One of the toys in my work shop at SOLID ANCHOR was an M21 rifle (sniper's) and a Sionics sound suppressor. [The M21 is an accurized National Match M14 with a Leatherwood 3x9 power Adjusting Range Telescopic (ART) scope.]  I decided that the rifle might come in handy for us, but we did not have any of the 7.62mm M118 Special Ball ammunition for it.  However, we did have lots of linked M80 Ball and M62 Tracer ammunition.  I figured that about 200 rounds would do it for this beast, but delinking all that ammo was going to be a pain. 

 

The solution was very simple: I would run two 100-round belts through the feeder/delinker of the Mini-gun on the HSSC.  Unlike most machine guns, the Mini-gun (a 7.62mm rotary barrel gun on the "Gatling" principle) is electrically driven.  So I grabbed an ammo box of 200-rounds and hiked over to our boat.  Once on the boat, I removed the connector plug on the feed solenoid to the feeder/delinker of the gun.  Without electricity, the feed solenoid would not activate the feed lever and allow ammunition to move from the feeder/delinker to the gun for firing.  Instead, the ammunition would just cycle through the feeder/delinker and fall into a large, gray 20mm ammo box directly beneath the gun.

 

I detacted the feed chute and ammo from the feeder delinker, fed the first 100-round belt into the gun, rotated the barrel cluster by hand until the first link and round dropped out.  Everything was ready.  I set the cutoff switch to ARM and squeezed the left trigger.  The electric motor pulled the belt through the feeder/delinker at the equivalent of 2,000 rounds per minute.  I loaded in the second belt and did the same thing.  Now I had 200 loose rounds of ball and tracer plus links in the ammo can.  I separated out the links and tracers to get 160 ball rounds.

 

Back at the work shop, I loaded up a couple of magazines and took the rifle out to our improvised range by the edge of the uncompleted airstrip.  It took me about 20 rounds to get the rifle scope zeroed for me to where I could hit targets.  In this case we had lots of half-fish, half-amphibians that were all over the mud flats by the airstrip -- we called them lung fish because they could breathe air and water and walk about on the mud using their front fins.

 

Once the rifle was zeroed, I told the SEALs that we had a rifle that could reach out and touch someone if needed.  Unfortunately, our op area was a thick mangrove swamp, and there weren't very many places to employ the M21.  I mentioned that we also had a sound suppressor.  This DID interest the platoons. 

 

I took the rifle back to the shop, removed the flash suppressor, and installed the Sionics sound suppressor.  The purpose of the suppressor is not to "silence" the rifle shot.  This is impossible because the M80 ball round is supersonic at 2,750 feet per second.  The purpose of the suppressor is to muffle the shot in such a manner as to confuse an observer where the shot is coming from or to so blend with background noise that it is not heard.  At night the suppressor is designed to completely eliminate any muzzle flash.

 

The next time we went out for a daylight recon of the area, I took the now-suppressed M21.  After we got our recon done, I broke out the M21 for some testing.  All of us knew how loud the rifle was without the suppressor, but with the suppressor it was a completely different.  I cranked off several shots and we all marveled at how loud the action of the rifle was.  I clanked and clunked like none of us had heard before because the muzzle blast had completely masked the operational noise.  We then turned the gas spindle to OFF to make the rifle a stright-pull, single shot weapon.   Here the suppressor really came into its own.  Without the gas operated action making noise, the rifle really was "whispering death."

 

The tactical reality remained.  Even with all those good attributes going for it, we were never able to successfully employ our suppressed M21 because the ranges were just too short.