“Y!” DeMille yelled to his team leader. “A gook!”
Corporal Ybarra turned and reacted instinctively. His magazine had seventeen rounds. His M-16 was set on automatic. He fired at close-range until the clip was empty, killing the dazed Vietnamese man.
Fortunately for Private First Class DeMille, whose M-16 had failed, Corporal Ybarra’s had not.63
The Hill Fights claimed more lives than any Marine action yet in the war. More than 150 Marines were killed. Several hundred more were wounded. Many elements of Marine firepower had worked together as two battalions had claimed the high ground. Attack aircraft, artillery, and mortars had pounded the North Vietnamese positions. The most basic piece of equipment had failed. By May 5, the jamming had been widespread enough that sadly surreal scenes unfolded at one helicopter landing zone on Hill 881 North, where wounded Marines, who had been hit in a mortar bombardment, were waiting to be evacuated. Marines who had not been wounded wandered among the casualties, asking their bloodied colleagues if their rifles had worked. When they found a wounded Marine whose rifle had performed well, they asked to trade and exchanged a faulty M-16 for the M-16 that had reliably fired. Other Marines had also found that three pins near the trigger assembly had a tendency to work loose and slip out, rendering the rifles useless.64 Over several days, the Marines’ initial satisfaction with their M-16s had turned to astonishment, then disgust. Emotions were further inflamed by a sense among troops that the Pentagon had failed to provide them with enough cleaning rods, as the army technical team had found when they visited Vietnam six months before.65 One survivor vented to the Asbury Park Evening Press:
Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Before we left Okinawa, we were all issued the new rifle, the M-16. Practically everyone of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.66
Back in Washington, the Marine Corps pushed back. It denied that the problems were extensive and insisted that the M-16 was reliable and that statements from Marines who said otherwise were exaggerated. There were, as is often the case, grains of truth in the official statements, just as there were errors and exaggerations in some of the troops’ accounts. In the Hill Fights rifles failed; by most accounts, many rifles. But the claim that “practically everyone of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him” was overstatement, at least battalionwide. By seizing on such statements and becoming argumentative, the officers in Washington missed the substantial truth: M-16s were failing at an alarming rate, the failures put lives at risk, and the grunts had lost faith in their rifles and in some cases in their chain of command. The officers had entered an argument they could not win. This was in part because by this time, the congressional subcommittee was gathering its own information, which pointed to widespread malfunctions and a pattern of false official statements by generals who were trying to convince inquirers that all was well. In May, Ralph Marshall, a lawyer working for the subcommittee, visited the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Illinois to interview wounded GIs. Marshall found twenty-two Marines who had fought with M-16s in Vietnam. Eleven had experienced jamming. Some of their accounts were jarring. “In a squad of 14 all rifles jammed—in another patrol 9 jammed,” he wrote. “Several of the marines had requested the return of their M-14 rifles in place of the newly issued M-16 because they had lost confidence in the M-16.”67
Marshall’s findings were a drop in a cascade. In letters home and interviews with reporters in the war zone, soldiers and Marines told of weapons failing while troops were under enemy fire. One Marine lance corporal noted that “every private through sergeant that uses the rifle will tell you that it will jam about once every 2 magazines if it is on full-automatic and about once every 3 or 4 magazines on semi-automatic.” How this translated into combat was captured in the last minutes in the life of Lance Corporal David C. Borey, a Marine from Massachusetts assigned to Bravo Company, First Battalion, First Marine Regiment. A fellow Marine mailed a letter home describing the skirmish, which erupted after his unit had been airlifted outside Da Nang and was caught in the open crossing a rice paddy the next day. “This is how it happened,” he wrote:
Like you said, Dad, we are all complaining about the M-16. When it works you can’t beat it but it jams so goddamn easy. The only cover we had was a 5″ dike to hide behind. There was a steady flow of lead going back and forth and we were jaming [sic] left and right. And when they jam the only thing you can do is poke a cleaning rod down the bore and punch out the empty shell. Borey had the only cleaning rod in our group and he was running up and down the line punching out the bores. I knew he was going to get it and I think he did too. A man needed the cleaning rod and Dave jumped up and started running towards him. As soon as he got up he was hit in the foot. He was about 10 feet in front of me and he called to me and said—Hey Bert I’m hit. He couldn’t stay where he was—bullets were hitting the dirt all around him. He had to get back to the dike. I told him to get up and run and I’d shoot grazing fire into the tree line where the VC were. I got three magazines and fired 60 rounds to cover him but as he was running a goddamn VC bullet hit in the back.68
The wall of silence had broken. One incident after another eroded public confidence. Senator Peter H. Dominick, a Republican from Colorado, visited Vietnam in May 1967 at roughly the same time that Lance Corporal Borey was shot. Dominick inquired about the M-16. He was told it was a good weapon and was invited to test fire a sample rifle himself. Someone produced an M-16 and handed it to the senator, who tried to fire it. It jammed.69 In June, members of Ichord’s panel held their own test fire with an M-16 provided by Colt’s. If any one M-16 might have been expected to perform flawlessly, this should have been it: the test rifle a manufacturer facing congressional investigation presented as a sample to Congress. The subcommittee’s rifle jammed several times. No one needed to be told what this might mean in combat. But another GI crystallized for the congressmen a particular species of nightmare:
The other night we got a radio message from one of our night ambushes…. The last words they said were, “out of hand grenades, all weapons jammed.” The next morning when they got to them, their hands were all skinned up and cut and their stocks on their rifles were all broken from using them as clubs.
As the battlefield accounts piled up, the M-16’s reputation sank so low that even troops waiting to ship to Vietnam worried about carrying it. “I was horrified at the stories of whole units being pushed back because of the inability of the M-16 to sustain a heavy rate of automatic fire without a malfunction,” wrote a navy lieutenant undergoing training in California. “It is terrifying and the stories and the opinions of the Marines regarding it have been ruthlessly suppressed…. I witnessed on the firing range malfunction after malfunction.” A sergeant on predeployment leave wrote Ichord to ask whether he should seek alternative arrangements to fight. “Are we, the troops en route to SE Asia, supposed to arm ourselves with a backup weapon, which is widely done, or can we bet our lives on our M-16?” he wrote. “If you, in your capacity can answer the questions as expeditiously as possible I would certainly appreciate it very much—so would my wife.”70
Colt’s and the army agreed to change after change. The plastic stock would be thickened so it would be less likely to crack. The chamber would be chrome-plated, and then the barrel would be, too. The heavier buffer would be added, to reduce the rate of fire caused by ball powder. The gas tube would be made of stainless steel to resist corrosion. The anodizing on aluminum parts would be upgraded. A better phosphate coating would be applied to the weapon to resist rust.71 Some of the steps were part of the normal debugging of a rifle. What made them remarkable was that they were being recommended for a rifle that had already been distributed for combat as the primary weapon for tens of thousands of American servicemen. The army and Colt’s had effectively put a prototype into mass production, and were fine-tuning it as it failed in the troops’ hands. Rifles shipped to Vietnam by late 1967 included so
me of these features, as one by one the changes were worked into the assembly lines in Hartford. But many changes identified as necessary in 1966 would wait until late 1968 to be incorporated on rifles being sent to the war. The improvements did no good for the thousands of troops carrying rifles issued until that time. Among the men on the line, their fates linked to rifles issued prematurely, anger boiled.72
Out in the field beside Ap Sieu Quan, Private First Class Nickelson worked on his jammed rifle. He had given away his position by firing. Bullets raked the grass nearby. He was terrified and enraged. He reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it as far as he could toward the trees; he hoped its blast would divert the attention of the enemy soldiers. After the explosion, he removed his rifle’s magazine and pulled back on the charging handle to look inside the chamber. The empty cartridge was stuck there. He cursed again and reached for his cleaning rod, which he kept taped to the rifle. Around him was chaos. First Platoon was pinned down. Nickelson pushed the rod down the muzzle and knocked the empty cartridge case clear. He returned the magazine to its place and chambered a second round. Again he looked up to fire, and spotted the North Vietnamese soldier in the tree line. The man was on his stomach, prone and firing out at the platoon. Nickelson aimed his M-16 and eased back on the trigger again; firing on automatic, he hoped to hit the man multiple times. The first bullet hit the soldier in the left leg. He watched him roll out of sight into the bushes.
But Nickelson could not finish him. His rifle had jammed again. He reached for another grenade.
Up and down the scattered platoon the Marines’ rifles were not working. A few Marines had defied the Marine Corps’ orders and managed to acquire M-14s. These men were able to provide a degree of protection for the rest, but could not produce the volume of fire needed to push off the NVA. Staff Sergeant Elrod radioed the company commander and told him that his platoon had casualties and was stopped. He asked for an air strike on the village. The Marines of First Platoon backed away, putting distance between them and Ap Sieu Quan. Perhaps twenty NVA soldiers with automatic Kalashnikovs had turned back a Marine Corps rifle company. Two helicopters tried to land, one to carry off wounded Marines and another to drop off more ammunition. Both faced fire from the village and from among the vegetation. As they alighted, rocket-propelled grenades flashed out of the tree line and exploded in the landing zone. One helicopter was damaged. The pilots lurched their airframes back into the air and veered off, rotors thumping. The platoon pulled back farther. Two more helicopters arrived and hovered above the grass, noses high, while their crews dumped supplies off the back ramps. This was war in the assault-rifle era; the NVA volume of rifle fire was intensive enough that the company needed heavy fire support. After the helicopters were gone, Hotel Company escalated, with mortars, artillery, and the air strike that Elrod had asked for. Explosions flashed in the village and heaved rubble into the air. Ap Sieu Quan fell silent. The NVA soldiers slipped away.
Hotel Company stood. It had suffered miserably. Five Marines were dead, thirty were wounded.73 Private First Class Nickelson had survived. He rose to his feet but left his jammed rifle in the dirt. He had arrived in Vietnam a month before. Until that day, he had never handled this kind of rifle. In the United States, the Marine Corps had trained him on an M-14. In his one previous firefight, his M-16 had jammed, too—after firing a single round. He had been in two firefights against NVA soldiers with automatic rifles, and he had managed to fire only three rounds back. What good was a rifle that did not work? Nickelson was new to war. He was no fool. He understood this was not right. A rifle that failed in battle was worse than useless. It was detestable. As far as he was concerned it was a discard. Upon arriving in Vietnam and before being assigned to the battalion, Nickelson had bought a .38 revolver from a soldier who was rotating home. He would carry that until the Marine Corps could give him a rifle he could trust.
An officer ordered him to pick up his M-16. Nickelson was incredulous.
“Fuck you,” he said.
An argument broke out at the edge of the smoking village. Nickelson refused to carry a rifle that did not work. Other Marines intervened. Hotel Company had enough problems. A compromise was reached—he would carry an M79 grenade launcher. Someone produced his new weapon. The Marine who had carried it had been shot; it was available for anyone else’s use. Nickelson slung it and walked into Ap Sieu Quan. The village had been partially rubbled. Shattered ceramic roofing tiles littered the ground. Blood-splattered trails showed where the North Vietnamese soldiers had dragged their dead away. A few chickens wandered the scene, the only remaining inhabitants. The Marines caught them, lit a fire from bits of rubble, and began to cook their birds. Nickelson settled into his new weapon. He would never carry an M-16 again.
By the time helicopters flew back to the USS Tripoli on July 26, the mood in Hotel Company was dark. The company’s executive officer, Lieutenant Chervenak, had queried each platoon in Ap Sieu Quan and learned that forty rifles had jammed during the battle. Forty rifles. Roughly a quarter of the company had been under fire and unable to fight back. The officers in other companies in Second Battalion, Third Marines told him of similar problems in their own firefights during Operation Bear Chain.
Lieutenant Chervenak, lean and athletic, had taken a roundabout route to the infantry. Raised in west central Pennsylvania, he had been the quarterback of his high school football team, and then attended Pennsylvania State University on a military scholarship. After he completed the basic infantry course required of all Marine officers, the Corps assigned him to naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida. He hoped to fly jets. It was not to be. The Marine Corps needed more pilots for helicopters than for jets. He was assigned to the helicopter course. An assignment to flight school was coveted, one of the professional plums for a young military officer in the United States. When Lieutenant Chervenak learned he would not fly jets, he immediately did something officers in good standing at flight school rarely do. He quit. He asked for orders to the infantry. Soon he was en route to Vietnam.74
In May 1967, he arrived in Okinawa as one of the replacements assigned to restore the battalion to fighting strength after the fights for Hills 861 and 881. For the first time he saw an M-16. He started hearing the harrowing accounts. He also discovered that troops were buying M-14s from rear-echelon and aviation units that still carried them. Lieutenant Chervenak was new to the unit; he reserved judgment until he could see M-16s in action himself. But he sensed something was deeply wrong. The Marine Corps was organized around its rifles. The rifleman was at the center of its identity, training, and lore. And Marines were trying to get their rifles on a black market?
The Corps’ reaction similarly stumped him. The Marine Corps had not been interested in the M-16 throughout the early 1960s.75 But once the Pentagon took its decision, the Corps’ generals adopted the Beltway stance. A din of complaints about M-16 jamming had risen from the ranks. The generals’ replies mixed paternalistic denials that the M-16 was failing with strong defenses of the weapon’s merits. The senior officers followed the army’s pattern: They blamed the troops for the weapons’ problems. At a press conference in Da Nang just after the battles for Hills 861 and 881, one highly decorated commander, Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt of the Third Marine Amphibious Force, delivered a classic performance of an officer who has lost touch with his men. First he declared that the Marines in his command were “100 percent sold” on the M-16. Most of those who had relied on the weapon in battle, he added, “have nothing but praise for it.” This can be read only as a lie. General Walt pressed on. He put blame for malfunctions squarely upon individual Marines and their officers and noncommissioned officers, saying they either had not adequately maintained their rifles or had tried to force too many rounds into their magazines. This was a slap at the men at war. In a booming slip of the tongue, General Walt added that “rumors” of unsatisfactory M-16 performance were started “by a very, very small majority.”76 Not long after the press conferenc
e, General Walt was reassigned to Washington and elevated to the post of the Corps’ assistant commandant. In July, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Greene, repeated General Walt’s position, calling the M-16 “ideally suited” for the jungle warfare of Vietnam. The brass had set a tone. With the generals standing behind the M-16, complaints had little chance of finding a supporting audience. The young Marines in Vietnam were on their own.
The brass’s position was reflected down the chain of command and in the army, too. One officer responsible for the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s public statements described an official prohibition against mentioning M-16 malfunctions. This was a subject not to be broached in any army comments or in conversations with journalists, along with other topics officially deemed too unsettling for the public’s ears: “the defeat of U.S. units,” “B-52 and other bombing errors,” “female VC,” “very young VC,” and the “use of flamethrowers, hand-held or track-mounted.”
MACV31 told all information officers prior to my arrival that the M16 was not a topic for discussion. Newsmen were not to question soldiers about the weapon. No stories about the rifle jamming or malfunctioning were to be written.
The Gun Page 39