In the early part of Vietnam, they still used the Browning Automatic Rifle as a squad-support gun. But it was too big and heavy for the ARVN plus it needed its own cartridge, magazines, parts, and so on. The M14 was intended to replace it AND the M1 Garand, after all, but it had trouble with full-auto.
So in 1963 they designed a new stock with a pistol grip for better recoil control, a folding front grip (absent on mine), and a different buttplate with a more secure shoulder lockup. Add a slip-over moderator to the flash hider and a bipod setup and you had the M14E2 (redesignated M14A1 in '66) automatic rifle. Which worked... okay. The modifications helped but not really enough. The fire rate was still too high and the recoil too heavy, and the magazine capacity wasn't enough for suppressive fire.
But the stock itself is very comfortable and they were coveted by those who could get them. Much later the USMC had a fiberglass version with an adjustable cheekrest on their DMRs . McMillan sold them until a few years ago, in fact. Now the original E2 stocks are very hard to find and the seller I got mine from sold out long ago. But there are rifles with them on Gunsinternational right now and you can still find the stocks now and then.
I've seen photos of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan still rocking wood stocks in the early days of GWOT, and one recent one of Ukrainian troops with a scoped wood-stocked M14 next to a HK G36 if I remember.
Here's one of my favorites of a SEAL during Desert Storm:
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