SEALs’ Weapon of Choice
Colonel Charles A. Jones U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired)
The February 2012 issue of Naval History featured an outstanding story about SEALs by Dick Couch (“SEALs: 50 Years & Counting,” pp. 16–23). On the issue’s cover was a SEAL with a weapon identified inside the magazine as a Stoner M63A1 light machine gun.
The Stoner was the signature weapon for SEALs in Vietnam and was one of two weapon systems invented by Eugene Stoner. Stoner’s most famous development was the M-16 weapon series. Lesser known is his Stoner 63 weapon system, comprising a basic design around which six weapons were based, including an assault rifle, a fixed machine gun, and the more popular light machine gun pictured on the cover of Naval History.
That particular light machine gun is an example of the model that fed from the left side of the weapon from a drum magazine holding 150 rounds of ammunition. The other Stoner light machine gun fed from the right side, from a box holding 100 rounds of ammunition.
The SEALs liked the Stoners and were the only combat unit to use them in significant numbers; Stoners never were general-issue weapons for the Marine Corps or Army. The Army refused to adopt them for various reasons, including a prejudice against the weapon and its 5.56-mm ammunition and because Stoners required more maintenance than the Army thought the average combatant could or was willing to perform. SEALs were much more conscientious about weapon maintenance.
Stoners served SEALs well because their high rate of fire produced prodigious firepower—one trademark of the way that SEALs fought and a characteristic that made SEAL teams so deadly.
As one former SEAL wrote me: “Great weapon! Lightweight, lots of firepower.” He added that with a combination of weapons such as Stoners, M-60 machine guns, M-14 and M-16 rifles, and grenade launchers, “we could put out the firepower of a company . . . for about 2–5 [minutes].”
Eugene Stoner, who served as an enlisted Marine in World War II, is buried at the Quantico National Cemetery in Triangle, Virginia.
A Lesson in Leadership
Captain Richard M. Trippe Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired), Master, U.S. Merchant Marine (Retired)
Mister Roberts (“Happy 65th Birthday, Mister Roberts,” December 2011, pp. 54–57) is a great fictional story by Thomas Heggen about the personnel on board a Navy auxiliary vessel during World War II. I have read or seen very few tales about the ships that supported the Fleet and our combat forces during wars. Meanwhile, readers and movie-goers have been flooded with stories about the battle actions of surface combatants and submarines.
If Mr. Heggen had lived longer, he might have overcome his depression and writer’s block to create more sea stories, perhaps interesting, historical short stories about life on board a cargo ship during wartime.
I agree with Commander Paul Stillwell’s statement (“In Contact,” April, p. 8) that Mister Roberts is a study of leadership, illustrated by Captain Morton’s bad leadership qualities and Mister Roberts’ good ones. During my five years on board Navy combatants and 41 years in U.S. Merchant Marine vessels, I sailed with several tyrants who claimed that they were using good management skills in place of good leadership principles. Their lack of leadership caused frequent personnel changes. Because of terrible leadership on board one Navy destroyer, I thought I was sailing in the USS Caine, and on board several merchant vessels I felt that I was in the Bounty.
When I was sailing master on board various types of commercial vessels, I spent time with the young deck officers while they were standing underway bridge watches. I told them sea stories about my career in order to develop their leadership qualities through example. The new officers noticed that most of the crew was made up of seamen who had sailed with me several times and had returned when they learned I was to captain the ship.
In addition to telling sea stories, I required the new third mates and engineering officers to watch the ship’s video copy of the movie Mister Roberts and observe the differences in leadership between Captain Morton and Mister Roberts. Except for personal example, this was the best training aid I had on the vessels I commanded.
Not in the Manuals
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hruska, Special Forces, U.S. Army Reserve (Retired)
Your article by Retired Captain Dick Couch, “SEALs: 50 Years & Counting” (February, pp. 16–23), featured a section titled, “Special Ops Forces, SEALs, and the bin Laden Takedown.”
Try as I might, there are no references in any of my Special Operations training manuals for the military option takedown.
Our politicians have already spoken of “taking out” military targets such as Osama bin Laden. When did these wrestling and Mafioso terms enter the lexicon of accepted military terms or practice? What’s next? Shakedowns? Are we gonna “whack” or “make” somebody?
The closest military action is a raid, which has a military purpose and is within the rules and practices of warfare. But raids are not conducted in the bedrooms of “castled kings,” even if they are terrorists. The OBL mission was pure theater and political in nature. If “takedown” equals simple assassination, then yes, it was a takedown—one that violated the sovereignty of Pakistan and accomplished little or nothing to the benefit of increased security in the United States.
USNI has compromised its integrity when it runs articles that use the terms of thuggery to describe military actions.
More on the Sea King
Norman Polmar
I am grateful for Sam Griffin’s additional material on the long-serving HSS-2/SH-3 Sea King helicopter (“In Contact,” April, pp. 9, 66; “Historic Aircraft,” February, pp. 12–13).
In service, rescue hoists often were removed from the early Sea Kings, hence their “reintroduction” in the later HH-3A model was noteworthy. Also, the definitive source for Sea King data—the Standard Aircraft Characteristics—for the SH-3A model (1 July 1967) lists “4 MK 44 (Mod. 0) torpedoes” among its armament options.
And, of course, the Sea King story could not be fully told nor illustrated in only two magazine pages. It was in many respects the “king” of helicopters.
Sloppy Virginia Conversion?
Nolan Nelson
The statement in John Quarstein’s article (“Proving the Power of Iron over Wood,” April, pp. 26–32) that Confederate Naval Constructor John L. Porter had miscalculated the CSS Virginia’s displacement prompted my memory about a passage from John S. Wise’s Civil War book, The End of an Era (Houghton Mifflin, 1899). Before the war his father, Henry Alexander Wise, had served in Congress and as ambassador to Brazil. He also had a strong interest in and an extensive layman’s knowledge of warships. His political prominence enabled personal friendships with Lieutenant John M. Brooke, who helped direct the conversion of the Merrimack into the Virginia, and Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, who commanded the ironclad. The applicable passage is as follows:
[My father] repeatedly expressed the opinion that she [the Virginia] was being built to draw too much water, and that her beak or ramming prow was improperly constructed in this, that it was horizontal at the top and sloped upward from the bottom, whereas it should have been horizontal on the bottom and made to slope downward to a point. When the ship was launched, he was indignant because the lower edge or eaves of her armor-clad covering stood several feet out of the water, and it was necessary to ballast her heavily to bring her sheathing below the water line. This increased her draught to eighteen feet, which was, as he declared, entirely unnecessary. He insisted that this condition was due to the failure of the naval architects (in calculating the water which she would draw when sheathed with iron) to deduct from the weight of her sheathing the weight of masts, spars, rigging, and sails, which were dispensed with.
In the same chapter the author relates his observations on the two days of battle at Hampton Roads. At the time Mr. Wise was 15. He was later one of the cadets from Virginia Military Institute who fought at the Battle of New Market. He obtained a Confederate Army lieutenant’s commission during the war’s final year.
Editor’s note: Henry A. Wise was also governor of Virginia from 1856 to 1860 and a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. His forces were defeated at the 7–8 February 1862 Battle of Roanoke Island, and he was at his home near Norfolk recuperating from illness when the Virginia was launched on 17 February.
Port-Side Carrier Bridges
Frank Mantle
Further to “U.S. Navy’s Multicarrier Experience” in the February issue (“In Contact,” pp. 8–9; “Pearl Harbor’s Overlooked Answer,” December 2011, pp. 16–21), during the 1970s I asked the late Japanese naval constructor Lieutenant Commander Shizuo Fukui why the Akagi and Hiryu had their bridges sited on their port sides. He told me that Japan intended to operate four carriers in a box formation and that this was found unsuccessful and dropped before the Pearl Harbor attack.
He also lifted a trapdoor in his studio floor and pulled out a complete set of sketch drawings of later Katsuragi-class carriers to be built entirely out of flat plates in a few months. He told me they calculated only a little loss of speed. I mention this because I have never since seen any reference to this project.