How nice! I go away for a couple of weeks and return to find all these new posts to read!

A couple of thoughts:

Quote Originally Posted by Richard W View Post
After the American five - man fire team went the way of the dinosaur something interesting happened. The Army authorized every Rifle Squad not one but two belt fed machine guns. One for each fire team.
I was there for that one. We thought we were pretty hot at the time, too!

For reasons I cannot understand the American Rifle Squad continued to soldier on through WWII, Korea and Vietnam without a belt fed machine gun. (I understand that some specialist units had one or more machine guns assigned to each rifle squad.) Apparently it was not until Gulf War I that most American Rifle Squads received their light machine guns.

But when they received the light machine guns the American Squads, for the first time in their history, suddenly had serious fire power at their disposal.
Yes, officially you're correct but let's make a distinction between what was official doctrine and what often happened in the field in Vietnam.

I've mentioned this a couple of times before (sorry to sound like a broken record): the rifle squad of that era didn't include the M60 at squad level but many Vietnam Vets remember employing the M60 at squad level as standard operating procedure anyway.

The usual Army squad in Vietnam wasn't 11 men in two fire teams (even if that was what the book called for). It seems to have been about six to eight soldiers with one M60, one M79, and a handful of riflemen with M16s.

So the "squad" itself was often, defacto, a large fire team and not a squad as we think of one: very similar to the German WWII squad, Paul Melody's proposed squad, and the fire teams in Wilf's proposed platoon.