The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  One reason for their success was their weapons. Nikita S. Khrushchev was gone from the Kremlin, forced into retirement in a bloodless coup in 1964. But his practice of using arms transfers as a foreign-policy lever continued, and the People’s Republic of China had followed the Soviet example with haste. By late 1964 China had distributed huge quantities of its Kalashnikov assault rifles[19] in Southeast Asia. A large fraction of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army combatants now carried a new assault rifle. In some units the saturation rate was as high as 75 percent, and many soldiers had been given a basic load of 390 cartridges to go with their new gun.5 The majority of the combat fatalities among the United States forces were caused by small-arms fire.[20] As the staccato din of the Kalashnikov was heard in battle each day, and American casualties mounted, the Eastern bloc assault rifle at last captured the Pentagon’s attention. Carried by proxies, the main rifle of an army whose nation lacked the technical sophistication to have its own modern gun works, it had become a marker of the Kremlin’s influence on how war was experienced by combatants of limited means. No young army or guerrilla force had ever gone to war with more rifle firepower, with more ability to fight a technically and materially superior foe in a straight-on infantry encounter. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were beneficiaries of a new form of martial leveling. Indigenous forces had long faced outsiders backed by industrial economies and the guns they produced. The firepower disadvantages had been extreme. Armed with rapid-fire arms and ammunition stores the local men could not hope to match, conventional soldiers had maintained influence over distant lands with small expeditionary detachments. The AK-47 provided a complication: The locals could now fight like never before. The class of fighter that had stepped from the rubble in Budapest in ones and twos—the Kalashnikov-carrying guerrilla, a common man with portable and easy-to-use automatic arms—was now in the field by the tens of thousands.

  On this day, before Second Platoon had moved ahead to sweep Ap Sieu Quan, Hotel Company had been told that the village had been cleared by an American unit the previous night. Until the platoon was ambushed near a church within the little village’s confines, the Marines were not expecting a fight. The North Vietnamese soldiers were dug in. The platoon could neither budge them nor get itself out. The company commander, Captain Richard O. Culver, Jr., directed Staff Sergeant Claude E. Elrod, First Platoon’s commander, to push off the NVA and retrieve the American casualties, weapons, and radios. The other platoons moved to close off the village.

  As the distance shrank, Staff Sergeant Elrod moved near the front of his platoon, between his radio operator and a three-man M-60 machine-gun team. Sweat rolled down his light frame. Ordinarily a lieutenant would lead a rifle platoon, but the battalion was short of officers. Too many officers had been shot. The staff sergeant had joined the special landing force just after the battalion had participated in the fight for Hills 861 and 881, one of the bitterest battles in the war. Upon checking into Hotel Company, he learned that the executive officer, First Lieutenant David S. Hackett, a Princeton graduate, had been shot through the head and killed. The Second Platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Bruce E. Griesmer, had been wounded. A new officer, First Lieutenant Michael P. Chervenak, had arrived to take Lieutenant Hackett’s place. Officers were otherwise in short supply. Staff Sergeant Elrod was told he would lead First Platoon. That was two months ago. Already he had been wounded. He had been hit with shrapnel and a rifle bullet a few weeks before. The bullet had passed through his side without striking a vital organ or severing a major blood vessel. The shrapnel injuries had been light. Luck had kept him alive. The corpsmen on the USS Tripoli had removed his stitches the day before. Now he was in-country again, leading his platoon, heading toward another village on another operation in the kaleidoscope of action that defined the battalion’s tour of some of the worst of Vietnam.

  Staff Sergeant Elrod was crossing the last dike before the village when a bullet smacked a bamboo branch near his head. He heard Kalashnikov rifles firing as he dropped. Down the Marines of First Platoon went, shouting, returning fire, dashing into motion in the pandemonium of initial contact. The staff sergeant ordered the machine-gun crew to set up and cover the squads in the field. He had already arranged for a three-man fire team to provide security around the gun, and he watched those men run into place as the M-60 opened fire. Good, he thought. The Marines were doing what they do. He shouted to his radio operator and told him to tell Captain Culver that the platoon was engaged.

  There are moments in modern firefights when combat can become, in an instant, a lonely and isolating experience. Since late in World War I, after automatic weapons, artillery, and mortars had become prevalent in battle and tactics evolved to account for them, foot soldiers had learned to spread out, scattering the targets they presented and limiting the danger to the group of any one machine-gun burst or exploding shell. This dispersion reduced risks to units. In certain circumstances, it also served to increase the individual’s sense of disassociation. At these instants of scattering, each combatant’s surroundings could suddenly change. One moment the soldier was part of a group. The next, in the confusion of sudden battle as each man took steps to survive and fight back, he could find himself alone. A man’s world compressed to a small, frantic, and companionless space, punctuated by the disorienting roars and blasts of incoming and outgoing fire.

  Private First Class Nickelson had entered one of these inner zones. A bullet had passed so close by that it seemed to clap beside his ear. More bullets thumped the soil around him. He pressed himself down, hiding in the grass, trying to make himself small. He felt utterly apart. For a few seconds, he had the selfish thought of a trapped man in what might be his last moment alive. All these guys out here in the field to shoot, he thought. Why are they trying to shoot only me? Then he collected himself. He knew that each man’s fate was tied to the platoon, and that the platoon survived only if it fought. He would fight. He lifted his head and saw a Vietnamese soldier in a tree line. He raised his M-16, lined up the rifle’s sights, and eased back on the trigger. He had set his M-16 selector switch on automatic. One round blasted out. Then nothing. His M-16 had jammed. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

  At the village’s edge, Staff Sergeant Elrod estimated that he had met a North Vietnamese platoon. NVA platoons were often small, but their weapons could make them potent. The Marines of the 1940s and 1950s had faced human-wave attacks in Asia. This was something else. Two dozen of this new breed of combatant could stop two hundred. First Platoon’s Marines were scattered and flat to the ground. Bullets whipped around them. The staff sergeant needed firepower to match what was coming in. But something was wrong. The Marines assigned to protect the M-60 were not firing. They were crouched and madly working on their M-16s. He ran to one of them. The man’s rifle was jammed. The staff sergeant looked at the others. Their weapons were jammed, too. The United States Marine Corps, built around its riflemen, was in battle with rifles that did not work. The platoon was exposed, under fire, and many of its members were busy working on guns gone silent. The machine-gun team nearby was under intensive fire. The gunner, a corporal, was struck in the head. The assistant gunner took his place. He was hit, too. Adrenaline pulsed through the staff sergeant. He was slicked with sweat, furious, confused. He wanted to kill. Why wouldn’t his platoon’s automatic rifles work? He slipped behind the machine gun and started to fire. First Platoon was stuck.

  Of the many enduring effects of the international distribution of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, its influence on the American military was among the least understood and most profound. The AK-47’s utility for guerrilla war, terror, and crime could have been readily foreseen. The bad choices it spurred in the United States military were not so predictable. Nor were their effects.

  Throughout the 1950s, the United States had missed the significance of the spread of Soviet and Eastern bloc small arms. By the 1960s the institutional ignorance could no longer hold. Jolted alert by the communist assault
rifle’s large-scale arrival in Vietnam, the Pentagon realized that in the matter of rifles it was outmatched. The American army abruptly selected the M-16 for general service in the war. Had the early M-16 been a reliable automatic rifle, this might have been a straightforward and simple development, a story as old as war. One side gets a new weapon, the other side matches it in kind. In this way, the war in Vietnam became the first large conflict in which both sides carried assault rifles—initially in small numbers but eventually as the predominant firearm. But the American adoption of assault rifles flowed from reaction rather than from foresight or planning, and it was painful and bungled. The early M-16 and its ammunition formed a combination not ready for war. They were a flawed pair emerging from a flawed development history. Prone to malfunction, they were forced into troops’ hands through a clash of wills and egos in Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s Pentagon. Instead of a thoughtful progression from prototype to general-issue arm, the M-16’s journey was marked by salesmanship, sham science, cover-ups, chicanery, incompetence, and no small amount of dishonesty by a gun manufacturer and senior American military officers. Its introduction to war was briefly heralded as a triumph of private industry and perceptive management, but swiftly became a monument to the hazards of hubris and the perils of rushing, and a study in military management gone awry.

  The origins of the problems emerge in especially sharp relief when viewed in contrast to the Soviet Union’s much more successful rifle program. The AK-47 and AKM had resulted from methodical state-directed pursuits. The M-16 arrived in troops’ hands by another route. The American system was neither capitalist nor fully state-driven. It was a disharmonious hybrid. Long-standing arms-development practices had failed; what replaced them was worse. The infantry rifles carried to war by generations of American servicemen had largely been conceived within the army’s ordnance service, and then manufactured by private firms commissioned to mass-produce the patterns. The sprawling army ordnance community—known as the ordnance corps—was a network of arsenals, laboratories, and far-flung commands that together had evolved into an empire within the armed services, replete with its own biases and mores. Its powers were substantial, as was its reputation for insularity. Tended to by a mix of experts and bureaucrats, the ordnance corps exercised de facto veto power over arms designed by anyone else. If the community had been objective and fair-minded, this power might have been well used. But the corps’ talents had over the decades been undermined by dogmatism. In the years after World War II, those responsible for American small-arms development had shown little interest in the foreign concept of assault rifles, and they had not understood the significance of German and Russian developments in the field. The parochialism was so firmly established that it had earned a label with its own acronym, which described the ordnance corps’ attitude toward firearms created by outsiders. The acronym was NIH: Not Invented Here.

  By the early 1960s, the army’s ordnance officials had lost the arms race of their lives. As a result, just when the American armed services grasped that they needed a smaller automatic rifle, there was nothing suitable in the government design pipeline. Instead, the Pentagon reached into private industry for the AR-15, as the precursor to the M-16 was called. This seemed sensible. The mighty industrial economy of the United States had helped carry the country to victory in World War II, and now its universities and factories were producing an ever-varying stream of consumer goods. This economic and intellectual muscle, seemingly tireless and nimble, was a bewitching force. Its slogans were seductive. It had become an article of political faith in Washington that the American businessman was the world’s most astute, and the American engineer the most innovative and sound. The evidence was all around. The United States churned out practical and coveted products like few other economies: televisions, phonographs, ovens, blenders, handbags, shoes, fishing reels, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles. If market forces could bring forth the Mustang and the Corvette, certainly they could produce a superior infantry rifle, too.

  This might have been a valid conclusion, had American industry been involved in assault-rifle development in any robust sense. But when the Pentagon went seeking an assault rifle that could hold its own against the AK-47, it was working from a position far behind that of its enemies. It had spent twenty years misapprehending the shift in the evolution of automatic arms. Now it was in an inexorably escalating war with almost no choices from the private sector. McNamara’s Pentagon was right on one point. The M-14 was not the best all-purpose rifle for what war had become, especially in a tropical delta or jungle. To compete against guerrillas armed with Kalashnikovs, the United States needed more firepower than the M-14 provided, and in a lighter rifle. It needed, in short, more lethality per pound, more ability to lay down suppressive fire, and more ammunition per combat load. It needed a rifle with which its soldiers would be mobile, quick, and deadly. The AR-15 offered all of these features, at least on paper. But none of this necessarily meant that the AR-15 was the best choice as a replacement. The AR-15 was, rather, the most well-known—and hyped—of the very few products available. It rose to the generals’ attention through neither a meticulous development cycle nor an expansive market competition. It arrived by default. The supporters of the AR-15, and its salesmen, insisted that it was ready for war. It was not.

  It had not yet proven its reliability in objective field tests.6 Questions of its performance dogged it. As it was handed out, modified and renamed the M-16,[21] many troops were not trained on it or equipped with the necessary equipment to clean it. Its proponents in the Pentagon first believed the most optimistic forecasts about the M-16’s suitability for battle. Then they dismissed reports of problems when its performance did not match the hype. Moreover, the M-16’s ammunition was neither fully developed nor subject to strict technical standards. For all these reasons, the M-16 was not a ready equalizer. It was the accidental rifle, pushed into service by a confluence of historical forces that left the United States military in a rush and unwilling to explore a wider set of options or a more careful course. These were conditions for disaster, as the Marines of Second Battalion, Third Marines were finding out.

  An account of the M-16’s ascension from California curio to the American military’s standard firearm could begin in many places, but the conditions that gave the process its velocity began with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy brought with him Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former top executive at Ford, and a believer in an approach to decision-making called “systems analysis,” which had been conceived in the 1950s at the Rand Corporation. Systems analysis centered on intensive study of problems and options, with examinations of costs, benefits, and risks of potential decisions. Its introduction to the Pentagon, along with a cadre of McNamara’s disciples, who called themselves the whiz kids, was a frontal challenge to the military establishment. McNamara’s followers saw themselves as a rarefied pool of talent, and they merged their boss’s aggressive management style with a Kennedy mandate to look past contigencies for nuclear war and develop the doctrine, organization, and equipment for flexible responses to conflicts overseas. This meant limited war, which in the context of the Cold War further meant the ability to counter the Eastern bloc in proxy fights. Several of McNamara’s officials turned their attention to the question of the rifle.

  The rifle conundrum was a significant one. America’s military machine had entered the nuclear age with an array of fearsome killing tools. The air force had supersonic jets and intercontinental missiles. The army was fielding a new line of battle tanks to enhance its armored divisions that had settled into Western Europe. The navy had launched a nuclear aircraft carrier that steamed under the power of nuclear reactors sealed within its hull. Yet when it came to the most basic tool of empire and of war—the infantry rifle—the American military had sputtered and stalled. The government had spent more than a decade bringing forward the M-14, o
nly to discover in simulations and in Vietnam that soldiers equipped with M-14s were outmaneuvered and outshot by opponents with AK-47s.

  The early 1960s were an unsettled time in American small-arms development. A pair of discordant ideas guided the army’s plans. On one hand was the M-14, a rifle firmly rooted in past designs. But the M-14—for that matter, any rifle—was both a nod to the army’s sense of what a rifle was supposed to be and regarded as the last of its kind, the end of the line. The army was developing what it called the Special Purpose Individual Weapon, or SPIW. As conceived, SPIW was to be the automatic dart gun for the Cold War, James Bond supplants Rifleman Dodd. It would fire bursts of needlelike flechettes from one barrel and grenades out another. By the early 1960s the project had met delays, and a variety of engineering problems was giving it the feel of unattainable whimsy. Its lightweight darts seemed less than ideal for punching through helmets, windshields, and armor plates. They struggled even to resist deflection in vegetation or heavy rain. The optimists who supported SPIW said a fully functional version might be ready in the mid-1960s and would replace rifles altogether. In the interim, troops would have their new M-14s. In the matter of shoulder-fired arms, the United States Army in the early McNamara era was very strange indeed. It simultaneously upheld old ideas about rifles and hitched its future to a fantastic dream. Somehow it had missed the weapon that was both feasible and the direction in which small-arms evolution had actually headed: the assault rifle.

  McNamara sensed at least this much. In October 1962, after his aides had examined the gun gap, he wrote a secret memorandum to Cyrus R. Vance, the secretary of the army. The memorandum was a marker of bureaucratic exasperation. “I have seen certain evidence,” he wrote: