The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  73. Combat After-Action Report of Battalion Landing Team 2/3, July 30, 1967. Declassified and on file at the Library of the Marine Corps, Marine Corps Base, Quantico.

  74. Interviews of Michael Chervenak by the author; the physical description of Chervenak came from Marines he served with in Vietnam.

  75. The Marine Corps had not shown interest in the AR-15 as Colt’s and its salesmen made the rounds with it in the 1950s and early 1960s. It wanted its rifle and machine gun to be of the same caliber, thereby simplifying logistics. Though the Soviet Union had taken this step in the 1950s—fielding both the AK-47 and the RPK, which used the same cartridge—the United States was only beginning to go down the road toward a lightweight assault rifle and had no companion machine gun, even in the research-and-design phase, to fire the same cartridge. This would come later, as the M-249, the Squad Automatic Weapon, known as the SAW.

  76. “Marines Hail M-16 Rifle, Army Accepts it Fully,” UPI, published in the Hartford Times, May 11, 1967.

  77. “House Ad Hoc Hearing for Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” April 23, 1971. From the transcript, Congressional Record vol. 117, part 10, which was introduced into the public record on May 3, 1971.

  78. Accounts of these inspections and function tests held at sea were shared with the author by former Marines who participated in them, including officers and staff noncommissioned officers who supervised them. These include Mike Chervenak, Chuck Chritton, Ed Elrod, Tom Givvin, Ray Madonna, Chuck Woodard, and Dick Culver.

  79. Text of letter from First Lieutenant Michael P. Chervenak, USMC, to the Barnesboro Star, the Washington Post, Senator Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), and Congressman Richard Ichord (D-Mo.), as published in the Barnesboro Star, August 10, 1967.

  80. A copy of the letter to Representative Ichord is on file at WHMC-C, U. Mo.

  81. Personal communication to author from Thomas Tomakowski.

  82. Personal communication to author from Charles Woodard.

  83. From Hallock’s brief biography in “The Hallock Soldier’s Fund and Metro Works Columbus Home Ownership Center.” Hallock entered the real estate business and died wealthy. He is a member of the OCS Hall of Fame at Fort Benning.

  84. “Report of the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program of the Committee on Armed Services,” October 19, 1967 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office).

  85. William G. Bray, “The M-16: A Report,” Data, April 1968, p. 6.

  86. Lieutenant Chervenak’s letter took a winding course to public light. The Barnesboro Star published it in August. Senator Kennedy never replied. Representative Ichord’s staff lost the letter (for which the congressman later apologized). The Washington Post held it, inexplicably, for three months. Throughout summer and fall 1967, as the M-16’s problems were a national story, no one helped Hotel Company as its new rifles continued to jam.

  87. The letter was a black mark on Lieutenant Chervenak’s otherwise promising career. Although promotion from first lieutenant to captain is almost automatic, the more so in times of war, Lieutenant Chervenak was denied promotion when his time came. He served an extra year in the lieutenant rank. This effectively docked his pay.

  88. Lieutenant Givvin wrote a letter detailing his platoon’s experience in the same fight, and it was forwarded to the Marine Corps, which did not investigate. Lieutenant Charles Chritton, who was briefly the commander of Foxtrot Company, wrote to Congress describing his company’s experiences with the rifle. One of the senators from his home state read the letter at a press conference on Capitol Hill, but there was no official reaction. The letter to the Washington Post changed the conversation.

  89. Letter from Kanemitsu Ito to William H. Goldbach, vice president and general manager of Colt’s Military Division, December 3, 1967.

  90. Dick Culver, “The Saga of the M-16 in Vietnam (Part 1).” Culver served a career in the Marine Corps. Some of his experiences with the M-16 when he commanded Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines are posted on www.bobroher.com, p. 5.

  91. Letter from Ito to Goldbach, December 3, 1967.

  92. Patent No. 3482322, “Method of Preventing Malfunction of a Magazine Type Firearm and Gauge for Conducting Same.” Filed with U.S. Patent Office on November 6, 1967.

  93. Letter from Kanemitsu Ito, Colt’s field representative, to Misters Benke, McMahon, Hall, Fremont, December 9, 1967, re: “Return from Bear Cat to Saigon.”

  94. Daniel C. Fales, “M16: The Gun They Swear by… and At!” Popular Mechanics, October 1967.

  95. “Memorandum for Record, Debrief of Colt’s Vietnam Field Representative—Mr. Kanemitsu Ito,” December 28, 1967. Prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Engle, Project Manager Staff Officer, Rifles.

  96. Personal communication to author by Paul A. Benke.

  97. Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Harcourt Books, 1999), p. 164.

  98. “Memorandum for Army Chief of Staff, G4, Fact Finding Visit to 199th Infantry Brigade,” March 28, 1968, by Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Semmler, Chief, PM Rifles, Vietnam Field Office.

  99. Personal communication to author from Jack Beavers.

  100. Contents of tape recording received from K. Ito and J. Fitzgerald, September 27, 1968.

  101. Letter from John S. Foster, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, to Representative L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, February 2, 1968. On file at WHMC-C, U. Mo.

  102. The poem, “Rifle, 5.56MM,XM16E1,” is by Larry Rottmann, who served as an Army public-affairs officer in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Excerpted with permission of the poet from Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans (1st Casualty Press, 1972).

  8. Everyman’s Gun

  1. This is the official German version; Abu Daoud, who claimed to have organized the attack, later said it was false. As with many accounts of terrorism, many sources contradict one another. Given the speed with which the terrorists located the Israelis’ apartment, their prior infiltration would seem probable.

  2. “Munich 1972: When the Terror Began,” Time, posted August 25, 2002 on www.time.com.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Simon Reeve, One Day in September (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), p. 2.

  5. This section was assembled using information from several sources, including Serge Groussard’s The Blood of Israel: The Massacre of the Israeli Athletes (New York: William Morrow, 1975), the most thorough and painstaking account of the act, by a journalist who covered the siege live and then investigated it. Reeve’s One Day in September, and reconstructions by Time magazine were also helpful, as was a visit to the site as part of a lecture series on the attack for students of the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, attended by the author in 2005.

  6. Personal communication to author from Lin Xu.

  7. Mike O’Connor, “Albanian Village Finds Boom in Gun-Running,” New York Times, April 24, 1997. The factory manager is quoted as saying production reached twenty-four thousand AK-47s a month.

  8. Descriptions, and a limited selection of photographs from within the Artemovsk cache, were provided by several people who have been inside the caves. The author was denied entry.

  9. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 302–3.

  10 The account of Fechter’s killing at the Berlin Wall was assembled from German newspaper and academic accounts, as well as from records in the archive of the Stasi, the West Berlin police, and the Ministry of State Security. Von Schnitzler’s quotation is from the transcript of the program he hosted, Schwarze Kanal (Black Channel), on GDR-TV, August 27, 1962. Research conducted by Stefan Pauly.

  11. From “Meeting Notes taken by Chief of the Hungarian People’s Army General Staff Károly Csémi On Talks with Soviet Generals to Discuss Preparations for ‘Operation Danube,’” July 24, 1968, in The Prague Spring ’68: A National Security Archive Documents Reader�
� (Central European University Press, 1998), p. 277.

  12. OTIA 6129 Technical Report, bullet, ball. Report a.k.a. “Preliminary Technical Report, Egyptian 7.62mm, ball.”

  13. Neil C. Livingston and David Halevy, Inside the P.L.O. (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990), p. 38.

  14. On visits in the United States, Kalashnikov has been gracious about the M-16, and complimented Eugene Stoner in person. Later, he placed flowers on Stoner’s grave. But Kalashnikov is both competitive and attuned to his audiences. In Russia, away from Americans, he routinely criticized the American rifle. A sample, from public remarks at Rosoboronexport’s offices in Moscow in April 2006, in the presence of the author: “They said that an American soldier would never take a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle in his hands. Oh how they lied! In Vietnam, the American soldiers threw away their capricious M-16s and took a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle from a killed Vietnamese, counting on captured ammunition. It all did happen, because the conditions in Vietnam were not as clean as conditions in the States where the M-16 works normally. Why am I talking about the past? You see it every day on TV. In Iraq, they openly show Americans with my machine guns, my assault rifles.”

  15. The theoretical range gains were offset to a degree by the short distance between the front and rear sights of the AK-74. This reduced accuracy with iron sights is a simple matter of geometry, and one of the trade-offs associated with having a shorter barrel.

  16. Hogg and Weeks, Military Small Arms, p. 271.

  17. Similar processes were at work elsewhere. In the 1960s, the Israeli military carried the Fabrique Nationale FAL automatic rifle. The FAL was a European competitor against the M-14 during tests in the United States in the 1950s. Like the M-14, it fired the standard NATO cartridge. The Israeli soldiers found it unsatisfactory, due to its heavy weight, its powerful recoil, and its performance shortcomings in the dusty conditions of war in the Middle East. After the Six Day War, the Israelis set out to find a better weapon. They were intrigued by the Kalashnikov’s performance in the hands of their Arab enemies, and in the ensuing contest between arms two designers for Israeli Military Industries, Yisrael Galili and Yaacov Lior, submitted an assault rifle that knocked off elements of the AK-47 but chambered for the same American round fired by the M-16—the .223. The result—the Galil—was a fine example of convergence: the Soviet rifle design made to the American cartridge. It was fielded in the early 1970s. The rifle did not enjoy especially high popularity with Israeli soldiers, who at about the same time as the Galil became available were also issued American M-16s, which by then were largely debugged and were considerably lighter than the Galil.

  18. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 431.

  19. Author’s visit to Kurya, 2004.

  20. Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed, (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 28–29.

  21. New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1967.

  22. Ian Johnston, “Death of a Despot, Buffoon and Killer,” Scotsman, August 17, 2003.

  23. Mustafa Mirzeler and Crawford Young, “Pastoral Politics in the Northeast Periphery in Uganda: AK-47 as Change Agent,” Journal of Modern African Studies 38, 2000, pp. 416–19.

  24. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 17.

  25. From “Programma Doprizyvnoi Podgotovki Yunoshei,” published by the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union.

  26. “Protocol of Pre-Draft Youth Competitions of Pripyat School No. 1.” The handwritten ledger of student performance was found by the author in June 2005 in the gymnasium of the school. Translated by Nikolay Khalip.

  27. Small Arms Weapons Systems, Part One: Main Text, published in May 1966 by the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command, Experimentation Command, Fort Ord, Table 4-1.

  28. Similarly, a contest between two Russian soldiers at Mikhail Kalashnikov’s eighty-fifth birthday celebrations in Izhevsk in 2004 was won by a soldier who disassembled and reassembled his Kalashnikov in twenty-six seconds. Author’s observation.

  29. Many sources describe the system that armed Afghan insurgents against the Soviet Union. This was condensed from Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan—The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower (Havertown, Pa.: Casemate, 1992).

  30. Ibid., p. 109.

  31. Lawrence J. Whelan, “Weapons of the FMLN—Part Three: Database Overview,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 3, Nos. 1 and 2, February 1992. Published by the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, pp. 1–9.

  32. Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, transl. Samuel B. Griffith II (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 83.

  33. Lawrence J. Whelan, “Weapons of the FMLN—Part Two: The Logistics of an Insurgency,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1991. Published by the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, p. 3. Also “Weapons of the FMLN,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1990, p. 3.

  34. “Weapons of the FMLN,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1990, p. 3.

  35. David Schiller, “Security Problems After Germany’s Reunification,” in News from the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, Vol. 2, No. 2, February 1991, pp. 3–4.

  36. Center for Peace and Disarmament Education/Saferworld, “Turning the Page: Small Arms and Light Weapons in Albania,” December 2005, p. 6.

  37. Personal communication to author from an international arms dealer in Ukraine.

  38. There are many accounts of Minin’s deals with Liberia. The facts here are condensed from the work of two international arms-transfer researchers, Brian Wood and Sergio Finardi, in Chapter 1 of Developing a Mechanism to Prevent Illict Brokering in Small Arms and Light Weapons—Scope and Implications, published by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2007, pp. 4–6.

  39. Interview with Patrick Okwera.

  40. Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena & the Holy Sprits: War in Northern Uganda 1986–97 (Oxford: James Currey Ltd., 1999), p. 47.

  41. Ibid., pp. 59–60.

  42. From “L.R.A. Religious Beliefs,” an unpublished twelve-page manuscript prepared primarily by Captain Ray Apire, a former LRA commander and spiritual leader who defected from the LRA, and Major Jackson Achama, a former LRA administrator and “technician.” Edited by Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Skow, a former defense and army attaché at the U.S. embassy in Kampala.

  43. Ibid. Interview with Captain Apire.

  44. Author’s interviews with more than a dozen former LRA members and officers.

  45. Interview with Lieutenant Colonel F. A. Alero.

  46. Interview with Richard Opiyo, a child soldier in the LRA for six years.

  47. Interview with Ray Apire, former LRA officer.

  48. Interview with Dennis Okwonga, a child soldier in the LRA for slightly less than two and a half years.

  49. Nearly two dozen students’ or instructors’ notebooks from several camps were collected in Afghanistan by the author and by David Rhode, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, in late 2001. See further, C. J. Chivers and David Rhode, “The Jihad Files: Al Qaeda’s Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing” and “The Jihad Files: Afghan Camps Turn Out Holy War Guerrillas and Terrorists,” New York Times, March 17–18, 2002. For a detailed description of one of the notebooks, a 190-page handwritten record made by a student in a camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, see “A Dutiful Recruit’s Notebook: Lesson by Lesson Toward Jihad,” by the same authors, New York Times, March 18, 2002.

  50. Kofi Annan, A. “Small Arms, Big Problems,” International Herald Tribune, July 10, 2001.

  51. Author’s observation at gun show.

  52. Mirzeler and Young, “Pastoral Politics,” p. 419.

  53. Michael Bhatia and Mark Sedra, Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict. Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in Post-war Society (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 42. The historical trends in Kalashnikov prices are from this work, published in Chapter 2.

  54. Auth
or’s observations and interviews in Iraq in 2003.

  55. Author’s interviews with Chechen insurgents in the Caucasus, 2005.

  56. Author’s interview in Norway in 2008 with Sharpuddi Israilov, a Chechen who had a vehicle impounded in this way before fleeing Chechnya.

  57. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan–The Bear Trap, p. 92.

  58. Author’s observations and interviews with arms dealers, customers, and intelligence officials in Iraq in 2006. For a further discussion, see “Black Market Weapons Prices Surge in Iraq Chaos,” by C. J. Chivers, New York Times, December 10, 2006.

  59. This is a commonly cited version, attributed to James R. Whelan, in his 1989 book Out of the Ashes: The Life, Death and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989.) Other accounts differ, including one that claims the inscription read: “For Salvador, From his comrade-in-arms Fidel.”

  60. Like many of the legends of the automatic Kalashnikov, this account has been the subject of considerable dispute.

  61. Author’s interviews with Palestinian fighters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2002.

  62. Livingston and Halevy, Inside the P.L.O., p. 278.

  63. Interview with author in 2008.

  64. Margarita Antidze, “Georgian Army Replaces Kalashnikov with U.S. rifle,” Reuters, January 18, 2008.

  65. Author’s observation and interviews with Russian soldiers during Russian-Georgian War, August 2008.

  66. From a memorandum in Mullah Omar’s laptop, obtained in Afghanistan in 2001 by Alan Cullison, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who allowed the documents to be reviewed by the author. The contents of one particular memo—“In the name of God, most Merciful, most Benificent, Thank God and prayers and peace upon the prophet, Following is the cost of preparing one mujahid with weapons and costume”—are reproduced here.