Alright folks,
I appologies for leaving this hanging. Daughter with a fever and on call at work.
I was issued a model M9 prior to leaving for Iraq. As a Corpsman this is all I'm officially authorized to carry. My daily maintainence routine was to clean the weapon with a dry dusting brush between 5-7 times a day. As long as I followed this routine, I would only have to beat the slide open with the handle of my knife on a few occassions. The pistol is a dust magnet and the crummy issue mags they handed out (Non-factory) made issues that much worse. I kept them loaded to only 12 rounds but had to shake the rounds out of them ever four hours or so and empty out all of the excess grunge. This was with a full flap, issue, Bianchi rig.
When I gave my M-16 (Imagine you didn't see this due to previous paragraph) to my SAW gunner when his weapon went down, I was left with only the M9. I tried various techniques and amounts of lubes from both the wet ie: CLP and RemOil, which sucked up the dust and made their own little mud pies inside my pistol, to dry graphite lubes, which lasted about 2 hours max.
This was a constant battle that was annoying. I got a very good deal on an AK during the fight for An Nazaria (Never fired and only dropped once) which allowed me a feeling of security in knowing that I had something in hand that would go bang when I needed it.
The M9 did go bang when I really needed it but a percussion or flint lock singel shot would have done just as well as the slide froze mid-cycle and that was that. Luckilly the shot went where I needed it to go. The energy from the round going off was enough so that I was able to clear the pistol and get back on target for a follow up double.
Each night I said my prayers and the words Glock, CZ and Browning were all in there. Unfortunately they were not answered.
Doc