Michael Moore coined my image of the M109 in „Fahrenheit 9/11“. In one scene you see crews firing their 155mm guns during the Iraq War to the music of the Blood Hound Gang’s iconic song „Fire Water Burn“. One of the moments in life when you feel fascinated and disgusted at the same time.

Nevertheless, yesterday I did the last brush stroke on these. In addition to painting details, wash and drybrush, I also added some jerry cans on each side of the turrets.
These are the plastic models from Zvezda, originally for their own tactics game Hot War: Battle for Oil. A game I never played but some of the models for this game are really great. And the M109 is one of them.

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I already had some of the older Battlefront M109s made of resin and metal parts for their Vietnam range. But I don’t like that old model which is rather chunky, in my opinion. But I used these models for my West German army later as you can see in the pictures.

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The Zvezda model shows much more detail and was much easier to build. Superb fitting with no glue required! The only major disadvantage is that it can’t be built open-hatched. So no model with a commander on this one.
Comparing the Zvezda M109 with the new plastic M109 from Battlefront, derived from pictures on their homepage, the similiarities between both models are so big that I’m wondering if there was a cooperation between both companies. Only some details on the wheels and the back of the turret seem to be more elaborated.

Another four off the list!!!