The Gun (48 page)

General Westmoreland’s frustration and Colt’s sales push worked in concert in October 1965, when Hall sent a letter to a brigadier general he knew who managed logistics in Vietnam. Hall informed the general that “effective the following January [Colt’s] would stop producing rifles for the Army and he was fighting a war without any support.” If this was meant to be incendiary, it had its desired effect. The brigadier passed the letter to General Westmoreland, who called Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., Democrat of Georgia. Russell, an ally of President Johnson and one of the deans of the hill, was touring Vietnam at the time as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Russell called McNamara on December 7 and issued a naked political threat: “Buy 100,000 rifles today, or I’m releasing the story to the press.” Hall was summoned that day to Rock Island Arsenal to sign a contract.
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Colt’s position and profits were preserved. General Westmoreland would get his guns. For those who think that the United States chose its primary infantry rifle through orderly deliberation, or that systems analysis led to organized decision-making, the episode showed how things actually worked. This was how troops in Vietnam would receive their weapons, including the unready M-16s soon to be put into the hands of Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines.

After all these years of dysfunction, scandal was not far off. But first came celebration. At Colt’s Firearms Division in Hartford, General Westmoreland’s end run meant salvation. In 1963, Colt’s had posted a million-dollar loss. It had hired and trained new workers and lured managers from other firms, staking its future, even its survival, on a gun without a market.
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Floated by the Pentagon’s order, the company entered a boom. The return on the AR-15 investment was at hand. When Colt’s bought the manufacturing rights from Fairchild in 1959, it had gambled on a concept more than a product. ArmaLite’s rifle had been rejected by the Pentagon. It had no powerful backers in the army or the Marine Corps. No domestic orders were expected. The nation was at peace. Almost seven years later, with the signing of the contract in December 1965, Colt’s effectively
became the sole-source provider of a weapon demanded by the army for an expanding war. The M-16, once roundly rejected, stood the chance of becoming the United States military’s primary firearm, which would mean the allies would be seeking a new class of assault rifles, too. The company grew. Between May 1966 and April 1967, as rifle production jumped at the Hartford plant, Colt’s military division hired 510 new employees.

Excitement surrounds a winner, and Colt’s was suddenly a winner. The accompanying promotional push was striking, both for Colt’s good luck and for the degree to which the gun press helped the company along. As part of the public-relations effort, William J. Curran, Colt’s advertising and public-relations manager, succeeded in publishing a story under his byline in
Shooting Times,
naturally touting the M-16.
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Gun companies and gun magazines have long had relationships beyond cozy. And now, when gun journalism was needed,
Shooting Times
failed. The magazine promoted the rifle further with a follow-up the next month. The second article detailed how Colt’s provided the editors an M-16 for test-firing. The editors avoided putting the gun through what they called a “torture test,” and were principally interested in its accuracy, its ease of use, and its bullets’ penetration of various items the authors judged common to the battlefield, including bunkers and steel plates. But a funny thing happened on the way to plinking the selected targets. Of the first 450 rounds fired, the brand-new M-16 malfunctioned eleven times. Might not this have been the story? Not in
Shooting Times.
The writer, Major George Nonte, passed off the poor performance as related to one bad gun and not indicative of M-16s as a class. It was, Nonte wrote, “only logical to assume that any deficiencies such as those noted would be corrected (or the gun would be rejected) in the course of final inspection.” He continued: “Before any single gun is actually accepted by Army resident inspectors and delivered to the military establishment, it must pass extensive firing tests.”
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This was not quite so. In fact, each rifle at Colt’s factory had to fire only thirty-three rounds to pass its acceptance test, and the army would later admit that in order to ensure a high acceptance rate, the acceptance test was skewed in Colt’s favor. Colt’s was allowed to conduct the tests with ammunition containing IMR powder—not the ball powder the rifles would fire in Vietnam, which was known to cause a higher rate of malfunctions.
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The stories went to print even as the army conducted a survey of
the small-arms use of 121 soldiers on infantry, cavalry, or airborne duty in Vietnam. Almost 90 percent were carrying M-16s. The results both confirmed the nature of ground fighting in the war and suggested that the M-16 was not ready for the job at hand. Eighty percent of the participants said they normally fired at enemy combatants within two hundred yards, and 95 percent said the enemy was within three hundred yards. Seventy-nine percent said that most or some of the time they fired at night, when more than half never saw the opposing soldiers clearly. Moreover, 95 percent of the combat veterans said that when they did see Viet Cong and NVA soldiers, the enemy was either running, prone, or in some sort of hiding.
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What all of this meant was that one touted feature of the M-16—an ability to strike and penetrate steel helmets at five hundred yards—was almost irrelevant in jungle war. This was a dispiriting finding, given that the desire for this long-range performance had led the army to accept a propellant that made the rifle less reliable. And the soldiers’ narrative comments hinted at burgeoning problems. Some soldiers liked the M-16. But many others said that while it was a good rifle when it worked, it jammed. Ominously, several soldiers pleaded for cleaning equipment.
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The National Rifle Association also was ready to give the rifle a boost, and prepared an article for the
American Rifleman
that praised the M-16. The article, published several months later, asserted that the rifle “bears up well under harsh field conditions” and that “dust, dirt, and rain do not make the M-16A1 less functional provided minimal care is exercised.” As with the stoppages mentioned casually in
Shooting Times,
the NRA’s article carried a strong whiff of the malfunctions plaguing the rifle. It mentioned problems with dirty chambers, extraction, and jamming, but only briefly. The
American Rifleman
concluded, without offering evidence, that the rifle “is proving itself in Vietnam.”
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The gun press, with access to arms and arms companies that the traditional media could not match, was missing the biggest small-arms story of the war. The troops would have to find out the truth themselves. They would get that chance.

In summer 1966 as General Westmoreland’s M-16s were arriving in Vietnam, soldiers receiving the new weapons were finding them hard to clean, fussy, and prone to untimely stoppages. The scale of the problems was severe
enough that in fall 1966 the army requested help, and teams of technicians from the Army Weapons Command and Colt’s were dispatched to investigate. In meetings with several combat units, the inspectors from Colt’s discovered that “weapons were in an unbelievable condition of rust, filth, and lack of repair.” They also noted that the troops had received insufficient marksmanship training, and “there was a shortage of technical manuals, there was a shortage of cleaning equipment, there was a shortage of repair parts, and there was a shortage of officers and NCOs who knew anything about the maintenance of the rifle.”

The fielding of the M-16 had stumbled badly. In a flash, a disturbing reputation had taken shape. When M-16s worked, they were excellent. But with unsettling frequency, after a bullet was fired, the empty cartridge case would not extract. It remained stuck in the chamber. The process of firing—not only on automatic, but at all—abruptly ceased. Making matters worse, sometimes the bottom of a spent cartridge case was torn away, which made it exceptionally difficult to remove the remainder manually. This was in some ways a familiar story. M-16s and their ammunition created jams as surely as Gatling and Gardner guns had early in their long period of manufacture. Moreover, as these problems were being reported, the weapons, billed as being assembled from modern components that gave the rifle an unsurpassed durability, were literally rotting in the troops’ hands. Another group of Colt’s specialists traveled to Rock Island Arsenal to inspect rifles returned from Vietnam. Robert D. Fremont, a former ArmaLite employee who had joined Colt’s, reported to Hartford that “the exteriors of most weapons were corroded and the bores and chambers almost universally fouled and dirty, showing evidence of real neglect.” Fremont suspected maintenance was a problem, because soldiers either had not been issued proper cleaning equipment or had not been trained. But he sensed as well that perhaps the M-16s were not yet suited for combat duty. There was too much rust and corrosion. He recommended “an investigation as to the possible use of stainless steel for barrels or chrome plating the chambers and bores of the AR-15 weapons in order to combat corrosion and neglect.” Fremont reached a conclusion that the army’s leadership and the president of Colt’s Firearms Division, Paul A. Benke, would not utter in public. “Colt’s weapons,” he wrote, “are sadly lacking in corrosion resistance.”
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It was a damning statement, though the public—and the troops—
would not hear it. For the manufacturer of a weapon distributed by the United States for jungle war, it must have been surprising. The M-16 was nearly ten years old, and the manufacturing steps necessary to ensure corrosion resistance were no secret. But the army and Colt’s had neglected to follow them. At the same time, an army review team was finding that the army had issued new weapons but not the necessary cleaning gear to go with them.
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Lieutenant Colonel Herbert P. Underwood, visiting Vietnam from Rock Island, watched the troops make do. His letter back to Colonel Yount detailed a supply failure. It also revealed his own uncertainty about the army’s state of knowledge of the weapons it was handing out.

The 173rd uses some field expedience, primarily for cleaning the chamber and the bore of the weapons. They either use a piece of commo wire, a shoe lace or a nylon cord which they carry with them. They take a 30 caliber patch cut it in half, fold it once and loop the string or what ever it is to the center of this patch. Then using oil they pull it through the bore of the weapon starting from the chamber. As they do this, they clean both the chamber and the bore and then dry it off. They also put a little bit of oil on it. I have not been able to find anyone that does not put a little bit of oil in the chamber of the weapon to prevent it from corroding. I try to discourage it, however I am not completely convinced myself that if you leave the chamber completely dry you won’t have a problem resulting from corrosion, even if you cleaned your weapon every day.
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No one, it seemed, was quite sure what to do with this new rifle, not even the officers issuing it. Lieutenant Colonel Underwood had other problems to report. “The 173rd Airborne Brigade tells me that they have had at least 10 weapons, if not more, to blow up in the same manner as the exhibits that we had sent to us,” he wrote. In at least one of these cases, the American soldier firing it was killed.
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The problems were multiplying. Of 2,000 M-16s tested at the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, 384
malfunctioned.
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One company, B Company of the Twenty-sixth Infantry, made a list of malfunctions that read like a roll call: 527042 Gorton, 54 rounds fired, 2 failed to extract; 701693 Mason, 2 rounds fired, round stuck in chamber, 60 rounds fired, 1 failed to extract; 531240 Coolet, 60 rounds fired, 1 failure to extract, 1 failure to feed, 40 rounds fired, 1 failure to chamber; and on it went, man by man.
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Three weeks later, David Behrendt, a Colt’s engineer temporarily assigned to Vietnam, mailed two audiotapes back to Colt’s officials in Hartford. Behrendt groused that while from the air Vietnam was beautiful, “when you get down on the ground and walk around, it’s something else, kind of cruddy. I told Jim I’ll be glad to see a blonde again. Everything around here is black hair and slanty eyes.” Behrendt had better reasons to feel indisposed. Many M-16s were jamming, and almost all were corroded. Working alongside soldiers at American bases and outposts, Behrendt restored most rifles to working order after cleaning them and replacing parts. But it was not a good sign that a corporate engineer with a bag of parts was required to keep a new rifle in service. Combat equipment was supposed to be more hardy than that. Behrendt noted, too, that the ball powder was making the M-16 run fast. Engineers at Colt’s had been working on a replacement part—a buffer inside the return spring—that would slow the weapons down. But none were yet in Vietnam. Speaking into a tape recorder halfway around the world, he urged action.

All the rifles have an extremely high rate of fire which isn’t helping us in the least bit. You better get that new buffer over here right pronto to stop some of this malfunction. It sure will help. Finishes have been wearing off many of the weapons and I’ve actually seen holes eaten right through into the charging handle area and along the lower receiver area, underneath the dust cover. You can see right into the magazine. Carrying handles are pretty well eaten up on many of the weapons. Rust is covering quite a few of them.
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Behrendt’s second tape detailed similar problems: “oily chambers, dirty chambers, dirty ammo, corroded ammo, or bent magazines, lips in particular.” One infantry company had a 30 percent failure rate, Behrendt said. The problems did not recur on the next operation, after the company
commander emphasized rifle cleaning. This was typical of the mixed reports making their way back to the States. There were many problems, though it was also possible to find troops who liked the M-16. But Behrendt put the positive comments in perspective. “This was the only unit that has been completely satisfied with the rifles,” he said. The experiences elsewhere were disquieting. “We took three rifles to the range,” he said. “This was with another unit. The rifles were pulled from their storage area and the condition they were in was the way they would be taken to an operation with the magazines they were going to use. On the three rifles tryed [sic], two of them failed to extract on the first round fired. One rifle fired 63 rounds before it failed to extract.” Behrendt cleaned the rifles, replaced the extractor springs on one of them, and repeated the test the next day. With new ammunition, they worked well. With older ammunition, the jamming began on the fourth round fired. Behrendt said the platoon sergeants who watched the test were convinced the rifles
could
work. He was not sure they would be able to convince their men. And once again it was not a good sign that a Colt’s engineer had to work on rifles one day for the rifles to function the next. He also had more bad news.