sharper than people assumed. The lesson was not simply carry more bullets. It was make the bullets usable, because that is the real point hidden inside Long Tan. The problem was never only how many rounds a man had. It was how many of them were ready, sitting in a magazine, able to be fired the instant a fresh magazine clicked home.

 A man with 60 loose rounds in his pack and three empty magazines is, for the first critical seconds, a man with no rifle ammunition at all. He has to reach the rounds and load them and seat the magazine and check it, and only then is he back in the fight, and every one of those actions cost time he may not have. After Long Tan, the minimum a rifleman carried went up to something on the order of 140 rounds, but the more important change was about readiness.

Ammunition for emergency resupply began to be prepared already loaded into magazines, so that a man who ran his rifle dry could be handed a full magazine and be firing again in a second, rather than be handed a box and told to load. That is a small administrative change on paper. In the rubber, in the rain, it is the difference between a rifleman and a man kneeling in the mud trying to fill a magazine while the line thins out beside him.

 Now, turn the camera around because this is where the title earns its other half. While the Australians were learning to make their ammunition ready, the Americans were going through something far worse with their brand new rifle, and this is the institutional horror at the center of the story. The AR-15, which became the M-16, was on paper a clever and genuine answer to real problems the SLR could not solve.

It was light, its ammunition was light, a soldier could carry far more 5.56 rounds for the same weight, which meant he could keep fighting longer before he ran dry, the very problem Long Tan had just exposed. It fired on full automatic, so a man could answer a burst with a burst at close range. It was short and handy in thick vegetation, easy to bring up fast.

Early testing had produced real, justified enthusiasm for the design. None of that was a lie. The rifle had genuine virtues, and good people believed in it for good reasons, and then the fielding went wrong in a way that killed soldiers, and it went wrong above the heads of the men who paid for it.

 Several failures stacked on top of one another. The rifle was sold to the troops in some units as needing almost no maintenance, a self-cleaning weapon, the story went. So, the cleaning kits and the training that should have gone out with it were treated as optional and in places simply weren’t there. Then, the ammunition was changed.

 The propellant the rifle had been designed and tested around was swapped for a different powder and that powder behaved differently. It fouled more heavily and it pushed the rifle’s cyclic rate up, so the action ran faster and dirtier than the design had counted on. The early rifles did not have a chrome-plated chamber and in the heat and wet of Vietnam, the bare steel corroded.

 A pitted, fouled chamber grips a fired case. The extractor trying to pull that case out could tear straight through the rim of the cartridge and leave the case stuck fast in the chamber. That is the failure to extract and it was a nightmare in a firefight. The rifle is jammed with a spent case welded into the chamber by corrosion and fouling and the extractor has just ripped through the only thing it had to grip.

 You cannot clear that with a tug on the cocking handle. To get the case out, a man often had to push a cleaning rod down the muzzle all the way down the bore and physically ram the stuck case backwards out of the chamber. Do that on a range and it is an irritation. Do that under fire while you’re being assaulted and you’ve taken yourself out of the fight at the exact moment you most need to be in it.

 Soldiers met this failure in combat. It became serious enough that Congress investigated and an army review followed. The men here deserve care. The Americans who hit these stoppages were not careless fools. Many of them had been told their rifle barely needed cleaning and then handed no proper kit and no proper instruction. Some of them cleaned that weapon obsessively, did everything right, and still had it fail because the cause was in the ammunition and the chamber, not in their effort.

 Do not let anyone blame a dead soldier for a procurement decision made in an office he would never see. The reports that came out of the 1967 congressional hearings, including testimony describing men found beside rifles they had been trying to clear, are part of the record. And they should be cited as what they are, testimony presented to that investigation, evidence of a real and recurring failure.

 They are not a license to turn one terrible scene into a claim that this happened to every man with an M-16 everywhere. It did not, but it happened enough to enough soldiers that it ought never to have happened at all. And that is the actual horror in this story, not on the Australian side, but on the American one. It is the horror of a rifle with real promise being pushed into combat before the system behind it, the ammunition, the maintenance, the training, the chamber metallurgy, was ready to support it. And of soldiers discovering the gap

under fire. The villain is not the rifle, and it is certainly not the rifleman. It is the process that fielded the thing half finished and let men find the missing half the hard way. Because here is the part the caliber warriors leave out. The M-16 was not simply an American mistake parked next to a perfect Australian rifle.

 It was a different and serious answer to a real infantry problem. The very problem Long Tan had just written in blood. How do you give a soldier more immediately available firepower, more rounds, faster fire, without crushing him under the weight of his ammunition? The M-16’s answer was lighter rounds and automatic fire.

 The SLR’s answer was a heavier, more powerful, slower firing rifle that the soldier trusted. Both answers were honest attempts at the same question, and the Australians knew it. They were not blind loyalists. Australian soldiers used the M-16 in Vietnam, and they used it where its strengths fit the job. Where weight mattered, where automatic fire was useful, where a short handy weapon beat a long one.

 A scout out front, a commander who needed a hand free for a map and a radio, a signaler already loaded down with a set and batteries. Men on operations where carrying a great many rounds was the priority. These were men for whom the lighter rifle made plain sense. The mix of weapons changed by unit, by role, and by period.

 There was no single rigid allocation handed down for all time. Some men kept the SLR because they trusted its power and its ruggedness and would not trade those away. Others reached for the M-16 because the job in front of them rewarded weight and volume over rate and punch. That is a far stronger story than blind devotion to one rifle.

It is professionals choosing the right tool, and it tells you they understood both weapons honestly. There is one more strand, and it shows the Australian relationship with the SLR was clear-eyed rather than romantic. Some Australians wanted more volume of fire than the standard semi-automatic SLR would give them, and they went looking for it.

 In specialist hands, rifles were modified. Locally, sometimes unofficially, sometimes through sanctioned channels in units like the SAS. The general aim was to combine the things the soldier valued, the power of the 7.62 round, the ruggedness the men trusted, and a higher rate of fire. I’m not going to walk you through how any of that was done, because that is not what this is about.

 The historical point is simpler and more interesting. The same soldiers who trusted the SLR still recognized exactly where it fell short. They wanted its reliability and its punch, and they wanted automatic fire on top. And so, they tried to graft one onto the other. And the results were a reminder of physics. A full-power rifle on automatic is hard to control and empties a magazine in a heartbeat.

 The modified weapons were not super rifles. They were a workaround that traded controllability and ammunition economy for for volume. And the men who used them knew the trade they were making. The popular version of the load is too neat. You will read that every Australian before Long Tan carried five loaded 20-round magazines, 100-rounds ready to go.

 The available accounts point instead to about three loaded magazines with the rest as boxed or loose ammunition, and the exact figure varied from man to man. The number was never the whole problem. Readiness was. After Long Tan, the load increased to toward 140 rounds, and emergency ammunition was prepared already loaded into magazines.

 So, a man could be handed full magazines under fire instead of a box of loose rounds. So, set the two rifles side by side, honestly, as systems, not as slogans. The L1A1 was a mature design driven by a piston with an adjustable gas system that let it keep working when it was dirty. Firing a powerful cartridge through established cleaning routines that Australian soldiers knew cold.

 Its weaknesses were weight, length, recoil, 20-round magazines, semi-automatic fire only, and heavy ammunition that limited how much a man could carry. Its strength was that maintained and understood, it did what it was asked to do. The early M-16 was a light direct gas rifle firing light ammunition at a high rate, which let a soldier carry more and shoot faster.

 Exactly the qualities the SLR lacked. Its tragedy was in the fielding, a rushed adoption, a changed propellant that fouled and sped up the action, early chambers without chrome that corroded in the wet, cleaning kits and training that arrived late or not at all, and the extraction failures that followed. Notice what is on each side of that ledger.

 Don’t let anyone tell you direct gas operation is what made the M-16 unreliable. Plenty of direct gas rifles work perfectly well, and the piston-driven SLR could foul, too. And the M-16’s troubles were not caused by its smaller caliber. The caliber, the operating system, and the procurement failures are three separate things, and the disaster came from the procurement, not from the bullet size or the gas system’s layout.

Keep them separate, and the real lesson comes clear. And the story does not stop in 1967, because the Americans fixed it, and the fix matters as much as the failure. The M-16A1 brought a chrome-plated chamber, and later a chrome-plated bore, so the corrosion that had been gripping fired cases lost its hold.

 Proper cleaning kits went out, and proper instruction with them, including, famously, a plain-language maintenance booklet that finally told soldiers the rifle needed cleaning and how to do it. The maintenance guidance was rewritten, the issues around the ammunition and the buffer were addressed, and the forward assist, which let a soldier push a stubborn round fully into the chamber, was standardized on the A1.

Soldiers grew familiar with the weapon, its reliability improved substantially, not perfect overnight, and I won’t claim every problem vanished the day the A1 arrived. But the M-16A1 became a genuinely credible, successful service rifle, and the M-16 family went on to one of the longest service careers of any rifle in history.

Any honest verdict has to criticize the rushed transition and the institutional failures that cost lives. And then has to admit plainly that the platform recovered and went on to prove itself. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The other rifles in the rubber belong in the picture without taking it over.

 The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese carried a range of weapons. AK-47s and Chinese Type 56 copies, SKS carbines, older rifles, light machine guns, and whatever they captured. The AK gave its user automatic fire, a 30-round magazine, a rugged reputation, and an intermediate cartridge sitting between the SLR’s full-power round and the M16’s light one.

 It was a capable, dangerous weapon in capable, dangerous hands. And the men carrying it were a thinking, adapting enemy, not target. But this story is not the SLR against the AK. The comparison at its heart is narrower and more human. The Australian settled confidence in his SLR set against the Americans’ crisis of confidence in an M16 that had been sent to war before it was ready.

New Zealand belongs in this properly, not as a footnote. New Zealand infantry serving in the Anzac battalions also carried the SLR and operated inside the same combined tactical system. New Zealand artillery, 161 Battery, Royal New Zealand Artillery, was part of the gun line that broke up the assaults on Delta Company at Long Tan, integrated into the task force’s fire support system.

The New Zealanders were inside this story from the start. The American side requires equal care. In one compact stretch, the M16 addressed real problems the SLR could not, the weight of full power ammunition and the limited volume of fire. And Long Tan had just shown how much those problems could cost. Many American soldiers came to value the M-16 once it worked and once the A1 arrived it worked well and kept working for decades.

 The men who suffered the early failures did not choose them. Those decisions were made far above the firing line and the wider American effort, the aviation, the logistics, the artillery, the medical evacuation, the whole vast machine was woven through Australian operations and made much of what the Australians did possible. This is not a story about Australians being cleverer than Americans.

 The man with the failing rifle is not the villain. The villain is a system that put an unfinished weapon into combat and let soldiers discover the consequences with their lives. And there is a correction owed on the Australian side too, because loyalty to the SLR could curdle into something worth naming. The attachment to that rifle could become conservatism.

Its weight and its ammunition burden were real, persistent limitations, not just charming quirks. The section genuinely needed more automatic fire than a row of semi-automatic rifles could provide, which is why the M-60 mattered so much and why men reached for the M-16 and why some modified their SLRs.

 And in the end the argument was settled the way it was settled in most armies. The Australian Army retired the L1A1 and went to a lighter rifle firing the lighter 5.56 cartridge, the Steyr. The SLR was trusted in Vietnam. It was not the last word in infantry weapons and the reasons armies moved toward lighter rifles and lighter ammunition were good ones.

Nostalgia shouldn’t be allowed to erase them. Where are you watching from and which rifle did you carry? The SLR, the M16, the M14, the Steyr, or something else? I’d particularly like to hear from veterans who trusted one weapon and disliked the other and why. So, come back to the rubber at Long Tan one last time to the man with three loaded magazines and 60 loose rounds and the rain coming down.

The SLR he carried was not light. It was not modern and it was not generous with ammunition. It kicked, it dragged at his shoulders through every patrol, and 20 rounds could disappear with frightening speed once a real fight began. But, he understood the bargain he had made. He carried the weight, he managed the recoil, he cleaned the rifle every day, and he counted his magazines because in return he expected the weapon to hold up its end and fire when he pulled the trigger.

 The early M16 offered a better sounding bargain, lighter, faster, more rounds in the pouches, and it was handed to American soldiers before the whole system behind it was ready to keep the promise. That failure was real. It cost lives, and it was eventually put right. The rifle recovered, but the reputation of the two weapons in that period had already been written.

 At Long Tan, with his magazines running down in the rain and the assault still coming, the Australian did not need the lightest rifle in Vietnam. He needed the one he was sure would fire. He had it.