I’ve carried a handgun for most of my adult life. During that time, I’ve learned a lot of things about carrying concealed. Some of those lessons came from others who are more experienced, some came through the many training courses I’ve attended and some I learned on my own—the hard way.
The lore filtered down from American ground forces in Vietnam—and later from those in Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts—was that the M16 and its related M4 platform worked well when they worked, but sometimes failed spectacularly under various combinations of dust, dirt and heat.
This is the story of a "potato digger," more accurately a Model 1895 Browning belt-fed, air-cooled machine gun. The Model 1895 was designed by the creative genius of John M. Browning, manufactured by Colt and was the first American machine gun ever manufactured.