Many of the Marine's M1icon rifles failed to function and in some cases fire. The book describes an incident where a Marine was laying on his back trying to push the oprod open with his feet when the Company Commander came along and saw the struggle. The Marine was doing this under fire. Some of the M1 rifles would work as straight pull rifles and some wouldn't even fire a cartridge due to the mechanism being frozen. It seemed that only the Browning MGs and 1911A1s functioned pretty much all the time. The weapons captured from the Chinese were mostly foreign except for Thompson SMGs which were most likely military aid to the Nationalist Chinese. Some of the Chinese prisoners were ex-Nationalist Chinese soldiers and not all that enthusiastic about fighting the U.S. forces.