During my two tours in Iraq, I learned several “hard” lessons about the limitations of the AR-15 platform that were never mentioned during training. Here is my story;
Growing up, my dad had a Colt SP-1 that he had purchased new back in 1977. Unlike most kids, I was fortunate enough to have grown up being familiar with the AR-15. During my high school years, Dad would take me and my brother shooting every Sunday and we never left the house without the SP-1.
Fast forward a few years; I graduated high school and joined the Marines. Between boot camp and Infantry School, I had fired thousands of rounds through my M-16. Hell, we shot so much that I remember one Marine at Infantry school say " I wish we would get to shoot something else", “I’m sick and tired of this M-16”. We also preformed regular cleaning and maintenance on our rifles. Needless to say, when I found out in 2004 that I was deploying to Iraq, I thought I knew everything there was to know about how to properly maintain my rifle.
During my first tour to Iraq, combat operations were running heavy and the enemy was eager to kill. Most of the missions that my unit conducted were based around either trying to liberate cities that were insurgent strong holds, searching for high value targets by setting up random vehicle checkpoints or conducting counter IED patrols along commonly traveled roadways. Roughly 2-3 times a weeks we would be hit with either IED’s followed by short coordinated ambushes, random mortar attacks and very rarely, sniper fire.
During these enemy encounters, I may only fire 10-20 rounds through my rifle before the fight was over. However, I noticed that I was experiencing FTF, FTE malfunctions. When I would return to base at the end of a mission, my rifle would be packed with a mixture of carbon and the fine power like Iraqi sand. I also noticed other Marines having similar malfunctions. In an attempt to fix this problem, I would clean my rifle and wipe off all the clp, giving the sand less of a sticky substance to adhere to. “IT WASNT WORKING”. I would still get a malfunction every so often. When I asked around, I noticed that malfunctions were happening less often to Marines that had newly issued magazines. Keep in mind that this was the era before Magpul anti-tilt followers and Pmags so all we had was the standard GI mags with the green or black followers.
I eventually came to the conclusion that the malfunctions were a result of several factors. It was a combination of the powder like sand grinding between the between the bolt carrier group and the upper receiver thus, slowing the bolt down and not allowing the rifle to cycle, leaving our magazines loaded for an extended period of time without taking our rounds out and relieving the spring tension, bad magazine followers and having so little time in between missions to properly maintenance or rifles.
That was almost 10 years ago. I have since discovered that this problem was common among troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since that time, products have hit the market that would fix most of these problems such as the development of pmags, anti-tilt followers, nickel boron bcg’s and sand resistant lubes such as militec and slip 2000. I often see people on this site dismiss piston driven AR’s and even though I have never fired a piston AR, I can see why it was loved among special operations units during the war on terror. I would theorize that the lack of carbon fowling on the bcg of piston AR’s, would help with the stoppages that were caused by the sand because less gunk would be entering the upper receiver.
Just thought I would share this story with you guys as we will go to war again and there is a good chance that it may be in a desert environment. These lessons can be passed on in training classes and may one day, save a life.
Those who choose to ignore it are simply acting on blind faith.