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.”
