The Gun (54 page)

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.

i
The Type 56 assault rifle, the clone of the AK.47 made in Mao’fs China since the Soviet army passed the technical specifications to the People’fs Liberation Army in the mid-1950s.

ii
The available data, compiled in the database of the Wound Data and Munitions Effectiveness Team, or WDMET, showed that 51 percent of American combat fatalities in Vietnam during the period under study were caused by small arms, 36 percent by fragmentation munitions, and 11 percent by mines and booby traps. From Ronald F. Bellamy and Russ Zajtchuk, Textbook of Military Medicine. Part I. Warfare, Weaponry and the Casualty. Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries, Chapter 2, Assessing the Effectiveness of Conventional Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1989), p. 65.

iii
The new name brought the rifle into line with the military’s standard designations. M stood for model; thus the M1903 springfield, the M1 Garand, the M.14, etc.

iv
A lock was installed on most M.14s to prevent them from being used on automatic fire. In every ten-man rifle squad in the army in the early 1960s, two men were given the M.14 capable of automatic fire, known as the M.14E2; this version was equipped with a bipod and other features that drove up its weight.

v
Under the license sale arrangement, MacDonald would receive a cut of both Fairchild’fs and Colt’fs future receipts. This included a 1 percent commission from Colt’fs for the selling price of every rifle sold, and 10 percent of Fairchild royalties, some of which were calculated on a sliding scale. For sales to military customers, the combined formula guaranteed him 1.225 percent. These were considerable incentives for MacDonald to try to have the AR.15 adopted by the American military. (For a detailed review of the license deal, see ’How a Lone Inventor’fs Idea Took Fire,’h Business Week, July 6, 1968.)

vi
The embarrassment had grounds beyond the origins of the cadavers used. The twenty-seven severed heads were ultimately subjected to tests of little apparent value. And there are hints in the report of a lapse of scientific judgment that cast doubts on the value of the entire study. According to the report, Dziemian and Olivier used AR-15 ammunition different from the ammunition the American military used in Vietnam. Throughout the war, American troops would use a metal-jacketed round, just as the military had been using in other cartridges throughout the century. But in the Biophysics Division’s test in 1962, the cartridges were described by Dziemian and Olivier as propelling ’bullets with a lead core and no metal jackets.’h These rounds could be expected to create wounds of a much different nature from those made by military ammunition, and their use in the tests risked undermining judgment about the relative lethality of the tested weapons. But there is a hurdle to knowing with certainty what really occurred: the secrecy and cover-up of the work. Was the reference a clerical error? The photographs of the ammunition released to the author by the United States government were low-quality digital scans and provided no help in determining the bullets’ composition. Ultimately, it is not possible to tell from the records released to date. The study’fs final report did have other clerical errors, so it remains possible that this, too, was a clerical error. This was one of the pitfalls of secret tests, which were subject neither to peer review nor to public scrutiny. Both research lapses and editorial lapses could pass, and did pass, unchallenged.

vii
Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which fought with American forces against the North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas (author’s note).

viii
The old cleaning gear was of little use. The M-14 had a bore diameter of 7.62 millimeters; the M-16 had a diameter of 5.56 millimeters. The cleaning rod used to push a patch through an M-14 barrel was too thick to pass through the newer rifle’fs barrel.

ix
What really caused the jamming? Ichord emphasized ball powder, a factor that a subsequent writer, James Fallows, endorsed. Thomas L. McNaugher, in his rigorous 1984 study, The M16 Controversies: Military Organizations and Weapons Acquisition, emphasized maintenance and noted that by 1970 the rifle was widely considered reliable. The most likely cause for most of the reported problems, based on the records now available, and the accounts of veterans, would seem to be corrosion in the rifles’f chambers. This was caused in some cases by cleaning habits in the wet climate of Vietnam, but from a manufacturing perspective was related more strongly to the failure of the army and Colt’fs to chrome-plate the chambers of all M.16s leaving Hartford until late in 1968. Another likely factor contributing to the failures to extract, though as far as is publicly known the army never conducted extensive tests of the cartridge cases from 1966 to 1968, was that the ammunition cases were too soft and expanded under the pressures of firing, lodging into pitting and tool marks in the chamber. The rifle’fs inherently poor resistance to corrosion and insufficient ammunition standards likely combined to create the most intractable jams. Rifle cleaning habits were in all likelihood much less of a factor, considering that the same troops, when using M-14s in the same environments, reported few reliability problems. By 1970, when McNaugher noted that the M-16s in Vietnam were performing reliably, the many manufacturing changes meant that in many ways the troops were carrying a different rifle than what had been issued in 1966 and 1967.

x
The United States Army in the Republic of Vietnam would not require soldiers to report M-16 malfunctions officially until spring 1968, making the military’s data throughout the worst period of M.16 malfunctions, in 1966 and 1967, of dubious value.

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

T
HE EIGHT YOUNG PALESTINIAN MEN, DRESSED IN TRACK SUITS
, 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.