I think this is retro related, if not I apologize. I've heard this myth many times over the years regarding the enemy being able to shoot our ammo out of their AK's during the Vietnam war, but we were unable to shoot their ammo out of our rifles. Does anybody know how this got started? I'm guessing a similar story to the "Mattel" M16's that were issued? My own father (a Vietnam combat vet) even echoed that myth when he bought me my first Norinco AK back in 1989 when I was only 16. I've owned dozens of AK's and AR's over my lifetime and fired thousands of rounds through captured AK's when I was in Iraq, never even attempted to chamber a 5.56 round in a 7.62x39 AK. Anyone have a clue? Thanks!
Phil

Sounds like a terrible idea

Only one way to find out! Would make a good youtube vid

I think it started before the M16, people being ignorant about 7.62x51 vs the combloc 7.62 calibers.

Thats what I heard 40 years ago x51 shorter than x54 so the 7.62x51 would fit in the x54 chamber but not the other way around...
I never tried it....

Well.. Yes it is absolutely true, but not from a standpoint that you may think.

MACV-SOG carried out missions where they tainted NVA ammo stashes
with 7.62x39 that exploded. Powerful enough to kill or seriously injure
the little Commie bastard that pulled the trigger.

These missions were called "Eldest Son" aka "Italian Green", "Pole Bean".

The rumors of NVA AK's and SKS's blowing up, and collected battlefield evidence,
lead to many American units banning the use of captured COMBLOC ammo for
those Americans that used AK's, etc.

A not so well kept secret of the VietNam War.

America indeed had friendly, trustful 7.62x39 made, and it was used
in SE Asia.

This applies to MORTAR ammo...

US & NATO uses 81mm mortars

RUSSIANS - Chinese ect... (ComBloc) uses 82mm mortars.

You can fire a NATO 81mm mortar shell from a Comblock 82mm mortar

You CAN NOT fire a Comblock 82mm shell from a NATO 81 mm mortar...

There You Go!  

BIGGER_HAMMER

Funny you should mention this.
The other day, letting a friend shoot my AK, I verified that you CAN shoot 5.56 out of a 7.62x39 AK.
Unintentionally.
I thought it was a squib, especially when I found this case jammed in the chamber.

Attached File

Attached File

It shocks and disturbs me how often this ^^^ happens.

I grew up in the 1960s hearing all sorts of rumors, including VC women hiding razor blades to maim US GIs....but I distinctly remember hearing that ALL our ammo could be fired in Soviet or Chinese weapons, including mortars, rifles, pistols & that the AK round “killed” more effectively than the 5.56 which was designed to maim.  And, related to the maiming, the VC would kill their wounded soldiers rather than carry them & not complete their mission.

Oy!  Our one babysitter was an antiwar protestor & I used to get to hear rhetoric every time he watched us.  I liked it better when his sister finally took over—she was pretty & didn’t smell like a Hippy....

Anyhoo, there was so much misinformation & erroneous BS during the 1960s-1970s regarding Vietnam, no wonder the politicians kept us from winning.  They took guidance from an ignorant populace instead of military doctrine.

ETA: proper correction about the outcome.
Mea culpa

IMO we did not lose, we were not allowed to win.

Stumpdog—thank you for catching my error—I fixed it.

We went into VN with M14's and those who are issued weapons are often trained in how to operate them but sleep thru nomenclature and disassembly. Not their MOS.

When you trace the origins of the comments it then goes to 9 out of 10 soldiers are NOT combat arms and are NOT qualified to open their yap about weapons. Yet, being 90% of the signal they get the majority of the bandwidth and everybody repeats their BS.

If you see five guys in a garage, are they all qualified mechanics? Nope. One might be the car owner, another is a delivery driver for the auto parts shops, another the route salesman for a competitor, the forth the office girl, and the fifth the overworked and underpaid mechanic signing for the parts while getting harangued by all the others. The media comes in, asks questions, and reprints all their answers as authoritative. 4 out of 5 have no expertise to speak about auto repair but when you read the article the mechanic's opinion is heavily outweighed.

Non combat arms used to perpetuate all sorts of misinformation. It was with much joy seeing their display sites during Branch choice demonstrations on post and discussing the actual about their defenses if the OPFOR really wanted them taken out. Spend a cycle in the box at Polk or Irwin and it really comes home. At least with Infantry you know what to expect, instead of the cultural misinformation about "front lines" and "safe rear areas" etc.

Now it's very much expected ANYONE can suffer an attack and has to engage their own self defense. Therefore, most soldiers these days are more informed about combat and don't repeat junk knowledge. Along with this is the lack of a draft, the reduced turnover in the service as tens of thousands dont leave and we retain their knowledge. They volunteered for it, which means they had a head for that career, not a distaste for press gang employment and trying to muddy the waters which draftees are well known for.

Elevate perspective to the 10,000 foot level and it becomes very apparent. They didn't want to know, so they spouted off a lot of BS. Look up "poops were it eats." We are still dealing with that going word of mouth in some circles who don't have a clue.

I would guess that a 45mm long cartridge (M193 ball) is a tight fit in a magazine designed to hold cartridges 39mm long.

It's still repeated on this website pretty frequently.

I just heard the "they can shoot our ammo" BS when I walked through the LGS a couple weeks ago, by people who were too young for Desert Storm much less Vietnam.

True tale: Went shooting over 25 years ago with a bunch of guys. Folks were bringing ammo over to the booth of whatever particular handgun he wanted to try. The firearm was a .45 ACP M1911-type, but a single round of 9mm got put in the mag. First two rounds fired no issue, then the third round fired, but the case would not eject. I was called over to clear the jam. I had to use a cleaning rod to unseat the case.

The 9mm case mouth expanded up to seal the chamber, but how the spent case sat after firing did not allow the extract to grasp the rim. No harm, no foul, a bit of embarrassment, and firing continued.

The first time I heard this BS was in the mid 70s and it came from an Army E7 who was on active duty at the time. He was referring to 7.62 NATO being fired in AKs.
Another popular tale about that time was that bullets came out of an M16 tumbling end over end (by design)

Reading all of this makes me think back to when Dad and I finally converted our Saiga .308 from "sporter' configuration to the 'evil AK' configuration. We both had a good laugh over having finally made this old line of baloney (partially) true. It ended up looking like a normal AK with "russian red" laminate furniture and an unusually heavy barrel. It tends to turn heads at the range when the massive magazine goes in and the 2 foot fireballs start. I also heard that Izmash just recently released a 'proper military' version of the rifle with all of the goodies you expect to find on a modern military factory AK these days, shame we'll never get to see it here without having to make our own out of the remaining Saiga .308s in the country.

Like another post above I inadvertently shot a .223 round out of a 7.62x39 rifle. This rifle was a Colt Sporter Lightweight in 7.62x39.
I took a couple of my ARs to the range. At some point I picked one up, stuck in a magazine and pulled the trigger. Something didn't feel or sound quite right. I looked at the markings on the rifle:
Colt Sporter Lightweight
7.62x39
I pulled out the mag and saw .223 rounds in it!
It's just too easy to get confused at the range when adrenaline is flowing etc.
That freaked me out.
I planned to mark it with big yellow numerals - 7.62 - on the side of the magwell but I have since sold it.

7.62 NATO ammo can be fired in a Mosin Nagant rifle. It wont extract, you need to pop out the fired case with a cleaning rod. No damage to the rifle, and the case may or may not split, depending on the manufacturer. I have done it.

Ditto. I'd forgotten the one about the razor blades, but I remember hearing that one around the campfire now that you mention it. Remember the one about the incurable VD that would cause your appendage to turn black and fall off?
And that all the "VC" weapons could shoot our ammo but not vice-versa. I bet that one indeed started with the 7.62 ammo and then sort of got morphed into applying to the M16 as well.

I guess there's always a tendency to make an enemy seem bigger, badder and smarter.
I remember my uncle telling me all kinds of BS about the Nazis; how they were better fighters, how great their guns were from the "Schmeisser" to the 88.
(Although he was a Marine corpsman in the Pacific and was wounded on Guam, he never even saw a German soldier, but that didn't stop him.)

When I was a kid I heard all sorts of things about how we were always outsmarted in Vietnam by various brilliant commie inventions and stratagems.
As a teenager I heard all sorts of things about how big and mean the Russkies were and how awesome their military equipment was. (And the tales of the Israelis, Oy...)
Before joining the Air Force after college I had the opportunity to visit the USSR to get a look at the enemy, so to speak. What I saw there didn't impress me, especially after serving in the USAF and seeing the difference.
Today, you can go online and see a million YouTube videos about how much better the Soviet fighters are than our F22 or F35, etc. etc.

Actually, that kind of "their stuff is better" stuff would make a good thread...

I heard more than one NCO say it back in the mid/late 1980’s.....heard it way too often

I remember being highly disappointed with bullshit like this when i was in

NCO's and Drill Sergeants are notorious for misinformation.  Take the notch that is found on WWII, Korean War, and early Vietnam dog tags.  To this day, vets SWEAR that the notch was built into the dog tags to lock the tag into your teeth when you were killed, because that is what they were TOLD.  Sure, it MIGHT have been used that way a few times, but that is not WHY it was there (the first dog tag machines had an indexing pin that the notch contacted to line it up).  Kind of like grown adults STILL believing that chiggers burrow under your skin, and you can kill them with fingernail polish because that is what their parents TOLD them. Some of these fallacies take forever to die, INCLUDING "they can shoot our ammo, but we can't shoot theirs".

i heard this almost 20 years ago

5.56 projectiles can be swaged down to 5.45

5.45 projectiles can not be swaged up to 5.56

5.45 projectiles CAN be fired just fine out of a 5.56 without doing ANYTHING to them, and they will still be fairly accurate in most rifles, as they will still contact the rifling.  Actually, 5.45 CAN be swaged up to 5.56 if you so desired.  I had a friend that used to swage 7.62 UP to 7.92, and he showed me how he did it, and it was quite ingenious.

wut

Yes, a 5.45  projectile is SMALLER than a 5.56 projectile, so it CAN be fired out of a 5.56 rifle without doing anything to it.  "Wat" do you not understand?

That's another tale that comes back to mind once mentioned. I can remember as a kid being a little freaked out by that one, then looking at all the WW2 photos and films and wondering why they never showed dead GIs with the dog tag poking out of their mouths... it was because it didn't happen.

As to chiggers, nail polish would certainly suffocate the little pests - if they were still attached. Problem is, they don't burrow (or drink blood); they just sort of latch on with their "mouthparts" and dissolve a tiny little patch of skin with their saliva, which they ingest. First time you scratch you scrape them off, but the mouthparts stay and skin damage is already done - which is what causes the itch, not some imagined chigger burrowing around under the surface. Something like Benadryl would probably be a much better treatment.

Chiggers are usually LONG GONE before you ever scratch.  They eat their fill and drop off.

The itching starts when the chigger's saliva starts dissolving your flesh.
Which has to happen before the chigger can eat.
Which it would want to do before it dropped off.

The itching starts when your body produces histamines from the dissolving skin, and that takes long enough that the chigger is gone before the itching starts.

Lest we drift even more wildly off-topic, I will defer to you regarding issues in this vein, so to speak.

I heard this same BS from WWII veterans who claimed that German 8mm Mauser rounds can be fired in an M1 rifle (.30-06) chamber.  But I could never find an individual who did it.  I imagine that same hold true to WWI that the Gewehr 98 (8mm Mauser) would fire in a M1903 Springfield or M1917 rifles.  Probably another BS story or rumor cooked up by troops who had too much idle time in the trenches.

The only truth That I personally know about is that our 81mm Mortar rounds can be used in the Soviet 82mm mortars.  I have actually seen the firing tables published by US Army Ordnance on the use of 81mm rounds in the 82mm mortar.  I believe they publish the firing tables in event that we had to use a captured 82mm mortar with our rounds.

projectile yes,

think the confusion (re the wut comment) is that the actual round will not,

ditto the 8mm to 30.06,
if the diameter of the cartridge is small enough to fit, then yep it will fire, probably, but may have a bit of pressure spike if/as it swages itself into the bore

I’ve done that before , loaded up a 556 into my ak mag on accident . I’m surprised that it chambered and fired.

I was once at the range and an old man was shooting a Japanese 7.7 rifle.  When he chambered a round he had to beat on the cocking handle to close it.  I eventually wandered over and saw that he was shooting 30-06 ammo out of his rifle!  I think that is a good testament to the quality of the rifle that it did not blow up.

Wonder if his confusion was due to it being common practice to make 7.7x58mm cases from .30-06 when there isn't 7.7 brass available. Gotta say though, 7.62x63mm (.30-06 metric measurements) in a 7.7x58mm chamber would be quite the squeeze.

As a side note I always wondered if that was a factor in them calling the takedown rifle in Dirty Harry a .30-06 when it was pretty clearly a sporterized 7.7 Japanese Paratrooper rifle, I think it was the Type 100 specifically. I suppose it's possible it would have been re-chambered to .30-06, but I like the 7.7 and it does everything you could realistically ask of the .30-06.

Can you actually support these claims?

This can be used as a good training opportunity.  I think that most of us own both 5.56mm/.223 Rem and 7.62X39mm rifles/pistols.  All that you have to do is take both weapons with their diverse ammo and show the difference between the casing sizes.  Common sense will lead the person shown that you can't stuff 15 pounds into a 10 pound bag.  Caliber is often confused with cartridge.  Both of the AK47/SKS are chambered in 7.62X39mm cartridge but the 7.62X54Rmm which is fired from the MN and most GPMG in COMBLOC militaries.  The 7.62 ammo of U.S. .308 Winchester is not the same as the 7.62X39 or the 7.62X54 of Communism.  Our 7.62mm has a different diameter projectile than theirs.  I've often wondered about the ability of a 7.62X54 being able to chamber a 7.62x51mm and firing due to the differences of rimmed versus non rimmed.

Since I've already derailed this conversation, I wonder why the four most common military rifle calibers in active military 20th century service were one flavor or another of .30 Caliber weapons;  8mm Mauser 7.62X54Rmm 30:06 Springfield .303 British.  With the exception of the 30.06 Springfield, all began service in the 1890s.  Of them, the only survivor of widespread use still in the 21st century is the 7.62X54Rmm.  I guess that is the legacy left to us by the Romanov Dynasty that ended in a brutal family murder in a cold basement in Russia in 1918.

I hear that. I suggest you peruse youtube and look at the hours of Russian driving accident videos... it's no small wonder why half of the Russian people are not dead already because of their incredibly stupid and dangerous driving . Some real knuckle draggers behind the steering wheels there !.

The myth was alive and well in 1991 when I went thru Army basic. The NVA and VC could use our ammo in their rifles, but we couldn't use theirs.  Also the one about M193 tumbling after it left the muzzle of the A1, in order to cause more tissue damage to the enemy. I got into a discussion with one of the instructors over that one, which left me in the front leaning rest position for a little while.