I don't know if our hair stood up, but we felt a bit ill looking at those pieces on the floor and knowing we had been firing that gun. The way it came about was that at that time anyone having a low-number receiver could send it (just the receiver) in through DCM and the Army would return a DHT or NS receiver in exchange. They didn't care about the shape as long as they could read the serial number, so before we packed it up I decided to see if the stories were true. I hit the receiver on the right rail and it broke; the left rail remained intact but the left rail broke at three points, one in the middle and the others at either end of the rail.
Anyway, I have mentioned this a couple of times on these sites and been told that it couldn't happen, it is all a lie, there is no such thing as a brittle receiver, it was some kind of conspiracy by Hatcher, and that I am nuts, an idiot, or a plain liar. Oh, well, such are the problems of posting on "the net".
I wish I had kept the pieces or at least recorded the serial number, but I didn't. A new NS receiver arrived in a couple of months.
Jim