AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (8 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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His interest was more than academic. If the United States was to engage the North Vietnamese, it would need a single rifle that could be quickly mass-produced at low cost.
 
With Colt still in financial trouble—Boutelle had already been blamed and fired—Macdonald was desperate. He knew that the AR’s future would be in Vietnam, so he traveled there with demonstration models. His bold move was designed to circumvent the standard military procurement process by going directly to battlefield commanders and having them put pressure on higher-ups to purchase the weapons.
 
Ordinarily, this kind of end-run tactic would not work, but these were unique times. The United States did not officially have troops in South Vietnam, only “advisors,” nomenclature designed to make the growing commitment more palatable to the American public. As such, the job of a special unit known as the Combat Development Test Center, located in Saigon, was to evaluate the military needs of the South Vietnamese army. It was already clear that the smaller-stature Vietnamese—the average recruit was five feet tall and weighed ninety pounds—could not handle the M-14’s recoil and weight. In addition, the average soldier could carry about three times more AR-15 ammunition than M-14 ammunition because of the lower weight of both the cartridges and rifle. This would be a decided advantage to jungle fighters out on long patrols.
 
The AR-15 was well received, and reports reached Washington about the lethality of the new weapon and smaller ammunition. American commanders and their South Vietnamese counterparts were especially impressed by the gunshot signatures seen in dead enemy soldiers, with reports of limbs being blown apart and chest cavities exploding after being hit by the high-velocity bullets.
 
Macdonald felt hopeful when Colt received an order for twenty thousand AR-15s, and he was further buoyed by the assistant secretary of defense’s report stating that the AR-15 was up to five times effective as the M-14 rifle as well as being cheaper to manufacture. Most startling, the report stated that the M-14 was inferior to the old M1.
 
McNamara and his Whiz Kids were surprised and confused by the discrepancy between this report and the Ordnance Department’s position supporting the M-14, so he ordered Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance to reevaluate the M-14, the AR-15, and the AK. Even President Kennedy got involved, demanding that the situation be cleared up once and for all. Time was of the essence. By October 1962, the United States had committed more than ten thousand advisors to Vietnam without the best available weapon and it was clear that many more troops would be on their way to fight the Communist threat from the north.
 
Ensuing tests did not prove the anecdotal stories received from the battlefield about the AR-15’s superiority, and charges flew around the highest levels of government about rigged tests designed to make the new weapon look inferior. Ironically, one test showed that the AK had significantly fewer malfunctions than
all
other weapons (there were some disagreements here, too), but several findings were irrefutable: the AR-15 was lighter, infantrymen could carry more of its ammunition, it was cheaper than the M-14, and it could be produced quickly.
 
McNamara decided to kill production of the M-14 by 1963 and begin production of the AR-15. He ordered eighty-five thousand AR-15s for the army and nineteen thousand for the air force. Opponents argued that his decision was based on bottom-line numbers—cheaper per unit costs and fast production—but his word was final nonetheless.
 
Whatever his reason, McNamara was clearly angry at the way Ordnance had handled the entire matter; several years earlier he had called the M-14 project a “disgrace” during public hearings. In congressional testimony he said, “It is a relatively simple job to build a rifle, compared to building a satellite.” In McNamara’s shakeup of the Ordnance bureaucracy, the name was changed to the U.S. Army Materiel Command, and Carten found himself transferred from the Springfield Armory to the army’s Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois.
 
The Springfield Armory also took heat for its complicity in the M-14 affair. For the first time, an outside vendor, Colt, was going to be the lead supplier of the army’s main weapon, now officially designated as the M-16. It used a .223-caliber cartridge with the military-metric designation of 5.56 × 45mm.
 
McNamara got even tougher and demanded that all branches of the military work together on modifying the M-16 for full-scale production and battle-readiness. Again, however, he found himself frustrated by the military bureaucracy’s inability to move quickly and decisively. McNamara was used to giving orders at Ford and having them followed immediately and exactly, and he soon found himself at odds with career military personnel as well as civil servants who resisted the new businesslike regime. Government, especially the military establishment, did not work that way. The process was slow, arduous, and contentious. Turf battles continued as various departments micromanaged the project to protect their interests and support their beliefs.
 
 
 
SEVERAL EVENTS IN 1963 PUSHED McNamara for an even faster resolution. In January, the South Vietnamese army, equipped with M-14s, was defeated at Ap Bac by Vietcong carrying AKs. The reports of this automatic weapon’s devastating effects worried U.S. commanders. It was becoming clear that an automatic weapon was crucial for winning in Vietnam because of a new pattern of warfare starting to emerge. Confrontations often consisted of what were termed “meeting engagements,” in which jungle patrols from both sides found themselves unexpectedly face-to-face, and the side that could pump out the most rounds in the shortest amount of time won the skirmish. The M-14 was no match for the AK in these close-quarter encounters.
 
Again, U.S. military planners were caught unprepared for a different kind of warfare that took place in dense jungles against an enemy that you could not track in advance. Superior airpower was often ineffective, so battles would come down to the infantryman carrying the best weapon for the environment. The United States lagged.
 
On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese generals assassinated President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother and advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Diem was a heavy-handed dictator whose regime so enraged the majority Buddhist population that monks set themselves on fire in the street to protest their oppression. The Kennedy administration expressed shock at the public immolations and dismay at the assassinations, but did nothing to discourage the generals’ actions. At the time of Diem’s death, the United States had about sixteen thousand advisors in South Vietnam. Now, with Diem gone, and American casualties beginning to mount, the nation was getting sucked into a larger combat role as the South Vietnamese government foundered and a string of corrupt generals ruled the country.
 
 
The standard U.S. battle rifle, which first saw action during the Vietnam War, was prone to jams and malfunctions when it was introduced. Although these problems were corrected, many GIs believed that the AK-47s used by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were superior to M-16s during close-proximity jungle fighting. In the aftermath of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in 2003, many U.S. soldiers preferred the AK-47 to their M16A2 rifles.
U.S. Department of Defense
 
Only three weeks after Diem’s death, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson soon escalated his predecessor’s policies. In August 1964, Pentagon officials said that U.S. warships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese patrol boats. These attacks prompted Congress to give President Johnson a free hand in Vietnam, through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This incident was later revealed to be a fabrication of the administration. No matter. The war was now in full swing and Special Forces, CIA operatives, and other elite units received the AR-15 to help counterbalance the AK.
 
Still, most U.S. forces were issued the M-14, and General William Westmoreland, who took command in Vietnam in June 1964, replacing General Paul Harkins, held a meeting of his commanders in Saigon in November 1965 to discuss how poorly the weapons fared against the AK. Congressional hearings held years later noted that GIs were buying black-market AR-15s for $600, compared to a list price of $100.
 
Back home, more testing of the M-16 continued, but McNamara was in a rush and so was Westmoreland. More than a hundred thousand M-16s were ordered by summer 1966. By October, however, some unexpected reports came in.
 
M-16s were jamming in combat.
 
American soldiers were found dead with their rifles in mid-breakdown. They were trying to undo the cause of the misfire while under attack.
 
Morale plunged as many soldiers felt they could not trust their weapon. Some anecdotal reports indicated that as many as half of M-16s were prone to jamming, but this number was probably too high. The real number was irrelevant, because soldiers never knew if their own weapon would perform as expected, and so every rifle was suspect. As the Vietcong learned of these problems, they were less in awe of the weapon. The sight of the “black rifle,” as the Vietcong had dubbed it in the early days, was now less threatening, and it empowered them. Reports indicated that Vietcong stripped dead GIs of their AR-15s and other equipment but were purposely leaving behind the M-16s.
 
Although the army tried to minimize the public relations fall-out, reports reached Congress through the parents of men serving in Vietnam as well as from soldiers themselves who felt they had been betrayed. Small-town newspapers ran letters from local soldiers about the failing new rifle. National media also covered the story. Soldiers and their parents inundated congressional representatives with letters and phone calls, and they wanted answers. With more and more Americans uneasy about the nation’s growing role in Vietnam, Congress began an investigation in May 1967. Under Democrat Richard Ichord from Missouri, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee shed public light for the first time on the inner workings of the Ordnance Department and its archaic method of developing small arms.
 
The subcommittee called hundreds of witnesses, including Macdonald, Stoner, and other representatives of Colt, who testified about their shabby treatment by the army. Military personnel described how the Ordnance Department tested rifles, although many stated they did not recall the fine technical details of the M-16 program. One of the most dramatic moments in the hearings came when a letter from a soldier was entered into the record. This poignant letter read in part, “Before we left Okinawa, we were all issued this new rifle, the M-16. Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.”
 
The subcommittee visited Vietnam to interview soldiers firsthand. They heard stories about how men routinely took AKs off of enemy dead and used them instead of their M-16s. This practice had became so commonplace that soldiers in the field officially were banned from using AKs, because those rifles’ distinctive sound attracted friendly fire. In the heat of a close-quarters jungle firefight, American soldiers had little to go on to identify enemy positions other than the sound of their weapons. The other reason the AK was banned was that carrying it further stigmatized the M-16. In defiance, many soldiers still carried AKs. Indeed, special covert units of the military and CIA were sanctioned to carry AKs on their secret missions because of the weapon’s reliability.
 
In his best-selling book
Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts
, Colonel David H. Hackworth told the story of bulldozers during a base construction project uncovering a buried Vietcong soldier and his AK. Hackworth yanked the weapon out of the mud and pulled back the bolt. “Watch this,” he said. “I’ll show you how a real infantry weapon works.” With that he fired off thirty rounds as if the rifle had been cleaned that morning instead of being buried for a year. “This was the kind of weapon our soldiers needed and deserved, not the M-16 that had to be hospital cleaned or it would jam,” he wrote.
 
The Ichord hearings continued through the summer. In October 1967 the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program issued a six-hundred-page report highly critical of the Ordnance Department in general and its handling of the development of the M-16 program in particular.

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