The Gun (45 page)

The AR-15 looked like nothing else in military service anywhere. It had all of the nontraditional features of its bigger brother, the AR-10, including an aluminum receiver, hard plastic furniture, and the odd-looking carrying handle. But it was thirty-nine inches long. It weighed, when unloaded, only 6.35 pounds. Its appearance—small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic—stirred emotions. A rifle, after all, was supposed to look like a rifle. To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223’s larger load of propellant and the AR-15’s twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds—in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound. The initial AR-15 and its ammunition were in place. The first steps in an American shift in rifles for killing men had been made.

Now came the matter of selling it. But to whom? Outside of ordnance circles, several officers saw promise in the SCHV concept.
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But as a rifle that emerged from the private sector, and had such unusual characteristics, the AR-15 met predictable resistance in the army’s ordnance corps. The M-14 had been approved as the new standard rifle in 1957. The AR-15 arrived just as the army thought the conversation about rifles had closed. The idea of reconsidering the years of effort and enormous spending behind the M-14, and challenging the prevailing thinking with a high-concept minirifle, amounted to small-arms heresy. The entrenched interests offered ArmaLite little hope. The Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, meanwhile, risked foundering. Its aircraft-marketing plans had not worked out. Nor had Boutelle’s other schemes. The company was starved for cash. On January 7, 1959, Fairchild transferred manufacturing rights for the AR-15 to Colt’s Firearms Division for $325,000 and a royalty-sharing guarantee with Stoner and Cooper-MacDonald, Inc., the independent arms-dealing firm that arranged the deal.
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From that point forward, the weapons were to be made in Hartford, Connecticut, by the descendant of the firm that had manufactured Gatling guns, and put the world on the path toward automatic arms.

With Colt’s, the sales push entered a new phase. Robert W. MacDonald, a principal at Cooper-MacDonald, was a graying curmudgeon given to hard-nosed deals. He had made a name for himself selling explosives in Asia.
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His firm had collected a neat $250,000 finder’s fee from the
$325,000 ArmaLite-Colt’s licensing deal. But he stood to make more money—a lot more money—if Colt’s found customers for the AR-15.
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First he faced an arms-trade policy hurdle. He could not sell the rifle to America’s potential enemies. And under mutual-aid provisions, he could sell it to Washington’s allies only if it was compatible with American arms. For the AR-15 to have international sales potential the rifle first had to be introduced, somehow, to American military use. MacDonald put his ample imagination to use, even as Colt’s pursued its own plans.

In summer 1960, Colt’s took the AR-15 on the road, including to police departments around the United States, where their sales team fired into a variety of objects (automobiles were a favorite) and engaged in almost giddy declarations of their rifle’s powers. “The penetrating effects of the .223 round are devastating from a practical standpoint,” one company summary read. “We are in a position to state that there is not a commercially manufactured automobile in this country that can withstand the penetrating effects of this weapon and cartridge.” The summary described the effects of roughly three hundred rounds fired into a 1951 Pontiac Catalina, which was shot in a demonstration for the Indiana State Police. The range was seventy-five yards.

The .223 cartridge will penetrate:

1. Bumper steel.

2. Frame steel.

3. Motor block (only enters, does not exit).

4. Both sides of car (broadside shot).

5. Trunk lid, back seat, front seat, dashboard, firewall and in some cases on into the radiator when fired from rear to front.

6. Wheel drums, coil springs and shock absorbers.

7. All glass (laminated shatterproof or tempered glass).

A few weeks later, Colt’s added a suggestive demonstration at a sales pitch to the police of Glastonbury, Connecticut. Its salesman put two large cans of water on the front seat of a 1955 Pontiac Tudor, paced off sixty yards, and opened up. The water cans were surrogates for a driver and passenger. Colt’s let everyone know just how poorly those would-be criminals in a getaway car had fared, and how well the bullets fired by the AR-15 had performed: “The bullet will still penetrate both sides of vehicle after passing through two 5 gallon cans of water placed in front seat of the automobile to simulate a body in the car. Both cans were ruptured and torn apart at the seams upon impact.” A single bullet fired by an AR-15, by the implicit wink in this kind of statement, was capable of a bad-guy-stopping twofer—it could pass through a door, then one man, and then another man and then out another door. Bonnie and Clyde would have no chance. The summary’s conclusions almost gasped. The AR-15, it read, “can be fired full automatic off the finger tips” and “can be fired off the stomach or chin or with one hand holding only the pistol stock. The recoil is so negligible as to be insignificant.” It added, “There is not a piece of metal or steel on a commercially manufactured automobile that cannot be penetrated by the .223 cartridge,” which will also “penetrate most commercially used building materials.”
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Such sales copy was straight from the days of the Auto-Ordnance Corporation and the Thompson gun, though it was targeted against law enforcement officers and not yet the general public. As this cocksure sense of the AR-15’s formidability was being assembled, the most successful demonstration of all was held. In mid-1960, while automobiles were being pierced, punctured, and shredded by Colt’s sales team, MacDonald arranged for General LeMay, then the air force’s vice chief of staff, to be invited to Boutelle’s sixtieth birthday party at Boutelle’s gentleman’s farm in Maryland. Much of the farm had been converted into recreational shooting ranges. General LeMay, like Boutelle, was a gun buff. The invitation was crafted to appeal. A sample AR-15, the new miracle gun, would be on hand for the general to fire. The party was held over the Fourth of July. The hosts set up three watermelons at ranges of 50 and 150 yards and invited the general to try his hand at shooting them. What followed was one of the odder moments in American arms-procurement history. Watermelons were bright and fleshy in ways that water cans were not, and when struck by the little rifle’s ultrafast bullets, the first two fruits
exploded in vivid red splashes. General LeMay was so impressed that he spared the third melon; the party decided to eat it. No doubt this was great fun for the arms salesmen. It was also nonsense. But salesmanship was salesmanship. MacDonald understood that the air force had its own small-arms needs and wanted its own automatic rifle for defending air bases and strategic-missile sites. He also knew that General LeMay was unimpressed with the M-14. Colt’s, for the price of three watermelons and Independence Day cocktails, had a high-level convert.

MacDonald had cultivated the right man. The air force began putting the rifle to tests. In 1961, General LeMay became air force chief of staff. In May 1962, the air force entered a contract with Colt’s to buy eighty-five hundred rifles. This was a small order. But just like that, the AR-15 formally entered the American military arms system, via a side door. Colt’s automatic rifle was now a viable product for foreign and domestic sales.

McNamara did not share with Vance what had convinced him of the M-14’s definite inferiority to the AK-47 and AR-15. But the evidence circulating in the Pentagon in late 1962 was both theoretical and empirical. The theoretical side was strong. Charles J. Hitch, a former Rhodes scholar serving as comptroller for the Department of Defense, had recently completed an analysis of the American military’s rifle programs. In it, Hitch endorsed the idea of the lighter-weight automatic rifle with smaller ammunition. The study marked a provocative tweak of the old guard. It suggested that systems analysts might, after all, be able to see things the traditional military could not. With it, the Pentagon had at last formally seconded ideas accepted by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army during World War II. The United States military was catching up. The empirical side was weaker. Hitch was more than attuned to the assault-rifle concept. He was smitten by a product: the AR-15. Classified reports from Vietnam, where hundreds of these new rifles had undergone combat trials, were giving the AR-15 high marks and providing a surprise. Reports from the field claimed that when a bullet fired from the AR-15 struck a man, it inflicted devastating injuries.

The causes were apparently twofold. First, the metal jacket of early AR-15 bullets tended to shatter on impact, sending fragmentation slicing
through victims.
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(In the army, this was variously seen as attractive and worrisome. In classified correspondence, some officers were thrilled by the perceived wounding characteristics, which one prominent army doctor described as “explosive effects.” Others wondered whether the .223 round might be illegal under international convention.)
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Second, the bullets often turned sideways inside a victim, a phenomenon known as yaw. In one respect, the effects of yaw somewhat resembled what could be seen on the surface of a lake when a speedboat turned sharply. In this case, the energy delivery manifested itself as a shock wave within a human body, which could create stretching or rupturing injury to tissue not directly in a bullet’s path. By turning, the bullet also crushed and cut more tissue as it passed through a victim, creating a larger wound channel.

The supposed effects of these phenomena on men were described in the first known battlefield trials of AR-15s, which had been coaxed to life in Asia via another of MacDonald’s sales masterstrokes. In 1961, MacDonald had made contact with the army’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had offices in Saigon and Bangkok. Among the officers eager to work with the new rifle was Lieutenant Colonel Richard R. Hallock, a paratrooper from World War II who was proud to be associated with the whiz-kid culture and was attracted to rifle development, though he had limited experience with ballistics, procurement, testing, or weapon design. He was, however, an able writer of memorandums. His office proposed a study. In December 1961, McNamara approved the purchase of one thousand AR-15s for American military advisers to distribute to Vietnamese government soldiers. The approval worked on two levels. It gave an outlet for McNamara’s interest in the new rifle and aligned with President Kennedy’s decision a month before to increase military aid flowing from Washington to South Vietnam. The United States was envisioning warfare with new roles for Special Forces and helicopter-borne battalions. Vietnam was becoming a showcase for this thinking. The futuristic AR-15 seemed a tantalizing fit. Enthusiasm for the rifle was running high enough that as the test was approved, President Kennedy’s military aide presented him with a sample AR-15 to look over in the Oval Office, and Kennedy was photographed playfully handling this peculiar little rifle, which was secretly being shipped to Vietnam.

Lieutenant Colonel Hallock and the agency dubbed their test Project AGILE—“a comprehensive field evaluation” of the AR-15 under combat
conditions. The name in itself might have been a warning that this was not to be real science. Throughout much of 1962, Vietnamese units carried the new American assault rifles into combat. Excited vignettes trickled back. In May, Colonel Cao Van Vien, commander of the Vietnamese Airborne Brigade, reported that his soldiers had shot two Viet Cong guerrillas with their experimental weapons. One guerrilla had been hit in the wrist. The bullet severed the man’s hand, which remained behind when he escaped. This was not necessarily revelatory. The typical Vietnamese fighter weighed about ninety pounds. Any number of military cartridges might shatter the lower forearm of a ninety-pound man upon smacking the radius and ulna squarely. And a data sample of one injury was not grounds for extrapolation. But context was absent from the report, which emphasized gruesome wounds with descriptive glee. “An AR-15 bullet pierced the head of a VC from the nape of his neck to his forehead,” the report said of the injury to the second guerrilla. “The hole in the nape of the neck was about bullet size. However, it came out his face and took off almost half of it. The face was unidentifiable. Firing range: from 50 to 70 meters.”
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This injury was easier to grasp, if only because it was familiar. Autopsy reports and medical literature had long shown that human heads shatter when penetrated by military rifle bullets. The description, in other words, should have been unremarkable. But the macabre cheerleading leaking from the field evaluation was a mere hint of what lay ahead.

The secret report of Project AGILE, submitted in August 1962, was short on dispassionate observation but long on product boosterism. Like the Vietnamese colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Hallock and his team gushed with satisfaction. “On 13 April, 62, a Special Forces team made a raid on a small village,” their report noted. “In the raid, seven VC were killed. Two were killed by AR-15 fire. Range was 50 meters. One man was hit in the head; it looked like it exploded. A second man was hit in the chest; his back was one big hole.” A Ranger unit detailed similar effects on five guerrillas ambushed on June 9. Ranges were thirty to one hundred yards. The inventory was chilling:

Back wound, which caused thoracic cavity to explode. 2. Stomach wound, which caused the abdominal cavity to explode. 3. Buttock wound, which destroyed all of the tissue of both buttocks. 4. Chest wound from right to left, destroyed the thoracic cavity.
5. Heel wound, the projectile entered the bottom of the right foot causing the leg to split from the foot to the hip.