The Gun
Page 58
Friends at the Times pitched in with information, referrals, translations, clippings, and other support: David Rohde, Nick Kulish, Paul Zielbauer, Eric Schmitt, Nick Wood, John Burns, Dex Filkins, Jim Dao, Thom Shanker, Michael Gordon, Jim Glanz, Carlotta Gall, Michael Slackman, Ellen Barry, Cliff Levy, Steve Myers, Andrew Kramer, Sophia Kishkovsky, Willy Rashbaum, Jeffrey Gettleman, Bobby Worth, Joe Kahn, Andrei and Oleg Shevchenko, Natasha Bubenova, Phyllis Collazzo, Cynthia Latimer, Flora Lee, Charlie Williams, Alain Delaqueriere, Ethan Wilensky-Lanford, Michael Schwirtz, Josh Yaffa, and Sasha Nurnberg. Photographers (and a videographer) joined me on many trips and indulged requests for detailed pictures of arms, ammunition, log books, serial numbers, shipping labels, munitions packaging, and markings: Adam Ellick, Luke Tchalenko, Joao Silva, Chang Lee, Christoph Bangert, Yuri Tutov, Justyna Mielnikiewicz, Joseph Sywenkyj, Sergei Kivrin, Dima Beliakov. Journalists from other news organizations helped, too: Nick Paton Walsh, Jeffrey Fleishman, Beth Noble, Arkady Ostrovsky, Alan Cullison, Aram Roston, Bryon McWilliams, and Bing West.
Several people listed here read portions of the draft manuscript, or drafts in their entirety, and offered suggestions and corrections. Other readers included Mark Greene and Kory Romanat.
I was assisted throughout by local journalists, guides, interpreters, and drivers in many different countries. Yuriy Tartarchuk escorted a small group of us through Chernobyl’s ruins and the exclusion zone, and allowed Joseph Sywenkyj to photograph pages in the military instructor’s log book detailing Kalashnikov drills performed by Soviet students. Yuri Strilchuk led us through the test site at Semipalatinsk, where the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, Joe 1, was detonated, and explained the bomb’s design, placement, and blast effects, allowing for this book’s opening scene. Many people who helped in conflict zones or police states will not be listed, to protect them from retaliation from insurgents or from authorities who punish dissent or restrict access and honest reporting, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and the Palestinian territories. Several can be named: Peshwaz Faizulla, Alan Abdulla, Sangar Rahimi, Abdul Waheed Wafa, Pir Zubair Shah, Taimoor Shah, Nasir Ahmed, Arian Jaff, Abdul Samad Jamshid, Olesya Vartanyan, Dima Bit-Suleiman, George Kumagong, Jimmy Otim.
Much of my understanding of infantry tactics and how they have changed was gained in the Marine Corps, both in the field and via the Corps’ emphasis on reading military history. This foundation was enhanced and enriched by countless military officals, officers, and troops who shared their experiences or who allowed me and a photographer to accompany them on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. A list of everyone would fill pages. Among those who helped with recollections, tips, suggestions, document review or arms or munitions identification were Nick Pratt, Mike Richards, Mike Bruce, Tom Wilhelm, Greg Sailer, Sulev Suvari, Rory Quinn, Ed Ota, Mike Mendoza, and Brett Bourne. Several public affairs officials assisted with documents or referrals: Bruce Zielsdorf, Frank Misurelli, Peter Rowland, Sheldon Smith, Dave Johnson, Daniel King, Christian Kubik, and more public affairs noncommissioned officers and officers in Afghanistan and Iraq than could be listed here. In the field, on patrols, raids, sweeps, medical evacuations, and other missions, and in long talks in the lulls, I was aided by and learned from Jimmy Howell, Josh Biggers, Paul Stubbs, Matt Baker, Ken Detreux, Sean Riordan, Dustin Kirby, Mark Grdovic, James McCarver, Bertrand Fitzpatrick, Richard Dewater, Colin Smith, Ramon Gavan, Daniel McKernan, Norberto Rodriguez, Douglas Terrell, Zackary Filip, Chuck Major, Walter De La Vega, Mark Trouerbach, Patrick Maguire, James Mingus, Stephan Karabin II, Tom Grace, Brian Rogers, Steven Green, Robert Smail, Gregory Veteto, Sean Conroy, Osvaldo Hernandez, Jarrod Neff, Cory Colistra, Adam Franco, Gordon Emmanuel, Jason Petrakos, Edward Mitchell III, Jeremy Owen, Joseph Wright, Matthew Dalrymple, Thomas Drake, Junior Joseph, Daniel Fuqua, Daniel Downes, Christopher Fine, Joshua Dolan, Brian Kitching, Moti Sorkin, Brian Christmas, Sly Silvestri, Jason Davis, Matt Stewart, Joseph Callaway, Deric Sempsrott, Ian Bugh, Grayson Colby, David Harrell, Chad Orozco, Zachary Kruger, Joshua Smith, Bill Yale, Eric Brown, Travis Vuocolo, Thomas Wright, Justin Smith, Robert Soto, Chris Demure, John Rodrigiuez, Tim McAteer, Chris Jones, Frank Hooker, Nick Rolling, and Brett Jenkinson. The last two on this list were fellow members of Class 1-90 of the Ranger Course whose paths crossed with mine in Kirkuk, Iraq, in Ghazni province or the Pech and Korangal valleys in Afghanistan. Our shared time informed my understanding of wars as they are fought, and of the experiences of combatants. They provided clarity and forcefulness to my thoughts.
The staff of the Maury Loontjens Memorial Library in Narragansett, Rhode Island, ensured that time at home was used productively, by searching for book after book, many of them out of print, and securing them for my reading via interlibrary loan.
My wife, Suzanne Keating, and our children supported everything and endured much, always offering understanding and love. Honey Keating made moonlighting possible, year after year.
Three colleagues deserve special mention: Nikolay Khalip and Viktor Klimenko of the Times bureau in Moscow traveled with me across the former Soviet Union, constantly providing advice and good judgment and sharing the work with good cheer. Tyler Hicks, a model of courage, talent, and professionalism, shared the patrols and many of the worst days, month after month for years. His photographs—disturbing, unflinchingly honest, and made at tremendous personal risk—show war for what it is.
My understanding of the consequences of assault-rifle proliferation, and the continued use of Kalashnikov rifles as instruments of state repression, was helped by Natasha Estemirova and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia, and Alisher Saipov in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. All three labored for justice and accountability in lands ruled by violence. All three were murdered for their efforts to uncover the truth, as was Umar Israilov, a source on the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Chechnya, who was shot dead in a contract killing in Vienna after sharing details of crimes by government officials in Russia. To these victims, and to the American, Afghan, Russian, and Iraqi service members wounded or killed on operations I was allowed to be part of or that I witnessed up close, words cannot convey the depth of my thanks, or of our loss.
None of the people mentioned above, or anyone else, deserves any blame for errors in this book or conclusions I have drawn that do not align with theirs. All responsibility lies with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. J. CHIVERS is a senior writer for The New York Times and its former Moscow bureau chief, and a frequent contributor to Esquire. From 1988 to 1994, he was an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and served in the Gulf War and in the Los Angeles riots before being honorably discharged as a captain. His work has received several prizes, including a National Magazine Award for Reporting for the reconstruction in Esquire of the terrorist siege in Beslan and a shared Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage in the Times of combat in Afghanistan. His war re-portage from 2003 through 2009 in Iraq and Afghanistan was selected by New York University as being among the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States. He lives with his family in Rhode Island.
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE IDEA OF CONCENTRATED FIREPOWER, MINIATURIZED AND MASS-PRODUCED
The first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm was the Gatling gun, shown here in patent drawings submitted by its inventor, Dr. Richard J. Gatling, in 1862. Gatling claimed he entered the weapons business to save lives. His weapon was not a true machine gun; firing it required a man to turn a crank. But it was the precursor to the rest.
As the killing powers of rapid-fire arms became understood, and manufacturing technology improved, new types of weapons—machines guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles, and assault rifles—entered markets. With time they were brought down in size and price, and connected to planned economies that produced them whether there were customers or not. The lethality, availability, and small size of assault rifles ultimately made them attractive to most anyone, including terrorists. Here, a
Kalashnikov with its stock removed, which had been worn on a makeshift sling under the parka of a man who attacked a police station in Nalchik, Russia, during an insurgent raid in 2005. Its owner was dispossessed of it when he was killed. The keys beside the weapon provide a sense of scale. A fully outfitted Gatling could weigh a ton. A Kalashnikov like this weighs less than 8 pounds. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
EARLY PLAYERS
Richard Gatling—inventor, salesman, cunning businessman—shown late in life. He made a small fortune from the Gatling gun before it was displaced from markets. He died having borrowed money from his son. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Hiram Maxim, accused trigamist, suspected draft dodger, and self-taught inventor from backwoods Maine, who decamped for London, where he invented the first true automatic weapon, the Maxim machine gun. His weapon changed war. Maxim guns were first used against men in lopsided fighting in colonial Africa and then helped turn World War I into a grisly hell. Maxim, the man, seemed untroubled by it all. He died proud. (Photo from My Life by Hiram Maxim)
…AND BATTLEFIELD SUCCESS, AND HORROR
John H. Parker, U.S. Army, one of the first officers in conventional infantry service to grasp the significance of machine gunnery. In the battle for Santiago in 1898, his hastily assembled Gatling detachment pummeled entrenched Spanish positions as the infantry advanced—a new use of rapid-fire arms that earned praise from then-colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Parker was seen as an attention-seeking radical, and mostly was ignored by the army he served. (Photo from Parker, History of the Gatling Gun Detachment of the Fifth Army Corps at Santiago)
The MG08. The primary German version of Maxim’s machine gun. Maxim and his partners sold his weapons and the rights to manufacturer them indiscriminately, including to nations that would become the enemies of his adopted country. The German military grasped what other Western armies did not, and the MG08 shaped the Western experience of World War I, wrecking untold lives. But it was still large—an instrument of the state, not of the individual man. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
AN EVOLUTION, AND A MYTH, TAKE THEIR DECISIVE FORMS
The celebrated face of a breakthrough arm. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the noncommissioned officer the Soviet Union credited with designing the AK-47, the descendants of which would become the world’s most abundant firearm. Shown here roughly two decades later, as a decorated Soviet hero. The rifle’s origins are more complex, and more interesting, than the Soviet fables that helped make Kalashnikov’s last name an informal global brand. (Photo courtesy of the Ezell Collection, College of Management and Technology, UK Defence Academy)
The guts of an AK-47. The weapon is of exceedingly simple design, and its durability is such that this early AK-47, manufactured in 1954 in Izhevsk, was still in use in 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan. Note the few parts and their intuitive relationship to one another; from top: the receiver cover, the recoil mechanism, the bolt carrier with gas piston. Note as well the external pitting, but the relative cleanliness inside. This was a fully functional rifle, made one year after Stalin died and still performing exactly as the Soviet Union intended more than half a century later in a war against the West. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
THE RIFLE’S INITIAL SPREAD
The Soviet Army shared assault rifles and the technical information to manufacture them with like-minded states. By the 1950s, the weapon was being produced in the Warsaw Pact countries, China, and North Korea. It was also shared with Egypt and other states. As its numbers grew, it became a symbol. Here, a Chinese-Albanian propaganda poster drew resolve from the rifle’s presence, an accent to the thick-necked, strong-handed optimism of the propaganda-poster genre. The caption reads: “Long live the long-lasting, unbreakable fighting friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people.”
Fuller accounts, and honest assessments, were much more complicated than the propaganda would have it. József Tibor Fejes, far right, the first known insurgent to carry an AK-47. Fejes obtained his prize after Soviet soldiers dropped their rifles during their attack on revolutionaries in Budapest in 1956. This photograph, taken after a cease-fire agreement, appeared in Life magazine, and drew the attention the ÁVH, the secret police, who tracked Fejes down. The Hungarian Revolution marked the AK-47’s true battlefield debut. (Photo from the Budapest Municipal Archives)
AN INSTRUMENT OF REPRESSION
(Photo courtesy of AKG–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
(Photo courtesy of Hermann–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
One essential element of the Kalashnikov legend, as told by Mikhail Kalashnikov and the Soviet and Russian governments alike, is that the AK-47 was designed for national defense and then distributed for liberation struggles. The script misses a characteristic use: as the strongman’s tool for crackdowns. The case of Peter Fechter (inset), an East German teenager, provides a more complete view.
(Photo courtesy of Bera–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
Fechter tried to scale the Berlin Wall in 1962. Border guards opened fire on him with bursts of Kalashnikov fire. One round struck his hip. His fingers tell the rest of the story—they are coated in clotted blood from his efforts to save himself while the men who shot him watched. The Kalashnikov has been turned by government troops against civilians in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tbilisi, Almaty, Moscow, Beijing, Baku, Bishkek, and a long list of other places where regimes have used violence to hold power.
…AND PROXY WAR
The weapon continued to spread far from its makers’ hands. By 1962, the breakout had accelerated. A Dutch soldier, from Bravo Company. 41st Infantry Battalion, in Western New Guinea. He is holding what may be the first AK-47 captured by conventional Western forces in battle, a rifle picked up after being abandoned by an Indonesian Special Forces team. The Soviet Union had provided the rifles to Indonesia. The new period of the Kalashnikov proliferation had begun. (Photo courtesy of a former officer in the unit who wished to remain anonymous)
VIETNAM: WHERE BOTH SIDES USED ASSAULT RIFLES AS PRIMARY ARMS FOR THE FIRST TIME
The young men of Second Battalion, Third Marines, were among the first Marines in Vietnam to receive the American answer to the AK-47: the M-16 assault rifle. From left to right are four lieutenants whose troops were issued rifles that failed: Mike Chervenak, Roger Gunning, Chuck Woodard, and Bill Miles. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Woodard)
The M-16 and its ammunition had been rushed into production. The early versions were plagued with reliability problems. The problems were largely resolved later, but its bungled and bloody introduction was a searing experience for men asked to put their faith in their commanders and their country, which failed them in war. The nature of war had abruptly changed. For the first time, the soldiers from an industrial nation were outgunned by an agrarian local population, for whom the Kalashnikov assault rifle was a battlefield leveler.
The military identification of Mike Chervenak, who spoke out publicly against the failures of M-16 rifles in combat—and was punished for it. (Courtesy of Mike Chervenak)
Staff Sergeant Claude E. Elrod, who led First Platoon, Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines, on July 21, 1967. The photograph was taken shortly before the fight against the North Vietnamese Army for Ap Sieu Quan, the day that ultimately would force the Marine Corps to admit its rifles were failing—and demand replacements.
After the battle, Hotel Company settled into the deserted village. First Lieutenant Chervenak is standing on the left, in a dark tee shirt. He was enraged, and set out to document the problems.
Marines inside Ap Sieu Quan, with M-14s against a wall. The Marine Corps had issued M-16s to replace M-14s, which were not supposed to be carried. Many Marines, not trusting their M-16s, procured M-14s through underground means and ditched their newer weapons. At Ap Sieu Quan, when at least forty of Hotel Company’s M-16s jammed, the M-14s allowed the grunts who had them to protect Marines whose rifles had gone silent. (Photos courtesy of Claude Elrod)
THE TEENAGERS’ WEAPON
The 1986 log book of preconscription training of Soviet students in Pripyat, the worker’s town beside the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl. The book was left behind after the power station exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation, and remained on the contaminated grounds in 2005.
Results of the students’ timed drills with Kalashnikov assault rifles—part of the curriculum in Soviet schools. The log book was a marker of both the rifles’s ease of use and the extent to which assault rifles had penetrated Soviet society. The practice persists in post-Soviet Russia. (Photos by Joseph Sywenkyj)
The Kalashnikov’s durability in the field and its ease of use, along with its slight recoil, have made it a weapon most anyone can use. These traits, coupled with its near ubiquity, have made it a primary arm of child soldiers. A boy soldier in the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka, 1992. (Photo by Suzanne Keating)
Drawing by a former child soldier from the Lord’s Resistance Army, an millennial insurgent group that originated in Uganda in the 1980s. Armed with simple and lightweight assault rifles, the group has survived more than a quarter century in the field. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)