US M113s for "Team Yankee"

1/100 scale M113s from Battlefront

The "Team Yankee" painting roll continues, switching over to some US stuff I had sitting around in the ol' pending pile for months.  These are M113 APCs from Battlefront, required in order to mount up some US mechanized infantry for action on the gaming table. 

View of the rear detail on these boring machines

To put a US mechanized company on the table in a game of "Team Yankee" you need at least two mechanized platoons.  I had painted two platoons of infantry, but only one of them had any APCs. The M113s took forever to arrive from Battlefront, and by the time they did, I was off into other projects...but now that the Team Yankee bug is back, I thought I should get them painted. My second US infantry platoon now has some tracks to give them a lift in their next scrap!

A soldier popped out of the hatch, ready to give some covering fire with the .50 cal...

My feelings toward the M113 remain "meh"...whatever its merits as a military vehicle - and full disclaimer, these may be considerable, as a civilian I have no idea - as a gamer this is one of the lamest models out there.  We all have models we dislike mixed among gaming settings we enjoy, and the M113 is one of those for me, just a stupid box with some treads.  Maybe only the British FV432 is lamer...

Look! Boxes with treads...

I also find this MERDC camouflage to be a real pain in the @ss.  I so regret doing my initial vehicles in this pattern, but I feel like I'm kind of stuck with it as I would like the whole force to match together.  To do the MERDC properly I should really use an airbrush, but life is too short to bother with that hassle on these models, so I tried my best to follow the helpful templates that Battlefront has on their web-site, and did my best impression with the plain old regular brushes.  As with camouflage on infantry models, I'm aiming more for an overall impression than a precise, Tacobat-level recreation.

My new M113s from Battlefront posing with the dismounts from Peter Pig which I painted back in March

So that makes two mechanized infantry platoons available for the US forces now.  On to some support options...and then more Soviets and West Germans and...who knows...?