Revell 1/72 US M109

If it a straight US Army M109, no the cover over the top of the mantlet should not be there. 

It is present on the US ARmy M109A6 Paladin though.

Ooooh...worse than I thought. The kit is a straight Vietnam-era M109; at least is is supposed to be. 

The problem is that the kit doesn't have the full mantlet, it is made for the cover to go over it and hide the top. The kit cover does not even look like the one in the picture you added, it looks something like a Venetian blind, which was probably a West German modification.

I was hoping that American vehicles would have used the same cover as on the later M109s, as you show in the picture, but apparently not.

Which leaves me with two options: either scratchbuild the mantlet, which would be difficult as the turret is to a great degree already assembled, and I don't like scratchbuilding anyway, or use putty to fill in the grooves on the kit part in order to make it look more like the American cover, and hope that the people who look at the model know even less about the M109 than I do! 

Thanks!

Hello!

I'm building that kit, too:

http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/3/t/181865.aspx

- and I also didn't catch the thing with that cover. It's partly because most of the photos show those tracks looking from the "street level" and then it isn't visible.

As my model is mostly done by now I guess I'm just going to put some tarp over there, because I can bet this place leaked when it was raining, and from what I read in Vietnam the rain can really be bad, so it's almost certain the boys improvised to keep the water out.

Have a nice day

Paweł