The 7.62 mm SLR was a noisy beast which didn’t go bang—it went boom! Often referred to as ‘the elephant gun’ by the Diggers, it was by far the noisiest rifle in the war that wasn’t a machine gun. Its sheer power made a lasting impression on those who used it.
“I had seen a guy hit with an SLR through a rubber tree, and I thought that was pretty impressive—so I liked that.”
The SAS patrol SLRs were converted to fully automatic by the squadron armourer, who also removed the flash eliminator to shorten the weapon’s length. The modifications made the weapon even more formidable:
“The back sight was set so that it couldn’t be lowered, so it was up at all times. The armourer fixed it up and put it on fully automatic for us, and with the flash eliminator taken off, took off the bayonet boss and all that shit. They were pretty nasty weapons. It creates a long flame. You could shoot and cauterise the wound at fifteen paces!”
When fired on full-auto, the SLR was a fearsome weapon, especially in an ambush. The overwhelming noise and firepower often gave the enemy the impression they were facing a much larger force:
“The sound of an SAS contact is just awesome. There is no, ‘Bang’—I wonder what that was?—‘Bang’—a few more shots. Whatever is happening? If we got away the first rounds, it would be automatic and it would be a full magazine, maybe if there were unders and overs (M203), we would have grenades going off, and rapidly joined in by the other patrol members. So it would rapidly escalate into a huge amount of fire by five people putting down automatic fire and grenades and so on. So we could recognise when one of our own patrols had a contact, and knew it was an SAS patrol. It could not be anybody else.”
Nev Farley explained the patrol’s SOP for an initial burst of fire:
“We used 30-round magazines, and most of the blokes carried a 30-round magazine on their weapon. Because the idea was that when you had a contact, you deliberately fired as much ammunition as you could, and if you had those bloody SLRs on fully automatic, firing a 30-round magazine, and if the flash eliminator was taken off it, you would think, ‘Fuck! What have I hit here?’ Because it sounded heavy, and fast, and automatic, and it would just make old Charlie think, ‘Shit, I’ve hit something big here’ and it would stop them, rather than race in and try to take you out. Because they think they have hit so much firepower, it’s at least a bloody company, and by that time we’ve got ourselves on a back bearing and fucked off out of there. But, once that first magazine was gone, from then on that was our rule—you fired well-aimed, single shots. But it was quite okay to fire a full mag for the first part of it in the initial contact. It’s pretty bloody scary when five blokes all open up at once. There’s a lot of noise and if you’ve got three SLRs on fully automatic with a 30-round magazine, shit flies everywhere.”
To add to the intimidation factor, the SAS often loaded extra tracer rounds:
“We wanted to put a lot of tracer into the magazines so that—from the bad guys’ point of view—they could see a lot of tracer coming at them, as well as the noise of having a lot coming at them. They could physically see the tracer, which gave the impression that we had more firepower.”
Despite its firepower, the SLR wasn’t the easiest weapon to carry:
“When you look back, it was cumbersome to be a scout with that weapon, but it was all right. It was good in a shit fight.”
The modified SLRs were brutal, loud, and effective, embodying the aggressive, high-impact combat philosophy of the SASR in Vietnam. The combination of sheer noise, rapid fire, and strategic deception made the enemy think twice before pushing forward.