Enter to win this awesome Black Hawk Down M14 Clone!
https://www.fanathem.com/forgottenweapons
Deadline to enter is 9/27/2024 @ 11:59 PM PST
Sergeant Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon were both awarded posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor for their actions in Mogadishu in October 1993. As portrayed in the film “Black Hawk Down”, the two Delta Force men volunteered (demanded, really) to be dropped onto the wreck of Super 6-4 alone to defend it against a huge number of Somalis, with no idea when backup might arrive. Because of their heroism, pilot Mike Durant survived to make it home.
The Delta Force operators in Task Force Ranger on that mission had wide latitude in choosing their own weapons, and Shughart had chosen to carry a 7.62x51mm rifle; an M14. He fitted it out with an Aimpoint red dot sight and an AIM1 infrared laser. In the film, this rifle is shown without a laser, and with an Aimpoint CompM2 optic – a model that was not introduced until two years after the events in Mogadishu. It is not known exactly which model of Aimpoint Shughart used, as both Aimpoint 3000s and 5000s were available and used by Delta around that time (and they look very similar) – but it was definitely not a CompM2.
That said, those are really the only substantive technical errors with the weapons in the film.
The clone shown in this video was built on an early Springfield M1A with a bunch of original military parts. It uses an Aimpoint 3000, AIM1/D laser, and M21-type scope mount. The desert camo is a simple spray paint job, as done by many of the Delta operators at that time.
Wow. You spotted a historical glitter in a Hollywood flick. Guess that makes you the second best thing to a real Delta Force trooper. Making the world safe for…for what? Clinton’s policy dictator to him by the architects of the NWO. You must be like really proud.
Wrong site bud, not a political corner.
Take it somewhere else.
“War is merely the continuation of politics with other means” Carl von Clausewitz
One sees all manner of politically charged comments in these threads. It is naive to think one can write of war in politically neutral terms.
Like many people Ian referred to the “Congressional” Medal of Honor. It is the Medal of Honor. On another note, back in 1977-1978 when I was a company commander in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) I had an M14 that was earmarked to my Scout Platoon. This was a 7.62mm rifle. I remember it having a scope. It was intended to be use as a sniper weapon. All the other rifles were M16A1s. The M14 was in pristine condition. The platoon Seargent of the Scout Platoon insisted on carring this weapon.
Someone who was in the Ranger element at Mogadishu told me that the Delta Force operators that had the M14s were actually carrying heavily worked-over M21s or M25s that only looked like they were stock M14 rifles because they’d had the ART II scopes taken off for missions.
I honestly don’t know the “real deal” on that one, but I also don’t know how the hell you’d be able to tell the difference unless you got up close enough to compare the receiver markings and serial numbers. My informant knew the difference between the M14 and M21/25, as he’d been assigned as a sniper in the Ranger Regiment at one point, and had actually been issued an M21. A lot of the difference between the two weapons was down to the scope, special selection for National Match accuracy, and the rifles getting more attention in regards to fitting and maintenance, sooooo… I dunno that the difference is actually all that great.
In any event, anything coming out of the Delta Force arms room is highly unlikely to be even remotely comparable to a standard-issue weapon from out in the general fleet of that sort of weapon in the rest of the military. Even the Rangers had a full-time civilian armorer who did nothing but maintenance and “massage” on the issued weapons; to my knowledge, the fleet of Ranger M21 rifles was about the only place in the Active Army of the 1980s-90s that had consistently operable M21 rifles that actually got used; most Infantry outfits that had the things left them in their arms rooms because they were simply too damn hard to keep going and get to maintain zero. You had to have an armorer who knew what the hell he was doing with one, and those were impossibly rare outside the Rangers, SF, and the Marksmanship Training Units.
I am guessing that the “Blackhawk Down” armorers substituted the Aimpoint CompM2 RDS for the original Aimpoint 3000 / 5000 sights simply because it was near-impossible to procure the latter by the time the movie was produced in 2001. Likewise, the absence of the AIM-1/D laser in the movie can probably be explained for the same reason. All the same, the sheer effort by Director Ridley Scott’s team that went into accurately reproducing the event and authenticity of the period in question is to be greatly appreciated.
FYI the Comp M/ML was available to the military in 93.
Somewhere in Somalia, two families’ most prized possessions are the guns they took off the Gordon and Shugart that day.
Just minor addition, as far as I know these two Medals of Honor are the only two awarded in peacetime.
I beg to differ.
The last actual declared war was WWII. Everything since then has been “peacetime”. Literally all post-WWII Medal of Honor bestowals have been “peacetime”, for whatever that’s worth.
They had to go back and rework a lot of the language in the laws and regulations governing wartime/peacetime awards. If I remember rightly, the early bits of the Korean War saw some rather byzantine regulatory hoops being run through by the administrative types, because things could not be given out under the strict letter of the laws that were in force at that time. Minor little issues like combat service stripes couldn’t be awarded, because “Police Action”.
Not sure I agree with the rationale, but precisely zero “wartime” anythings have technically taken place since the end of WWII.
“(…)these two Medals of Honor are the only two awarded in peacetime.”
This is not true. Coxswain Halford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Halford
was awarded said medal for boating distance of fourteen hundred miles from immobilized U.S. STEAMER SAGINAW—FOURTH-RATE to Sandwich Islands in 1870 in order to summon help for said ship.
The Last Cruise of the SaginawGIG, used for said travel, which should help comprehend said feat.
The Last Cruise of the Saginaw is available at https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/32170