M14 rifle - Wikipedia

The M14 was the rifle on which I was trained in boot camp. It was a good drill rifle and it was easy to learn to shoot. When I was in Vietnam and in a CAP unit, I traded my M16A2 "made by Mattel" rifle for an M14 with bipods, a selector switch and seven magazines. I got all the stripper clips I could find and loaded them with ball ammo stripped from machine gun belts. After a couple tries, I pretty much gave up on full-auto fire (it's difficult to handle in a relatively light rifle), but I could ding out to 500 meters on semi-auto! The rifle was easy to clean and one could dump a shovel of dirt into the receiver and it would still function, unlike the finicky M16A2. So, I kept a magazine in the weapon and had six reserve magazines, plus two or three belts of clips. In a firefight, once I emptied the first magazine, I just kept popping clips into the charger guide (like an M1903 Springfield) and kept firing. The other magazines were held in reserve. When I was at Marine Barracks, I was without my M14 rifle on qualification day, so the range officer let me qualify with a rifle that had just come out of 4th echelon maintentance. He gave me two sighter rounds at each yard line and I still was able to shoot 217 out of 250, just missing qualifying as an expert. So, yeah, I like this rifle! I'd get a civilian Springfield Armory M1A, but they are over $2k, way too much for my budget.

A very powerful weapon. A friend at Quantico got on the USMC Team as a leg shooter around 81. He did good in the Intramurals (M16A2 KD) and got selected from there. He fired the High Power matches at 600 yards, and had a gravy assignment. Carried his M14 around with all his gear in his station wagon, and basically shot for a living. We lived outside the Camp Barrett gate (TBS) and he only had a few miles aboard base to get to Weapons Training BN.

One of my favorite weapons of all time. I found a demilled military M14 in a pawn shop several years ago... still kick myself for not buying it.