Not Every SEAL Falls in Love with the Long Gun.
Everyone expects me to say my favorite gun was some sleek, suppressor-kissed, 1,000-meter headshot-maker straight out of a Tom Clancy fever dream. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my .300 winmag but it wasn’t my fav.
My favorite gun of all time was the M60 machine gun — a steel-chomping, hair-pulling, hot brass spitting, soul-rattling, chest thumpin’ monster that sounded like someone lit Karen on fire as she screamed in full-auto.
The M60 is not for the faint of heart, soy-blooded civilians, or anyone who thinks trigger warnings are something other than a literal part of the gun. This beast didn’t whisper sweet nothings — it screamed unholy hellfire in 7.62mm NATO.
As a freshly minted Navy SEAL, I was assigned the pig or hog, as we called it with affection, and it was love at First Brrrt.
The first time I got behind the M60, I was a wide-eyed new guy still figuring out which end of the gun the pain comes out of. They slapped that greasy pig in my hands on the range, I slammed the ammo belt in and slapped the feed tray cover down, and the moment I squeezed the trigger, I felt God’s applause.
Shooting it was like riding a Harley through hell with a bottle of Jack in one hand, a hot jean girl (AKA Sydney Sweeney) on the back seat, and a cigar clamped between your teeth, except louder and with less chance of liver damage.
Maintenance? A Cruel Joke. Let’s get real, the M60 of old could chew through ammo without fault.
It was as reliable as a Vegas stripper with daddy issues.
You didn’t just “use” an M60. You had a relationship with it. You fed it. You talked to it. You apologized to it after hours-long bursts of full auto.
Every time I fired that demon, it was like giving the middle finger to the Grim Reaper.
I still remember my platoon chief, Dan, taking a hundred rounds of hot brass down his collar from my pig. He was writhing in pain and screamed at me after the contact drill ended, but deep down, he knew I was not at fault and was careful not to curse too loudly in front of my M-60 for fear of retribution. Dan still had that hot brass neck burn scar years later. It was a badge of honor if you ask me.
You want to really intimidate the enemy? Don’t send a sniper round. Send four SEAL platoon machine gunners walking upright like gods of war, raining down steel and tracer like it’s a scene from Apocalypse Now.
The M60 doesn’t just kill, it traumatizes entire combat zip codes.
I once saw a medic on the range flinch so hard when I lit off an M60 that he involuntarily wet farted and embarrassingly spilled his coffee on the deck. That’s raw power, my friends.
Not politically correct, just correct.
Some tools are just beautifully savage, and the M60 is a mechanical love letter to unapologetic violence. Precision chaos. It was my drum solo in the middle of live-fire contact drills at Niland, California.
If you never lugged a hunk of American steel across a mountain while silently screaming at it like a disobedient dog, you haven’t lived.
So no, my favorite gun wasn’t a sniper rifle. It was my M60, a glorious, unholy badboy that went bang louder than anything else on the battlefield and made me feel like a demigod with a machine gun.
I loved that thing like it owed me money.