With unfiltered information about the M-16 now reaching General Greene, the commandant reversed himself. Ito could feel the tension. “Phone calls and secret messages were flying all over the Marine Corps area,” he wrote. The Corps had decided to replace all of its M-16s. Rifles in the Corps’ possession in Okinawa were “to be air lifted ASAP” to replace the rifles in Marines’ hands in Vietnam, Ito reported. The Corps also put in a request to Colt’s for twenty thousand rifles with chromed chambers. Ito saw the problems for what they were. His correspondence to Colt’s did nothing to sugarcoat them. But he was in a difficult position. Colt’s had wanted him to distribute surveys about the rifle. A lockdown was in place.
The questionnaires are out of the question. The M-16 rifle is a very hot topic over here. They don’t want any names or units put on paper. I have been asked not to put anything down on paper. Unit COs [commanding officers] and staff officers forbid the use of the questionnaires. I go into the field armed (would you believe) with an M-16 rifle, when I can get one. Everything that I inspect and see, I must keep in my head until I can get to a place to write it down.91
Ito’s letters suggest that he was a man of conscience. He had been telling his bosses at Colt’s in clear terms for more than a year that the M-16 had real problems, and now he knew that these problems were worse than what the military or Colt’s had ever publicly said. He had fought in Korea and been awarded a Silver Star. He was a professional engineer who had worked closely on the M-16, including working on ways to prevent malfunctioning. (At Colt’s, between trips to Vietnam, he had designed a gauge to measure the dimension of a magazine to ensure it would feed the M-16 optimally and reduce the incidence of jamming.)92 He understood the anger of men who could not trust their rifles. A few days after meeting the Marines, he forced himself to confront the failures more personally. He visited the hospitals, to see men who thought that Colt’s and the Pentagon had let them down at the most important moments of their lives. He wrote back to the States, hinting at his pain.
Every time I think that I am tired, I do these things. As I said I have a lot of guts. I wished that others had the guts to look at things I see or ask questions. Some had reasons to hate me yet they like me because I am helping—a few don’t really know. I don’t know what to say to them—there are people with no arms, legs, faces and the rest. These are some of the places I go to find the information I need. I go every place, but I sure wouldn’t ask anyone else to do it.…
…It is difficult working 18–20 hours a day—7 days a week. Any time I am tired I go back to the 24th, 93rd Evac or the 3rd Field Hospitals.93
Ito returned to the United States for Christmas and re-entered the delicate game of pretending things were better than they were. This remained Colt’s posture. Even as late as summer 1967, while complaints of jamming rose to a roar, Colt’s executives had been briefing journalists as if nothing were wrong. They told the executive editor of Popular Mechanics that they had received “no official complaints from their customer—the Department of Defense.”94 On December 28, Ito and Paul Benke, Colt’s president, met at the Pentagon with officers from around the services involved in the M-16 program. Ito’s presentation was direct: The new buffers were reaching many units, but severe problems persisted. About 70 percent of the rifles in the Marines’ possession, he said, “should be condemned due to pitted chambers.” More than one-fourth of the M-16 magazines in Vietnam should be condemned. He said he had seen several units that were still short of cleaning gear. He further noted that the army had no formal system for reporting M-16 malfunctions. This point raised a searing question. Now, two years after the problems had been identified, did the army’s data, and its statements about the rates of failure, reflect anything like the truth?[28]
In the end, Kanemitsu Ito was a midlevel engineer. He could describe what he had seen. He could share what he knew. But Benke, the man who ran Colt’s Firearms Division, would get the last word. Benke interjected. He told the military officers present that “the observations were based on very brief contact, hearsay, and single pieces of evidence, and that final conclusions would require added review and investigation.”95 By this time, Benke had been receiving frank, descriptive accounts of M-16 failures from his teams in Vietnam for more than a year. The accounts had come from multiple engineers—from Fremont, Hall, Behrendt, and others—and from multiple trips. Each of his company sources had relayed the remarks and experiences of many soldiers. Ito was neither treading new ground nor trafficking in rumor. He was sharing carefully observed details consistent with what others had seen and said. In November 1966, Benke had received a memo from another Colt’s engineer, which summarized “discussions with one brigade commander, four battalion commanders and many other field and company grade officers.” The memo specified “changes and things which should be expedited,” including chrome-plating the bore and chamber, installing new buffers, and applying a better protective finish. More than a year had passed. Thousands of troops in Vietnam still had rifles without these improvements. They continued to suffer malfunctions. Colt’s position, at the late date of December 1967, was now a matter of record: The reports of problems, even when supported by his own engineer fresh from Vietnam, were “hearsay.”
More than forty years later, Paul Benke disagreed with any reading of the record that suggests that Colt’s was not forthright and conscientious, or sold the Pentagon rifles unfit for combat duty in Vietnam. The M-16 rifle program suffered from problems, he said, but these problems were related to interservice rivalries, inadequate troop training, and bureaucratic opposition to the rifle within military circles. The problems with the rifle’s reputation were exacerbated, he said, by the fact that he was opposed to the American involvement in Vietnam.
As for design or manufacturing shortcomings, he said: “We did have some problems, including the corrosion of the aluminum receiver. The measure of them was not so much to cause a Congressional investigation.” He also said the path the rifle took from the ArmaLite prototypes to the rifles issued in Vietnam was such that it was not exhaustively tested by the Army’s ordnance corps, in part because the ordnance community resisted the rifle in both concept and particulars. “The M-16 never went through the testing process that other rifles had undergone,” he said. “Had it gone through the normal cycle of introduction, it probably would have been a different rifle.” As for the complaints by troops in Vietnam, like those of Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines, he said, “I think many of the tales have been exaggerated. We took them all seriously, but—” and he spoke about the political quarrels the company faced in Washington. When provided a copy of Ito’s correspondence and of the memorandum of record from the meeting he attended with Ito in the Pentagon in December 1967, he said, “We never ever ever tried to hide anything.” Their only concern, he said, was that soldiers have the best possible rifle.96
Several weeks after Benke and Ito appeared at the Pentagon, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive, striking scores of American and South Vietnamese positions across the country simultaneously. Tens of thousands of communist fighters had coordinated an action. In the matter of a rifle, the defending American troops, after several years in Vietnam, still did not have a fully reliable firepower match. Matters were more dire for the Americans’ Vietnamese allies, who often were armed with surplus weapons from World War II. One of the senior South Vietnamese officers, Lieutenant General Dong Van Khuyen, lamented his soldiers’ predicament against the better-armed foe. “During the enemy Tet offensive of 1968 the crisp, rattling sounds of the AK-47s echoing in Saigon and some other cities,” he said, “seemed to make a mockery of the weaker, single shots of Garands and carbines fired by stupefied friendly troops.”97 With Tet, the war had changed. The American and South Vietnamese forces were not defeated in the field, and the South Vietnamese government did not fall, as the architects of the communist offensive had hoped. But the communists’ ability to mass and fight shocked Washington, w
hich had never expected the war to be this hard, or its foes this capable.
By late in 1968, the M-16 was performing better than it had, but it was far from good enough, and it was late. Survey teams were finding a higher level of satisfaction with the M-16. New troops arriving in Vietnam had been trained on the rifle, cleaning gear was available, and the rifles now had chromium-plated bores and the new buffer. The worst problems were past. But throughout the year, more problems were still reported—not at the rate of 1966 and 1967, but alarming nonetheless. A battalion in the 199th Infantry Brigade had seventeen rifles blow up on an operation conducted in muddy terrain and wet weather, and apparently water or mud had clogged the barrels.98 The rifle, for all of its modifications, struggled to function when exposed to the worst sorts of field conditions. In Hotel Company of Second Battalion, Third Marines, Corporal Jack Beavers was in a battle in Quang Tri province on July 7, 1968. The NVA were firing artillery at the Marines, and as the corporal crouched and crawled to stay alive, his M-16 became coated with sand. Later, as his platoon assaulted across a rice paddy toward a village, the rifle jammed. So did the M-16s of other Marines around him. As Marines dropped, felled by NVA fire, he picked up their M-16s, only to have those rifles jam, too. Corporal Beavers went through three or four M-16s before the fighting stopped.99 Seven Marines in Hotel Company died that day, including his best friend, Lance Corporal Gerald L. Baldwin, who was shot several times.
In autumn 1968, Ito was back in Vietnam, where he and another Colt’s field representative toured military units around Saigon. They found that many magazines did not seat well on the weapons, which caused M-16s to fail to feed when fired on automatic. They found problems with the selector switch, which was often difficult to turn. And, even after all of the changes, they found that “quite a few rifles are rusting or corroding,” especially around the selector switch. In a tape sent back to Colt’s offices, Ito said that “damaged or poor functioning parts were noted in rifles which were only in use for two months maximum.”100
The Pentagon eventually accepted that M-16s would jam at higher rates than it or its soldiers would have liked. One investigation early in the year found that during a seven-hour firefight near Chu Lai, Company D of the Fifth Battalion, Seventh Cavalry suffered many jammed weapons, and some were so severe that by the end of the firefight, of the sixty-five or seventy M-16s fired, “twelve were out of action.” The Pentagon noted that “this was directly related to the inordinate amount of sand which was built up in the weapons during the rapid movement through the dikes and rice fields.” “From past observations and tests,” the official assessment continued, “it is known that small arms have difficulty in functioning satisfactorily in a severe sand environment.”101
Such was the state of resignation. The M-16, which at the start of the war had been a symbol of innovation and technical promise, had become instead a symbol of the mix-ups of war, and of a dishonest Pentagon and a manufacturer with which it worked. As public opinion on the war shifted, America’s undependable rifle became another element of disaffection, a symbol of failure for a military that had won World War II and for a nation that believed its industry was among the best in the world. It was a demoralizing comedown, as one embittered officer wrote:
The M-16 sure is a marvelous gun,
and in a god-awful war
it provides some keen fun.
The bullet it fires appears too small to harm
but it makes a big hole
and can tear off an arm.
Single shot, semi, or full automatic,
a real awesome weapon,
’tho in performance sporadic.
But listen to Ichord and forget that stuck bolt,
for you aren’t as important
as a kickback from Colt.
So carry your rifle (they don’t give a damn),
just pray you won’t need it
while you’re in Vietnam.
The M-16 is issue, though we all feel trapped.
More GIs would protest,
but somehow they got zapped.102
* * *
Several months after the fight for Ap Sieu Quan, Staff Sergeant Elrod was reassigned from Hotel Company’s First Platoon to become the battalion’s intelligence chief, and was meritoriously promoted, to the rank of gunnery sergeant. The battalion continued to operate against the NVA in the provinces just south of North Vietnam. Throughout this time, he refused to carry an M-16. He had seen too many M-16s jam in too many fights, and lost too many Marines. After the battalion’s rifles were replaced in December 1967, the newer rifles performed better, but many Marines still had problems, and the rifles with chromed chambers would not be available for months. The M-16 remained a bitter subject.
One day in spring 1968, after a skirmish in a gully near Khe Sanh, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod found an AK-47 beside a dead North Vietnamese soldier. The rifle was in excellent condition. He claimed it as his own, along with several magazines. This was not a trophy. It was a tool. Now he had an assault rifle he could depend on. The AK-47 did not solve all his problems. It solved one problem but replaced it with another. There was a special danger related to carrying the enemy’s weapon: The M-16 and the AK-47 have distinctly different sounds, and whenever Gunnery Sergeant Elrod fired his new weapon, he risked drawing fire from other Marines. He considered this less of a risk than carrying a rifle that might not fire at all.
A few weeks later, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod was walking across a forward operating base near Khe Sanh with his AK-47 slung across his back. A lieutenant colonel stopped him.
“Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?” he asked.
“Because it works,” Gunnery Sergeant Elrod replied.
“It’s going to get you killed,” the colonel said.
Gunnery Sergeant Elrod knew something about how Marines were getting killed. In his experience, this was not one of the ways.
“Sir,” he said. “My Marines know what my weapon sounds like. And it works.”
And that was the basic position from which any discussion about automatic rifles began and ended. It was well and good to design a rifle that fired bullets at tremendous velocity, or could achieve exceptional accuracy over substantial range. Soldiers would welcome a rifle that was especially lethal, just as they would praise a rifle that managed to be lightweight, or sturdy, or had recoil so slight that it almost could not be perceived. But none of these traits meant much if the rifle could not be relied upon to fire when a Marine pulled its trigger. If a rifle could not be trusted, its other characteristics were moot. Being a bayonet holder was not enough.
Gunnery Sergeant Elrod kept his AK-47 that day, and he carried it for several more months. He set it aside only when he rotated back to the United States.
CHAPTER 8
Everyman’s Gun
Q: You said you killed an army officer?
A: He was on a treetop on a small mountain near Kilak, Okidi Hill. The commander was in a tree. He was on a patrol or an observation post.
Q: What happened?
A: We were three. We came from behind. We saw him and he didn’t see us. The commander was using his radio. The officer was not alone—the others were down below, cooking. They opened fire on us.
Q: And then?
A: The officer fell from the tree. It was my accurate fire that shot the officer.
Q: After you knew he was dead, and the fighting was over that day, what did you think of the operation?
A: I was so happy because I knew I would be promoted.
Q: What was your new rank?
A: I didn’t get promoted.
Q: There were other operations?
A: My own group killed my mother. It was announced on the radio. I was involved in a raid, and later I learned my mother had died in the raid.
—Notes from author’s interview with Walter Ocira, a child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, in northeastern Uganda in 2007
THE EIGHT YOUNG PALESTINIAN MEN, DRESSED IN TRACK SUIT
S, reached the barrier outside Munich’s Olympic Village in the darkness just after 4:00 A.M. on September 5. The fence was neither tall nor topped with razor wire, and an easy climb for a young man, even a young man with a duffel bag. The athletes and officials participating in the 1972 Summer Olympics slept on the other side. Though the compound was guarded, the security was relaxed, even casual. The West German government, eager to exorcise the memories of Hitler’s Olympics in Berlin in 1936, had chosen a low-key police posture: an unarmed security staff, unimposing barriers, a climate of trust and accommodation rather than suspicion and control. The organizers had dubbed the competition “The Carefree Games.” Like this motto, the public-relations ambition was unsubtle. The XX Olympiad was to be a global affirmation of Bavaria reborn, and a declaration of decency for a nation that had returned from fascism to the civilized world.
The men in the track suits were members of the Black September terrorist organization, a recently assembled cell directed to exploit the Games’ officially friendly atmosphere. A police reconstruction would later claim that two of the cell’s members had infiltrated the village weeks before and taken temporary jobs on the Olympic staff. The commander, Luttif Afif, a thirty-five-year-old émigré who had lived in West Germany for several years, had worked as an engineer; his deputy was a cook.1 Afif had patiently watched this same section of fence the night before and observed athletes returning from parties outside. The athletes had scaled the barrier, dropped into the compound, and continued toward their apartments. No guard had stopped them. They passed unchallenged into the secure zone. Afif decided that his cell would imitate this behavior. The killers would masquerade as athletes coming home.
That night, before leaving their hotel, the Arabs slipped into athletic suits and packed their weapons into gym bags printed with the Olympic logo. Into each duffel they stuffed hand grenades, first-aid gear, amphetamines to ward off sleep, ropes cut to lengths ready for binding hostages, sections of pantyhose for masks, and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Six of these rifles had been flown into Germany from Algiers, via Paris.2 The world had not yet adapted to the idea that calculated menace, in the form of attacks upon civilians, might lurk anywhere. This was before air passengers and luggage were as a matter of routine thoroughly screened. The Kalashnikovs, tools designed for infantry, were in Munich to be used to corral and kill civilians. As they lifted each firearm and slipped it into the kit, Afif and his deputy gave it a kiss. “Oh, my love,” they said.3 Then the team set out, into the night.
The Gun Page 41