That is what screwed up the barrels on the early M-16 rifles! I saw many with a bent barrel!! All you had to do is lift up on the butttsock an voila!! your rifle now shot around corners!! The leverage you had by holding the buttstock and having the flash hider under the metal strapping on the c rations case was a disaster waiting to happen! And using the pistol grip to break the band was another problem!! I am sure many a trooper did this and lost the flash hider while marching back to the encampment area!! Imagine this problem along with the no cleaning rods issued with the early rifles--Then the early ALUMINUM Cleaning rods issued that snapped off in the bore of the rifle!! What a ill conceived mess!! Ask me how i know about the early cleaning rods!! I remember that exactly like it happened nearly 50 years agO! I learnedmy lesson then and have not forgot about it since!!
The early M16 cleaning rods looked just like the later steel ones but were made out of soft aluminum!! We didn't have any precut 223 patches and you had to cut a 30 caliber patch down!! I cut one a little too big and wet it down with bore cleaner and tried to pull it through!! The patch and one lenght of cleaning rod with a broken thread was lodged in the bore half way down never to come out as far as I know to this day ! In one platoon this happened to over 10 rifles in one day so the armorer's knew they had a problem and collected all of those stupid aluminum cleaning rods! Now those original cleaning rods are a very RARE item! Only seen one complete set since!!
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