Interesting Life magazine cover from June 1967

[midnight rambler]

http://www.usslittlerock.org/Documents/LifeCover062367.jpg

[midnight rambler]

Someone help me out here with the message being sent. I don't quite get it. At that time the IDF only had FALs and FALOs as service rifles, not CommBloc AKs. Is this soldier simply showing off his war trophy? In the water??

[Gaillo]

Someone help me out here with the message being sent. I don't quite get it. At that time the IDF only had FALs and FALOs as service rifles, not CommBloc AKs. Is this soldier simply showing off his war trophy? In the water??

At the time, they took what they could get... which was a LOT... as history has shown! :(

[gunDriller]

June 23 1967 on the cover.

on June 8, 1967 - the USS Liberty incident.

i wonder if that Life magazine said one word about what the ADL calls a "terrible tragedy".

[KumbayaMan]

Someone help me out here with the message being sent. I don't quite get it. At that time the IDF only had FALs and FALOs as service rifles, not CommBloc AKs. Is this soldier simply showing off his war trophy? In the water??

Funny you posted this...

Just yesterday I saw one of those shrink wrapped recruitment SUV's covered on all sides with US Navy propaganda. It had murals on all sides of the typical Nuke Sub, Carrier, "(Global) Force of Good" etc. Anyway, along the side was a mural with a Navy (presumably) Seal in tac-gear holding a rifle looking into the distance.
Guess what was he holding???

AK-47

I had to do a double take.... My thought was this was for some reason deliberate. I mean, how could it be a mistake?

[horseshoe3]

I'm no expert, but that looks more like Hebrew lettering than Russian, Arabic or any of the Asian forms on the stock.

[midnight rambler]

I'm intimately familiar with what country was using what arms post WW2 thru the early '80s, and the IDF NEVER used any CommBloc weapons. And anyone familiar with the geopolitics of that era would know that the Israelis wouldn't have anything to do with the suppliers of the weapons to their adversaries (as in the Soviets). When the IDF went to the Galil (the IDF version of the AK) in the early '70s the earliest Galils were manufactured for the IDF by Valmet (Finland) until the IDF began producing their own Galils. Interesting fact: when you see Israeli troops on the news carrying M-16s, those are the reservists carrying weapons furnished by Uncle Sugar; the regular IDF troops carry Galils in 5.56.

As for the Israelis "using whatever they could steal" there was no need for that with respect to their service rifles as they had PLENTY of FALs, and therefore all of their ammo was 7.62 NATO. Besides, you don't take your own valuable service rifle swimming with you, you do that with the stuff you capture and don't care about.