Iraq Veterans, what is your true opinion on the M9 Beretta 9mm?

I wad never in the military, but I carried either an M9 or the civilian M92FS for two years in Kuwait. I found it to be very accurate and reliable when kept the magazines spotless inside (hard to do in the middle of the desert) as an armorer I saw quite a few get the return spring on the trigger bar get dislodged resulting in a dead trigger. Fortunately the tiny springs never fell put of the gun and it only took a moment to pop it back into place. This mostly happened when cleaning the weapon.

My main complaint with the Beretta was the weight and grip size. At the end of the day I couldn't wait to take that brick off my hip, sometimes it would cause actual pain. I wear size large gloves and the grip was merely uncomfortably large for me ( one particular sharp edge near the beavertail tended to bite me during recoil) for female shooters and those with smaller hands the pistol is almost unmanageable.

When I was in Iraq I was issued a variety of pistols. I hated the Zastava CZ 99. The CZ 999 wasn't much better. I very much loked the West German Sig P226's I ran across, they rode easier on the hip than the Beretta and seemed to fit my hand very well, accuracy was very good, but current Sig quality control leaves me skeptical. The Glock 19 was great and I carry one daily now. Small, light, and accurate with the same magazine capacity as the M9. What's not to love?
 
The Seals purposely switched to the P226 because they felt the 92s were not up for the job.
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They did not switch because the "M9 wasn't up to the job"...they switched because the M9 was not available.

I was in SOCOM when the M9 testing was going on. The DoD weight requirements put on the pistol manufacturers were unrealistic, IIRC combined with some bad metallurgical batches. We had some slides depart and cracks develop. The M9 had passed all the testing. DoD halted the adoption process and went back to the drawing board. Nobody knew when our war weary 1911's would be replaced in the Army.

During that time, the NAVY simply used the magic credit card to buy a bunch of SIG P226's in 1989....

They tested the only manufacturers who get them something in the holster in quantity. Glock did not pass leaving SIG as their only choice.

That is a full year from 1990 when the M9 was formally adopted. Since that time, a new generation that was not there has cropped up bad mouthing a pistol they have never used and altering the narrative.
 
Interesting and shocking replies. I assumed most the opinions on the M9 would be the same as how I feel about my 92FS. Accurate, reliable, points well, and I personally like the feel of a large grip pistol that's going to be used for self defense. I guess the folks working on the military versions don't know how to maintain them very well? Or the guys carrying them didn't treat them well?
 
I guess the folks working on the military versions don't know how to maintain them very well? Or the guys carrying them didn't treat them well?
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The main reliability problem I saw was from the Checkmate magazines that the Army bought that had an out of spec finish applied to the inside of the magazine. This caused the followers to bind when the fine desert sand would get inside them. Unless you have experienced a middle eastern sand storm it is impossible to describe just how dirty any machinery gets in that environment.

The solution of course is to take the magazine apart and wipe everything down, preferably with a rag, but toilet paper actually works pretty well. Unfortunately getting a bunch of former military security contractors to actually follow that advice is/was a road to madness. Most of them would notice their rounds were loose in their magazines, because the follower was jammed, when they received them at shift change and decide the best way to fix that problem was to take the magazine apart and stretch the spring as far as they possibly could to "make it stronger".

I threw away dozens of magazines that were ruined in that fashion. About the time we got enough ammo and magazines to issue them every day with the weapons, instead of hot swapping on post, I finally got our training cadre on board with teaching basic magazine care and feeding and the problem mostly stopped.
 
I have an M9, was never in the military but lived in Saudi and traveled the region, dealing mostly with dukes, spooks, dips, corps and cops.

1) +1 on handguns-in-hand in public significantly and quickly raise blood pressures (in that entire region), where M9 usually meant American.
2) +1 on AK’s are very common and often ignored
3) I have a few thousand rounds thru the M9 with very few FTE’s
4) The M9 magazines are slightly different having a coating that makes them more resistant to dirt and dust
 
Most of them would notice their rounds were loose in their magazines, because the follower was jammed, when they received them at shift change and decide the best way to fix that problem was to take the magazine apart and stretch the spring as far as they possibly could to "make it stronger".
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Any positive effect is only temporary--very temporary. That treatment will ruin a spring in short order.
 
JohnKSa said:
Any positive effect is only temporary--very temporary. That treatment will ruin a spring in short order.
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That is why I threw so many into the trash.

Also a fair amount of M16/M4 magazines with spread out feed lips. Some to the point it would take two people, one pulling the rifle while the other pulled the magazine, to remove them from the magazine well of the rifle. I shudder to think what those idiots were doing to insert those magazines.

I would generally smash them flat so some well intentioned idiot would not pull bad magazines out and try to reuse them.
 
maintain them very well? Or the guys carrying them didn't treat them well?
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Pretty much spot on. The regular army tended to over maintain their weapons inducing malfunctions and problems.

My favorite was the load once and leave it magazine. They would load a magazine and leave it fully loaded for months. I saw regular army guys pull their magazines out only to watch them leave a trail of cartridges like bread crumbs.

We rotated our magazines every week so that the springs would not weaken and induce malfunctions. I still do the same with my CCW gun or any weapon I leave ready to use.
 
Here:

A spring is a mechanical device and will wear out. That is why you can buy them separately from the manufacturer!!!

Loading and unloading your magazines will cause wear AND so will leaving your magazines loaded.

Well after 130 cycles the spring that had not been left on the fixture is still noticeably longer than the spring that was left on the fixture. So there is a certain amount of set a spring takes when left long times compressed.
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The real question now is how did the extended time compressed effect the spring rate of the spring?

Well using a store bought scale I compressed both spring to 1.5 inches. This was not to solid length as that length was about 7/8 of and inch. The spring that was on the compression fixture of 14.5 months produced about 10.0 lbs. of force. The spring that had not been left compressed and was cycled 130 times produce 11.5 lbs. of force when compress to 1.5 inches.

It seems that, at least in this particular case and conditions, the spring that was left compressed for an extended amount time has loss some stiffness due to this prolonged compress condition.
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http://www.ballistics101.com/mag_spring_experiment.php

So yeah, my experience is leaving a magazine loaded for extended periods of time causes more damage and WILL result in malfunctions in US Army M-4's and M-9's.

The real question is do you want to wear out your magazines by leaving them loaded in the drawer or do you want to wear them out loading them after you have shot the weapon.

Either way, you pay a price. Just do not let the price be your life because you believed the internet claims of being able to leave a magazine loaded for extended periods of time without consequence.
 
I'm not a vet with Beretta experience but Every Time I've handled one it reminds me of grabbing a baseball bat by the wrong end and that's from someone who has LG/XLG hands. I can't speak to the reliability of them but from a fit to my hand standpoint I fully welcome the move to Sigs.
 
Loading and unloading your magazines will cause wear AND so will leaving your magazines loaded.
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Correct. I've run a few tests involving leaving magazines loaded for years and measuring their strength and length before and after the test. So far the springs have always been weakened and shortened by being left loaded. I have yet to have one weaken so bad that it won't function, but then I'm testing good quality factory magazines.

I don't have a problem believing that lower budget aftermarket magazines might not have the same quality materials. Especially since it's not hard to find examples of people having exactly that problem.

The problem with this topic is that there are many people who can't conceive of the possibility of getting differing results using differing magazines. They know of a magazine that was left loaded for years that still functioned and so they believe that the same must be true of every magazine, everywhere, regardless of design or quality.
 
Ben Dover said:
Leaving a magazine loaded (modern materials) will not weaken the spring.

Loading and unloading it will.
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What are you basing this on? I’ve always understood that the longer you compress the spring the more it loses its tension. You are basically say a change in tension is what causes wear? Is this some engineering principle? Im curious because ive always rotated mags and usually leave one or two rounds less than full capacity to increase life.
 
Such a neat thread about veterans opinions about their service pistols. It would be such a shame if it were to become another thread about mag springs...
 
I won't argue the topic. I know what several firearms instructor training courses and 60 years experience with magazines has taught me.
 
RE: Spring life and function:

Here's a link to a much-earlier discussion here on THR (dating back to 2011), with a number of the same participants. Look first at response #8, by Danez71 and it had links to technical sites that no longer work as they should, but the links to Wikipedia entries explain the WHYS and HOWS of spring decline. Variations of this whole discussion has been repeated any number of times with the same and some times better proofs. It's been repeated so many times that it's hard to find the bet ones. If nothing else, focus on the Wikipedia articles. JohnKSa did some tests, which he has provided links to in the past, and those results show decline, but no failuires, yet.

https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=442487

Working springs can wear them out -- it will certainly degrade them. But they may continue to function longer than the rest of the gun.

Leaving a mag fully loaded CAN (not WILL) also wear them out -- but it all depends on the mag's or recoil springs design, and what the gun designer wants the springs to do. What causes the wear when the spring isn't cycling? The same thing that causes the wear when it is cycling: compressing the spring to it's limits. Not all mag or recoil springs, for example, come close to that limit. (A seven-rond 1911 mag spring may last almost forever, even if left fully loaded!)

If you leave a spring compressed (or cycle it too many times) near or beond it's design limit, metal fatigue sets in. (Micro-fractures in the steel... A few little breaks mean that the rest of the spring must do more work, and the metal in other places will also break, and the problem cascades. The spring will eventually soften. Coil springs typically soften and quit working right and are thrown out before they can really break like a flat spring.

With very small guns, and some hi-cap mags, the springs are, in effect, renewable resources.

Some hi-cap mags designs push springs to or beyond their design (elastic) limits. Those springs don't last as long and standrd (non-hi-cap) designs, - but the stressed springs can make a magazine hold more rounds for quite a while. Some small gun designs also push springs to their limit, because the smaller springs must do the same work as larger springs (in larger guns), but there's no room to use a larger spring. As some like to remind us: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Some non-high-cap mags may work forever. So will some recoil springs. But hi-caps can wear out more quickly, particularly if left fully loaded for long periods. (That's why Wolff Springs recommends downloading a round or two for long-term storage.) Leave a slide locked back for several months, if you doubt any of this -- that springs isn't cycling, but it will almost certainly weaken.

And as JohnKSa says, stretching springs just accelerates a spring decline. It'll work for a cycle or two and then get worse. Springs don't heal, and they don't get better from being rotated. Rotating mags just spreads the wear over more mags...
 
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I only had an M9 for the second of my three Iraq trips and was not a huge fan. I don't have large hands and the grip is too large for me to disengage the safety with my firing hand. There is also a very small spring that has a tendency to fall out when you are cleaning sand out of the magazine well, after which you have a really neat single shot pistol. I carried a MEUSOC 1911 for a year after those tours, unfortunately the majority of the ones we had were very worn down. Given my choice, I would go with a Glock 19.
 
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