In the last century, I was a cadet at North Georgia College, one of the nation's six senior military colleges. Then, we had maybe 500 or so M14s in the Arms Room. I spent a lot of time at right shoulder arms with mine, and a lot of time walking through the mountains loaded with blanks. My M14 was a great, if heavy, rifle, but I never got to fire any live ammo from it.

Jump ahead a few years... I was back at the college as ROTC cadre, in fact as the advisor to the Combat Shooting Team. The school was down to a lot less M14s. They were replaced by M16A2s. I did get to take the old M14s out one day though. The Cadets, most of whom had not fired a 7.62 before, got to shoot about 1000 rounds of ball ammo. The ammo was on 5 round stripper clips. The inside of the crate was stamped 09/60. That stuff sat in an earthen bunker since the Eisenhower administration. I told the Cadets that it was built to shoot Russians in Germany.

We were shooting 50 year old rifles, with 50 year old ammo, and 50 year old magazines... 1000 rounds fired with no malfunctions. That is a tribute to the design.

After we shot up the 7.62, we went back to the M16s. They felt like pop guns after the M14s. I also started getting double and triple feeds. As an aside, most of those were magazine or maintenance related. ROTC is about dead last in priority for repair parts. I can certainly understand why the old timers held their M14s in such regard. They are both reliable and powerful.

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Proud anachronism