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thatguy96 said:
I also have no information to suggest that the USMC's "interim SAW," seen in the oob as the "M16 LMG" or something to that extent, was used in Vietnam at all, althought I'm more readily willing to believe I could be wrong about that.
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The M16 Saw is a regular M16. The guy designated as the M16 Saw gunner carried extra magazines, and was supposed to fire on full auto, whereas the other M16's were supposed to be fired on semi-auto. I was in the 82nd ABD in 1984 and we still did this, although we got the real saw shortly after my arrival.
At the time, the M16 SAW didn't seem so stupid, as i was trained to just do as i was told. Now that i'm a bit older, i think it was just a really stupid way to pretend we had a SAW when we didn't. It didn't even have a heavy barrel attached, although i remember seeing a really cheap clip-on bipod.
Oh, and i think the reason for the 'fire team' based unit is so that you can play very small scale scenarios, where having the squad broke down into three component parts was appropriate. It is a regular Marine squad, just subdivided. It might be good for certian defensive battles, spec-ops type missions. I think it would suck for assaults.