Having read many Viet Nam memoirs over the decades, I can report that the most common modifiers added to "LAW" in those books are "f'ing" and "POS."

 

Toward the end of the battle of An Loc we went to retrieve a couple of T-54’s. One the NVA just abandoned the other was in town and had been shot over 10 times with LAWs by MARVN directed by MACV advisers. You could not get within 20’ of it as the smell would gag anyone. The good one got sent to APG, the shot up one sat in the middle of the divided road in from of ARVN HQ. We had the last US M-88 in RVN.

 

IIRC, the old M72 had a 10 meter arming range, so if you got too close, the sucker would amount to a dud.

 

I was well aware of the stand off but when it goes Click...the war head arming is not the problemo.

As to An Loc, the LAW was used but the issue was it did not come with a Hero who'd use it. Volley fire
of LAW's got more results.

 

At Ft Devens, an A-Team drew a LAW with the 35mm sub caliber device for training. Back in the Team Room someone asked how it worked and someone showed him. Unfortunately a 35mm rocket came screaming out of the LAW, apparently it had been turned in loaded. It went thru three of those old single wall lockers, and of course destroyed all the clothes in the wall lockers. No one was injured and the good thing about it was the EOD officer who came to investigate what had happened, was a female Captain and she ended up marrying the Team leader. John
PS Pre-deployment training on Okinawa, ordered 18 Laws to be fired by a 12 man team, but 180 showed up and those were the days you fired what you had. We spent the afternoon on a Marine range at Camp Hansen, 12 men plus tow range NCO's and fired all those Laws. By the time it was over we could hit the tank targets at well over 400 meters, but our hearing was bad for several days after that. John

 

I was on an article 32 investigation in 7th Corps in the late 70s for a fatal range accident where an E3 was shot through and through with a LAW subcaliber rocket from some distance. The incident happened when an E5 was attempting to fire subcaliber LAWs that failed to fire on the first attempt. Those were placed in a pit away from the firing line until the end of the day. The tube would be collapsed, then extended and the rocket fired. In this instance the rocket fired as the tube was extended and hit the E3 downrange who was standing on top of a M113 that served as the range target. This has stayed with me for over 40 years. About the worst bad luck a soldier can have.

When I was at ROTC advance camp in '76 on the LAW range, the instructor talked about the rocket firing when the tube was extended and showed us how to extend it so that it wasn't pointing at anything important. Apparently it was a well-known problem at that time.

 

Priority to SE Asia....all M151A1 and A2 jeeps had heaters, all I ever saw in Conus and Europe had none. That heater was a real luxury in SE Asia.

 

Circa, 1977/78 I was working as a laborer for a company that did light asphalt repairs and seal coating of parking lots at large factories.
This work was usually done over a long week end.
One job took us to a factory just outside of Boston, that place must have had something to do with the manufacturing of the M72.
On the backside of the lot were several large roll off dumpsters full of empty launchers, there must have been thousands of them.
Given the proximity to a major urban area, I doubt if they were loading them with the rockets but could have been making the tubes and shipping them out to be loaded elsewhere.
If those bins were manufacturing defects then, apparently, building the things had its issues.
The shop was shut up tight so I never got to ask what it was all about.
Curiously, in my entire time in the army, I never handled one of these things, I knew what they were and had heard the complaints of other people but, apparently, I missed the entire experience.
From what I'm reading here, I did not miss much!

 

All that I ever fired was the sub-caliber, in training. We had Dragons and TOWs. We also had M202s, but I don't know anybody that ever fired one (or brave enough to try). The biggest problem with any of these systems (and even though the new stuff is much better than the M47), is that people seem to think that one click of the trigger, and a grunt takes out a main battle tank. Nobody thinks about what happens when it goes "p-twing", instead of "k-boom". While you are watching this thing cartwheeling off of the armor, you should be thinking about that turret rotating a 125mm gun toward that big ole dust cloud that you just created from the backblast. These are all very valuable weapons - when properly used - but if you've ever been on the ground with tanks, you'll have a completely different, and skeptical, view of them.

 

Looking at various diagrams I have found online, it appears to me that this design was bound to be problematical right from the get go.
I always assumed that these were electrically fired, with a piezoelectric initiator, I now know that they are percussion fired with a complex mechanical firing pin.
This explains why the tube needs to be closed and reopened to recock the mechanism.
Given that primers (I.E., percussion caps) are pretty reliable these days and have been for a long time, the problem with misfires on these has to do with the mechanism.
It's no wonder given what the design has to do to get it to hit the primer.

 

Knew a Lt. that was dumpster diving after the Panama event was over and moved junk causing a shot LAW round to arm and explode.

 

Never saw them used, we still had the 3.5 RL with the 1st Marines in 1969. However, we had been told the problem with the LAAW was that once opened, fire it. If closed,a misfire was sure to happen, something with humidity in the Nam.

 

I think Bowman arms has a bunch at around $650