The Gun (46 page)

The report claimed that in another firefight a Vietnamese Ranger fired a three-round burst into a guerrilla fifteen meters away and both decapitated the man and severed his right arm. In order to accept these descriptions at face value, one would have to believe that in a small sampling of injuries the AR-15 had caused two traumatic amputations—a type of injury rarely observed from rifle bullets. But such coolheaded skepticism did not work its way into the report. A sales pitch was gathering momentum: The AR-15 was the most lethal rifle the world had known. The Project AGILE report did not stop there. It listed advantages beyond the AR-15’s capacity for producing theatrically grotesque wounds. The new rifle was small, light, and easy to handle. The authors claimed it required very little maintenance. Its reliability was unsurpassed. They recorded only one shortcoming: A plastic handgrip along one rifle’s barrel had cracked. This they explained away with laconic bemusement, observing that the break occurred while moving a stubborn prisoner, and “the soldier concerned had placed the handguard against a VC head with considerable force.” MacDonald’s Saigon pitch proved to be another salesmanship triumph. The report, from its title to its conclusions, could not have read better for Colt’s had MacDonald dictated it himself. Its claims exceeded even the contents of AR-15 sales brochures.
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Cyrus Vance had little to do but follow his boss’s orders. He passed McNamara’s instructions to General Earle Wheeler, the Army’s chief of staff, who ordered tests to determine the “relative effectiveness” of the AK-47, the AR-15, and the M-14. Here began the next strange chapter in the M-16’s march out of obscurity. Evaluators have many ways to measure a rifle’s utility for war. There are tests for accuracy, reliability, and durability. There are means to assess ergonomics. How the rifle performs tactically—the number of shots, hits, and near misses fired by soldiers as they attack and defend in controlled simulations—can form another set of useful measures. At General Wheeler’s instruction, evaluators at American commands around the world were put to work to rank the three rifles along these lines. This was a sensible idea. It was also a flawed plan. General
Wheeler wanted answers by November 30—a deadline almost certainly too tight for findings that would be meaningful, much less conclusive. But President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara wanted answers. The Pentagon was galloping headlong. The army’s internal correspondence was frantic. “Initiation of testing will not await submittal or approval of final detailed plans,” one of the instructions read. “Representation at tests will be kept to a minimum. . . . Tests should not be influenced or delayed by the requirements for observers.”
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To see how this kind of haste could lead to poor judgment and shoddy science, one need look no further than the army’s attempt to measure the three weapons’ lethality. The tests sought to answer a seemingly simple question. What happened when a bullet fired from each rifle actually hit a human being? Implicit in the work was the related question: Which weapon would most surely cause incapacitation, the state in which a wounded enemy combatant would no longer be able to fight? Answering such questions was the realm of a sometimes-scientific field known, in what could seem a double entendre, as “terminal ballistics.” The practitioners of this now secretive art were the professional descendants of Louis A. La Garde, the turn-of-the-century surgeon who had fired into cadavers and livestock to explore the means by which bullets tore through skin, bones, and flesh. In the United States, many of them worked at the army’s Biophysics Division at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where General Wheeler’s project became a major undertaking. More than 90 percent of the division’s staff participated, overtime pay was freed up, and to meet the tight deadline many people worked nights, weekends, and on holidays. The division chose four methods to evaluate the rifles.
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Its staff would measure the velocity of the bullets at the muzzle and at various points downrange. They would fire into blocks of a special gelatin designed to simulate human tissue. They would fire into live castrated male Texas Angora goats, which were the laboratory’s preferred animals for experimentation, and in ready supply. And in tests that would later cause their study nearly to disappear from government records, they would fire into amputated human legs and decapitated human heads.

Organizing a supply of legs and heads presented problems. In 1902, then-Major La Garde could make arrangements at a private medical college and shoot dangling corpses on the university grounds. Such options were not available in 1962, at least not on short notice. But the men who
led the study—Arthur J. Dziemian and Alfred G. Olivier, who later would be expert witnesses before the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy—had tools at their disposal that were unavailable to La Garde. First, they could shield their work from public review. The Cold War’s atmosphere of secrecy allowed a cone of silence to be lowered. Dziemian and Olivier needed only to claim that shooting human legs and heads was a matter of national security, and warn everyone involved that disclosing the strange doings of the Biophysics Division was punishable under counterespionage law. This ensured that the work would be classified, and remain classified, and that whatever the scientists did would barely be known. Second, the United States was now a global superpower with deep resources and long reach. For a project with the interest of the president and the secretary of defense, the ballisticians could make cadaver-procuring arrangements that had been impossible in La Garde’s day. And so it came to pass that in order to satisfy McNamara’s curiosity for a comparison, for the 1962 lethality tests a batch of human heads were made available via shipment from India. Neither the laboratory’s classified report nor the limited correspondence about the tests that survived disclosed precisely how the army procured them. Nor did the authors say how they disposed of the human remains after subjecting them to gunfire. All that survived was a 286-page record of the tests and the testers’ conclusions, along with telltale signs of the army’s embarrassment about the entire affair.
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But if the record did not illuminate all of
the details, it did illuminate something else. It showed just how bizarre, and off track, the American reaction to the AK-47 had become.

The tests opened at 9:30
A.M.
on October 26 at one of the proving ground’s outdoor ranges. It began with live goats. The morning was chilly and overcast. The goats, which weighed between 62 and 145 pounds, had been sheared and secured inside holding racks. They were oriented at right angles to the gunners, each goat so his right side presented itself as a target. The gunners sat at a shooting table, leaned forward, looked through telescopic scopes, and fired. Thirty goats were shot that day. Goat No. 12658, an eighty-pound billy, was first. After each goat was struck, the testers released the wounded animal from the rack for the next research step: “observation of the clinical response of the animal to the trauma.” This included measurements of the volume of blood lost (in milliliters); the “time to permanent collapse” (in seconds); the “direction of fall” (vertical, from the rifle, toward the rifle); and survival time, which was determined by counting the elapsed seconds from the impact of a bullet with a goat until the “cessation of heartbeats.” (The goats that did not die quickly, and seemed destined to live beyond a few hours, were “sacrificed by electrocution.”) To ensure nothing was missed, a 16-millimeter Dynafax motion-picture camera recorded each billy’s fate, and the carcasses were examined by necropsy. Goat No. 12658 was hit with a bullet from an AR-15 at a distance of either twenty-five or one hundred meters, depending on which chart in the report is to be believed. He had a quick end. The bullet passed through the animal’s liver, at least one lung, and the gastrointestinal tract. Permanent collapse came forty-four seconds later, when the billy fell toward the rifle. His heart ceased beating within five minutes. In the course of the study, 166 goats were shot in all, at ranges of twenty-five to five hundred meters.

The leg tests began on October 29, when gunners fired into human limbs that had been amputated from cadavers, frozen, and then thawed for testing day. The gunners shot from a distance of fifty meters, aiming for thighs, calves, and feet. On November 3, the gunners turned their attention to the processed heads from India. For these tests, the skulls were, according to Dziemian and Olivier, “unbleached and undefatted.” To ready them, each was encased in ballistic gelatin, which allowed tissue gaps inside the cranium to fill with fake tissue and form what the authors called a “pseudobrain.” The gelatin outside was sculpted close, to create
“about the same resistance to penetration by the bullets as would the scalp and soft tissues of the face and head.” The Biophysics Division’s scientists switched on their motion-picture camera and the gunners began their work, firing from ranges of fifty and one hundred meters. In every case at both distances, the impact of a military rifle bullet with a human head created what Dziemian and Olivier called “explosive hydrodynamic effects.” The heads ruptured and the fragments scattered, due in large part to the shock wave traveling through the pseudotissue within the cranium, which could not contain it. This should have been predictable. La Garde, in a summary of his own work and case studies of others, had published a voluminous work in 1916 that detailed what he called the “explosive effects” to the human head when solidly struck by modern rifle bullets. His case studies included victims of battlefield injuries, a barracks suicide, and a prisoner who attempted to flee from a guard, who shot him high on the back of the head. Ample data had accumulated in the decades since, including studies of cranial injuries to Allied soldiers in World War II. Put simply, by 1962 it was well-known in the ballistics and medical communities that human heads broke apart when struck by military rifle bullets at the ranges in question in these tests. Nevertheless, the heads were shot, twenty-three with pseudobrains and four without.

Then things got interesting, to the point of forensic absurdity. After the heads were broken, Dziemian and Olivier and their scientists attempted to differentiate the damage. A simple matrix was established. At a range of fifty meters, the M-14 and the AR-15 both caused more cranial damage than the AK-47. At a range of one hundred meters, the AR-15 caused more damage than either the AK-47 or the M-14, which were roughly equal to each other. Presented this way in the narrative portion of the Biophysics Division’s secret report, the information appeared methodically observed. The pictures published in the appendixes exposed the rankings as near meaningless. Some of the images showed cranial fragments arranged for assessment and display. Others, time-sequenced photographs excerpted from the thousands taken by the motion-picture camera, documented in slow motion the effect of a bullet penetrating and passing through a human head. The results, in practical terms, were identical. Each and every head containing a pseudobrain flew apart. Government scientists might care to count pieces and decide which rifle was more lethal, as if such measurements were revelatory. Soldiers would have
better sense. Heads were heads, not ammunition cans, watermelons, cubes of gelatin, or blocks of pine. When attached to living men they contained brains. The shooting tests had established, unsurprisingly, that bullets fired from some military rifles caused human heads to fragment into more pieces than bullets fired from other rifles. But what exactly did this mean for either a rifleman or his victim? There is, after all, but one degree of death.

If General Wheeler wanted to know about the relative effectiveness of the rifles under review, this was not a measure. The lethality tests, in the end, offered little of obvious value. Every human bone struck by a rifle bullet had broken, every gelatin-filled cranium had shattered. The relative differences in damages were academic. And yet the test results still might have had a use in restoring a more realistic conversation about the AR-15. Dziemian and Olivier’s final report subtly but clearly revealed that the army’s terminal-ballistics experts were suspicious of the Project AGILE findings. “More shots were made with the AR-15 on legs than with the other bullets,” it noted, “because of the rather startling results from limb wounds in combat described in the A.R.P.A. report.”
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The Biophysics Division’s gunners shot legs at various orientations, with standard bullets and with bullets that had their tips trimmed off. No matter what they did, they were unable to reproduce the effects that the participants in Project AGILE claimed to have seen. At Aberdeen Proving Ground, the traumatic amputations simply did not occur. This result, coupled with the observation that all heads shattered when struck by any of the bullets, might have been a basis for the Pentagon to question the objectivity and methods of Lieutenant Colonel Hallock’s team. But instead of having such a practical value, the lethality tests underlined other things: the risks of secrecy and the deep dysfunctions in McNamara’s supposedly highly functional systems-analysis approach. There was no peer review of this kind of hushed work, and events that followed ensured that almost no one would ever find out about it.
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The deadline for an initial report was November 30,
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seven weeks after Secretary McNamara raised the issue of American rifle choices with Secretary Vance. An understandable curiosity rose through the Pentagon. The possibility that scientists might tell soldiers which new American rifle was more dangerous was intriguing. Lethality data for the AK-47, a Soviet weapon the United States was beginning to face, added spice. But
rather than allow a wider set of minds to examine the study and glean what they might from it—in other words, rather than being systematic—the army restricted its circulation reflexively and fiercely. Sometimes supervisors have to be wary of what they ask for, especially in institutions that mix secrecy, cash, and guns. Away from the Biophysics Division, where shooting body parts had become part of the job, the realization that federal employees were performing gunfire tests on human heads was at once unsavory and politically risky. Someone, it seemed, felt that this was something the United States did not want to get caught doing. In spring 1963, the staff of Charles Hitch, the Pentagon’s comptroller, asked the army chief of staff’s office for two copies of the lethality report. Worry and embarrassment crept in. The cover-up began. In a memorandum stamped SECRET the army chief of staff ordered Lieutenant General R. W. Colglazier, Jr., the deputy chief of staff for logistics, not to share the report, even with Hitch’s office, “in view of the sensitivity and potential sensationalism with the use of human cadavers from India.”
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General Colglazier sought help from Vance. “Although this is not the first use of elements of the human cadaver for this purpose, I consider such use to be extremely sensitive,” he wrote, in another secret memorandum, adding that the army would like Vance to ask Hitch to withdraw the request in “recognition of the potential sensationalism which could arise from public disclosure of this information.”
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The results of the lethality study remained hidden for forty-six years. And at the most important time, during the early and mid-1960s, the Project AGILE report, with its suspicious observations and false conclusions, remained uncontested.
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The AR-15 continued its rise, boosted by a reputation for lethality and reliability that it did not deserve.