8/13/10

Sweet Mother Mary, that hurts. My finger is pulsating with pain, sharp excruciating stabs of agony as I learn one of the many lessons of how to handle select foreign arms, not all of which are nearly so painful. But what is imprinted forever in my brain is this: If you disassemble a Soviet DShK heavy machine gun, don’t let the feed cover fall on your finger!

“Get you, did it?” instructor Matt Babb asks with a devilish grin. “I told you to keep that cover locked back.” Like all hard-bitten old salts, Babb seems to take a secret sadistic pleasure in seeing one of his students dance around holding his finger, thereby proving his keep-the-cover-locked point.

Of course this is nothing compared to what would happen if I put my hand in the path of the big gun’s recoil spring tube. “Digits will fly!” Babb says menacingly. “Do not put your hand anywhere near the barrel when you release the bolt!”

The DShK is pronounced “Dushka,” which means “sweetie” in Russian, an ironic nickname. The Dushka is not sweet. It’s a heavy, ungainly, massive hunk of Russian steel. It fires the 12.7x109 mm cartridge, the Communist Bloc equivalent of our .50 BMG, and it’s one of more than a dozen foreign military arms I’ve set about studying at Long Mountain Outfitters in Henderson, Nev., during a five-day class focusing on the firearms that our troops are currently encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eight of the 11 students in my class are from the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey: four mechanical engineers, two ammunition specialists and a pair of Army and Marine veterans, who for all the world look like they’re twins from different mothers. Still sporting regulation haircuts, Tom and Alan are barrel-chested senior NCOs (retired) who handle the real-world test firing of small arms in the ARDEC division of Picatinny. They allow the engineers about a half-inch of slack.

We’re here to learn everything about the guns of the Gulf. I expect to see various AK-47s and maybe some SKSs, but I’m mildly surprised when class starts with Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles. Yes, there are still a lot of old World War I-era bolt-action rifles floating around in the hinterlands of the sandbox.

“The Mosin-Nagant is a Russian service rifle that fires the longest-serving military cartridge in the world,” Babb, a military small arms expert and gunsmith, tells us. “The 7.62x54 mm R is over 100 years old and it’s still in service in guns like the PKM, which we’ll see later in class.”

Babb shows us how to function check a rifle, a fundamental test that he will demand we perform on every arm we subsequently cover. “Always start with a function check, always end with a function check,” he instructs us.

“It’s a very Russian rifle,” Babb says of the Mosin-Nagant. “Simple. Brutally simple. It’s made for peasants, by peasants. Russian military doctrine was to arm as many conscripts as possible with as little training as possible, so their guns are basic.”

We next move to the French MAS 36, another bolt-action firing a 7.5x54 mm (French) cartridge. The variant we take apart comes with a rifle grenade launcher. The gun has a spike-shaped bayonet in the stock, under the barrel where you normally find a cleaning rod.

From France we cross the channel to England and the Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE). The Brits are prone to over-engineering, like the Germans, and we find that the SMLE is enormously complicated compared to the MAS or the Mosin-Nagant. Babb shows us how to remove the detachable box magazine, but tells us that British troops were not issued replacements. “You didn’t change magazines to reload as you’d think. You reloaded the one that came with the rifle,” he said.

“The cock-on-closing of the Lee-Enfield is very fast once you get used to it,” he added. “The Germans often thought they were up against a machine gun when in fact it was just a company of Limeys who knew how to work their Lee-Enfields. They’re very fast.”

The legendary Mauser 98 is another old warhorse encountered in theater, so we learn how to fieldstrip it. The bolt is a marvel of design with its controlled-round feeding handled by its massive claw extractor. “The Mauser is still a good, solid weapon system,” Babb opines. I notice he refers to every firearm in the parlance of the military as a “weapon system.”

8/13/10

The famous Russian arms designer Sergey Simonov developed the Samozaryadnyj Karabin Simonova (Simonov Self-Loading Carbine), better known as the SKS, around the then-new 7.62x39 mm cartridge, which came about as part of the whole push for an intermediate “assault rifle” in the Great Patriotic War—what the rest of us call World War II. The SKS uses the Simonov locking system about which Matt Babb is quick to point out, “Some people say this is a weak action.” He pauses for effect. “Folks, this is a miniaturized PTRS anti-tank rifle. It’s a plenty tough action.”

Each student disassembles his own SKS. I lift the take-down lever on the left side of the trunnion, I remove the gas piston and I see how it moves to impact a short-stroke connecting rod that in turn hits the bolt. Ingenious. I’m looking at a short-stroke gas piston system in its purest form. I will see more examples of the short-stroke system as the class progresses.

We detour from rifles to pistols, starting with a Tokarev. It’s reminiscent of an M1911 so I find myself at home as I remove the slide stop, take out a barrel bushing and expose a barrel with a Browning-style pivoting link. Babb tells us to remove the grips via an elegantly simple rotating lever inside the magazine well.

We now remove the trigger pack and disassemble it. And I thought it was hard to get the disconnector and sear back in the M1911. I finally get the Tokarev’s pesky hammer spring to stay in place while I reinsert a pin. I breathe a sign of relief as those ingenious grip panels snick back into place.

The Makarov is a Russian knock-off of the German PP or PPK/s. It’s a simple blowback-operated pistol (meaning it doesn’t have a locked breech), chambered for the 9x18 mm Makarov cartridge. Babb explains a feature on the Makarov that sheds light on a lot of other designs: the magazine release.

“Europeans want a heel-release because they feel that the magazine should be retained with the gun. They’re not into high-speed reloads and leaving mags all over the place,” he says. Another handgun found in the sandbox is the Beretta 951 or Iraqi Tariq pistol, an open-slide design that’s the progenitor of the current 92FS. Tomorrow will be big: We will tackle the AK-47.

8/13/10

The iconic AK-47 is not what you might have been led to think, Matt Babb says. “You’ve probably heard the spiel. Mikhail Kalashnikov, a brilliant arms designer, is convalescing in a hospital when inspiration strikes and he designs the AK-47. Folks, it didn’t happen like that. It wasn’t until his sixth prototype that Kalashnikov finally got it right. That was the ‘first’ AK-47. He himself admits that he looked at the M1 Garand as part of his inspiration for the weapon system.”

Having debunked part of the AK myth, Matt walks us through how to strip the gun and why it is such a brutally simple, typically Russian design. The top cover pops off easily, allowing you to remove the recoil spring, which is captive so it doesn’t fly across the room and hit the Picatinny guys. The bolt assembly comes right out with the gas piston attached. From there, you’re three pins away from having the trigger assembly apart. We’re taking apart a select-fire AK-47 since this is a military firearms class, so we see how the auto sear also serves as an out-of-battery safety to prevent the rifle from firing if the bolt isn’t fully closed. We remove the three pins and take out the hammer, sear, cyclic rate reducer, trigger and auto sear.