The HORRORS of the M79 Grenade Launcher in Vietnam 

The HORRORS of the M79 Grenade Launcher in Vietnam 

One machine gunner told me how he fought back. When they come at us at 4:00 in the morning, we were ready for them. In one machine gun hole, we had three laws, 3,000 rounds of ammo and three M16 guns and one machine gun and about 30 hand grenades. What’ you do with this thing here? We brought natural bone smoke.

We burned up about three barrels in this machine gun and knocked out about three machine gun crews of VCs. How many do you think you killed yourself? Well, I really fair to say I’d say around 40 or 50, maybe maybe even more. In November 1965, a 22-year-old farm kid from Minnesota named Galen Bungum carried a weapon that looked like an oversized saw-off shotgun into the jungles of Vietnam’s central highlands.

He was supposed to be on a flight to Bangkok for R&R that morning. Instead, his sergeant told him to get his ammunition back. Hours later, Bungam found himself surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers with only 18 rounds for his M79 grenade launcher and a45 pistol. The weapon in his hands could turn a single soldier into a one-man artillery battery.

 It could clear bunkers, stop human wave attacks, and level the playing field against an enemy that outnumbered American squads 10 to1. But that same weapon came with a terrible cost. It made him a walking target. It left him defenseless at close range. And in the dense jungles of Vietnam, close range was where most firefights happened.

 This is the story of the M79. The weapon that brought devastation to the enemy and horror to the men who carried it. The M79’s origins trace back to the frozen hills of Korea, where American soldiers faced a terrifying problem. Hand grenades could only be thrown 40 m. Mortars needed entire crews to operate, and the rifle grenades of that era were wildly inaccurate with brutal recoil that sometimes injured the men firing them.

 In 1952, the Army launched Project Nibck at Springfield Armory with a simple goal. Give the individual soldier the ability to put an explosive round on target at ranges between 50 and 400 m without needing a fire support team. What they created was elegantly brutal. A breakaction singleshot launcher that fired a 40mm grenade using what the army called the high low propulsion system.

This ingenious mechanism kept recoil manageable while still launching a grenade over 350 m with accuracy that rifle grenades could never match. On December 15th, 1960, the Army adopted the weapon as the M79. By 1961, the first units arrived in Vietnam with American advisers. Within four years, over 350,000 would be manufactured.

 The soldiers who carried it gave it names. The thumper for its distinctive firing sound. The blooper for the noise the round made in flight. The bloop tube. Big Ed. But the name that stuck was one of respect. The platoon leader artillery. For the first time in military history, a single infantryman could deliver what amounted to precision artillery fire.

And in the jungles of Vietnam, that capability would prove both devastating and deadly in ways no one anticipated. Every American infantry squad in Vietnam included two grenaders. These men carried the M79 not as a secondary weapon, but as their primary arm. And that decision came with consequences that shaped their entire combat experience.

 A standard Grenadier’s loadout included the M79 3640mm rounds and a single M1911 A1 pistol with just three magazines of ammunition. The grenades alone weighed over 18 lb. add water, rations, the weapon itself, and the grenadier was carrying between 60 and 90 lb through jungle that hit 100° with near total humidity.

The ammunition selection gave Grenaders flexibility that no other squad member possessed. The M406 high explosive round could clear bunkers and tree lines. The M576 buckshot round turned the launcher into a devastating close quarters weapon. Illumination rounds could turn night into day.

 Smoke rounds could mark targets or provide cover. But here’s where the horror began for the men who carried this weapon. The M406 high explosive round had a minimum arming distance of between 14 and 27 m. That meant if the enemy was closer than 50 feet, the grenade would not detonate. It would hit them. Yes, it might kill them from blunt force trauma, but it would not explode.

 And in Vietnam’s Triple Canopy Jungle, the enemy was almost always closer than 50 ft. One veteran from the 327th Infantry described a close ambush near Hugh in terrifying terms. The VC were about 20 ft in front of them. He fired his M79 repeatedly, but all he was doing was knocking them down. He heard no explosions. The rounds weren’t army.

 The Grenadier also faced another brutal reality. He was the only man in his squad without an automatic weapon. While his brothers carried M16s with 20 round magazines and full auto capability, the Grenadier had a singleshot weapon and a seven round pistol. Every time he fired, he had to break open the weapon, eject the spent casing, load a new round, close the breach, and acquire a new target.

 In a firefight where the enemy could fire hundreds of rounds per minute, the grenadier got off five to seven aimed shots at best. And the enemy knew this. The North Vietnamese Army and Vietkong had no equivalent to the M79 at the squad level. Their soldiers faced American grenaders who could place explosive rounds with accuracy at ranges where the VC could do nothing but die.

The EM46 high explosive round contained 32 g of composition B explosive. On detonation, it produced over 300 steel fragments. The kill radius was 5 m, but the casualty radius extended to 130 m. A single well-placed round could wound an entire squad. The North Vietnamese commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nuan Hu an studied these capabilities and developed a counter tactic that would shape the entire war.

 The tactic was called hugging. NVA forces would close with American units so [snorts] rapidly and so tightly that the M79 became useless. At ranges under 30 m, the grenade wouldn’t arm. At ranges where bodies were intermingled, American grenaders couldn’t fire without risking their own men. At IA Drang, this tactic was demonstrated with devastating effectiveness.

The NVA pressed their attacks so close that American artillery and air support became nearly unusable. The fighting deval to hand-to-hand combat. The M79’s advantages evaporated. But the enemy had another problem to solve. the Grenadier himself. The M79 had a distinctive silhouette. Unlike the M16, which blended into the chaos of infantry equipment, the stubby, fatbarreled grenade launcher was immediately identifiable.

VC snipers and ambush teams were trained to target grenaders first. Kill the grenadier and you eliminated the squad’s organic artillery. This made the Grenadier both the most valuable and most endangered man in the patrol. Despite its limitations, the M79 saved countless American lives in situations where nothing else could.

 Against fortified positions, the M79 was devastating. A skilled grenadier could drop rounds directly into fighting holes through bunker apertures and behind cover that stopped rifle fire completely. The weapon turned individual soldiers into bunker busters. At landing zone x-ray during the battle of Eadrang, grenaders played critical roles in repelling human wave attacks.

 The M79’s ability to break up masked formations before they reached American lines was the difference between survival and slaughter. One account from the battle describes a grenadier who fired rounds so rapidly his weapon became too hot to hold. The distinctive thunk thunkk thunk of multiple M79s firing in coordination could suppress enemy movement across entire sectors.

 But perhaps the M790’s most terrifying application came with the M397 air burst round. Normal high explosive rounds were defeated by simple terrain. An enemy soldier who went prone presented almost no target. The explosion would scatter harmlessly above him. The M397 solved this problem through horror. The round contained a small charge that detonated on impact and bounced the grenade approximately 5 ft into the air.

 The main charge then exploded above the prone soldier, raining fragments straight down onto him. There was no cover, no position that could protect against an explosion coming from above. The Vietnamese called these rounds something that roughly translates to jumping death. The wounds from M79 fragmenting rounds were catastrophic.

Unlike bullet wounds, which created relatively clean entry and exit points, the 300 plus steel fragments from an M406 round shredded everything in their path. Field surgeons described removing dozens of fragments from single casualties. This wasn’t just killing. This was industrial dismemberment delivered by a single soldier.

While conventional forces struggled with the M79’s limitations, one group of soldiers found ways to turn the weapon into something even more deadly. M A CVs OG reconnaissance teams operated deep behind enemy lines. Often just six Americans leading a handful of indigenous troops against entire NVA battalions.

 They couldn’t carry the weight of standard M79s. They couldn’t afford the singleshot vulnerability, so they modified the weapon. SOG operators sawed down the M79’s barrel in stock, creating what was essentially a handheld grenade launcher small enough to fit in a holster. These modified pirate guns could be drawn and fired in seconds.

 According to John Striker Meyer of Spike Team Idaho, every American on his team carried a sawed off M79 with at least 12 rounds. They called it their break contact weapon. When things went bad, the team would open up with M79s, filling the jungle with explosions while they ran. These teams preferred the M79 over the newer M203 underbarrel launcher that the Army introduced in 1969.

The M203 was convenient, but its 150 m effective range couldn’t match the M79’s 350 m of accuracy. For a six-man team trying to break contact with a company of NVA, that extra range was the difference between escape and annihilation. The special operations community’s respect for the M79 lasted for decades.

 Navy Seals and Special Forces units continued carrying modified M79s into Iraq and Afghanistan long after conventional forces had moved on to newer weapons. Some weapons become obsolete. The M79 became a legend. The Army officially replaced the M79 with the M23 underbarrel launcher beginning in 1969. The last conventional units phased out the weapon by 1975.

But the M79 never truly disappeared. The weapon saw service in Cambodia, the Faullands, Colombia, the Philippines, and dozens of other conflicts. Its simplicity made it reliable. Its punch made it effective. Its accuracy made it irreplaceable for certain missions. As late as 2007, American special operators in Iraq and Afghanistan still preferred the M79 for specific applications.

 When you needed to put a grenade exactly where it needed to go at 350 m, the 60-year-old design outperformed everything that came after it. But the true legacy of the M79 isn’t measured in specifications or combat effectiveness. It’s measured in the men who carried it. The grenaders who walked point with a weapon that made them both protector and target.

 The specialists who carried 18 pounds of explosive rounds through jungles designed to kill them. The soldiers who faced human wave attacks with five rounds per minute and a prayer. Men like Galen Bungum, the farm kid from Minnesota who survived 25 hours of hell at Ayad Drang with half his normal ammunition load. He earned the Bronze Star for actions during that battle.

 He went home to Minnesota and never forgot what the M79 could do. What it did to the enemy, what it cost him and his brothers to carry it. The M79 represented a fundamental truth about warfare in Vietnam. Every advantage came with a cost. Every weapon that could save you also painted a target on your back.

 Every round that devastated the enemy also marked you for death. The horror of the M79 wasn’t just what it did to the men on the receiving end. It was what it demanded from the men who carried it. The special operators who sawed down their M79s who carried them alongside C15s and modified weapons that no conventional unit would recognize.

 They understood something that the regular army was still learning. In Vietnam, standard gear got you killed. If you want to know why Vietnam’s most dangerous units, the LRPS and MACVS recon teams refused to carry standard issue equipment. That story reveals everything about how the war was really fought behind enemy lines.

 Click the video on screen now to see what happened when six Americans faced off against entire NVA battalions with nothing but modified weapons and a plan to disappear.