The Gun (66 page)

ii
In one famous image, the cover of
Life
magazine displayed a young Israeli soldier, soaked and grinning, as he frolicked in the Suez Canal with a captured Kalashnikov.

iii
This rifle was slightly longer than the AKM, but almost exactly the same weight, and the bullets it fired traveled at a higher velocity (more than twenty-nine hundred feet per second, as opposed to less than twenty-four hundred with the AKM).

iv
Its place was so complete that at times it was absurdly overstated. By one rumor, macaroni in Soviet pasta plants was required to be manufactured to a thickness of 7.62 millimeters; this, the story went, was because the machinery that produced pasta was ready, under secret decree, to be convertible to manufacturing cartridges. Nonsense, but a sign. Soviet priorities were such that a joke like this had currency.

v
The remainder included 6 heavy machine guns, 54 general-purpose machine guns or squad automatic weapons, 182 carbines, 123 submachine guns, and a mix of grenade launchers and surface-to-air missiles.

vi
The FAL originated in Belgium, but over the years was manufactured in several nations, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina, and India.

vii
This for an army that by 2007 would report having fewer than seventy-five thousand soldiers and rarely had any soldiers abroad, aside from small contingents working under the auspices of other organizations—such as the multinational force in Iraq or peacekeeping force in Kosovo—that provided much of their logistics.

viii
These two lines—
it takes only a week and the boy soldiers were not good shots
—serve as a departure point for further discussion about one element of Kalashnikov proliferation. The Kalashnikov is a very effective firearm at short and medium ranges. But its ease of use should not be confused with a user’s ability to master marksmanship. Most anyone can load, carry, and fire a Kalashnikov, and so most anyone does. And often the poorly disciplined or the poorly trained use them ineffectively in fights. Any extensive reconstruction of the ways that warfighting has changed since handheld automatic firearms became prevalent in conflict zones will invariably turn up accounts of gunmen who fire wild bursts and hit nothing at all, even at close range. Such observations align with a school of thought that says that since assault rifles displaced bolt-action rifles, marksmanship skills in many fighting forces have declined. Why? Because of a reliance on automatic shooting, often without aiming. This behavior, combined with the trajectory of the medium-powered M1943 cartridge, limits the effective range of the weapon as commonly used. In the hands of unskilled gunmen, Kalashnikovs are effective for crime and for action against the unarmed, and for destabilizing regions not under tight government control. (The villagers in Acholiland are almost defenseless against them, and have suffered terribly.) But in the years since most well-off conventional armies developed or procured their own assault rifles, and often mounted optical sights to their updated arms, Kalashnikovs in such hands have proven at times to be less effective in fighting conventional forces with sophisticated training and modern equipment.

Sometimes the differences between a lightly trained Kalashnikov-wielding gunman and a modern Western soldier can be stark. In one example, from November 2005, a small convoy of American soldiers stopped outside the police station of the Afghan National Police, or ANP, in Zormat in Paktia province. The American patrol leader, from Charlie Company, First Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had planned to talk with the Afghan police chief. The soldiers, with the air force noncommissioned officers who coordinated the company’s air support, waited outside, standing beside their vehicles and among the milling police officers. One of the Afghan officers leveled his Kalashnikov at the Americans and started shooting. The officer, according to one of the men who was attacked, “came toward our vehicles from the opposite side, maybe forty or fifty feet away before we noticed him and, without warning, raised his AK-47 to his hip and opened fire, yelling. He had wrapped the hand guard in red plastic and wasn’t disciplined with his firing, shooting on full auto. We immediately took cover and none of his rounds hit anyone, but they did chew through the hood of the HMMWV [a military vehicle] I was standing beside, spraying fiberglass into the face of the sergeant standing beside me. Before anyone else had a chance really to react beyond taking cover, the gunner in the turret simply turned his M249 SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun] and pretty much cut the ANP in half. After searching through his pockets, they found something along the lines of six months of pay which indicated he was likely paid off.” (Personal communication from Staff Sergeant Bertrand Fitzpatrick, United States Air Force, who was present at the attack.)

ix
The oft-repeated conventional wisdom is that the rifle on the Hezbollah flag is a Kalashnikov. The rifle’s magazine resembles that of a Kalashnikov, as does its stock. The front sight post does not, and a case could be made that the image more closely resembles the G3 rifle, a widely circulated product of Heckler & Koch and another descendant of the
sturmgewehr
, which was designed in a Spanish–West German collaboration in the 1950s. Or it might simply be sloppy political art. Similar uncertainty surrounds the emblem of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, which included the image of an assault rifle that is often called a Kalashnikov. The common assertion about Hezbollah’s choice is not the most glaring error in the legends of Kalashnikov symbols. That distinction perhaps falls to the frequent claim that the logo of the Red Army Faction, the now-defunct left-wing German terrorist organization, bore the image of a Kalashnikov. The weapon on the group’s red-star logo is an MP-5 submachine gun, also a product of Heckler & Koch.

x
Special Forces soldiers.

xi
Saakashvili and his military leadership also seemed not to know much about choosing its rifles—it bought thousands of Bushmaster M-4s, knockoffs that resemble the American military’s standard Colt carbines but are not made to the same certified manufacturing standards. This was a strange choice, given that for roughly the same price, the Georgian military could have purchased the more combat-tested design. Military rifle choices have long confounded political and military leaders. This was another such case.

xii
The precise figure given was twelve thousand Pakistani rupees.

xiii
Government purchasers can buy military-standard M-4s for about $800 a rifle. The American military pays more because its M-4s include an after-market rail system to which accessories can be mounted. This pushes up the price.

xiv
In an email later, Mahmoud expanded upon his question that night. The email read, in part: “I would like to ask Mr. Kalashnikov, what made you think about making such a horrible machine? What were you thinking about? Helping people or destroying their lives? I’m sure that you are a smart guy. Why didn’t you go for finding a way to bring peace to life again? What we had—all those kind of guns through history—wasn’t enough to make a man think about something more useful for people’s lives rather than finding another killing machine? Why? I know that sometimes that piece of metal was helping nations to survive. But how about if there were no guns at all, not for attack and not for protection. What would happen? . . . It is not just me, and it is not only thousands who got injured or killed by your ideal machine. I’m wondering—how about if you tried it on yourself, one bullet into your feet before sending it out to the market. That might change your mind?”

xv
His factory salary was roughly three times that of a typical worker at the plant, when the workers were paid at all.

xvi
A second try at the vodka market, this time through a British businessman who took the Kalashnikov name up-market with a brand to compete with Grey Goose, flopped, too. The designer’s surname brought no magic; it might as well have been Scud. For several years, one of the general’s grandsons labored to capitalize on it too, marketing a line of Kalashnikov pocketknives, snowboards, thermoses, sunglasses, and umbrellas. Brochures with the products were abundant at trade shows. Sales appeared negligible. By 2004, Mikhail Kalashnikov expected no turnabout. “For now I haven’t experienced any financial benefit,” he said. “There aren’t yet any results.” The ventures all suffered in part from their organizers’ misunderstanding of the meaning of the Kalashnikov line. They insisted that the word
Kalashnikov
rang with the many admirable traits they saw in the rifle or the man: quality, reliability, fidelity to nation, and the rest. They did not grasp that among many would-be customers, away from the catechisms of Soviet propaganda, it might mean something else.

xvii
The museum, which struggled for years to raise money for its construction, provides a series of stories within a story. Kalashnikov derided the men who dismantled the Soviet Union and profited from the looting of state assets afterward. The museum in Izhevsk that is dedicated to him was built with donations from Anatoly B. Chubais, one of the main architects of the privatization of state assets, who profited handsomely in the process. The ironies only get richer. Chubais was nearly assassinated in 2005 by at least two men who ambushed his armored BMW on a road outside Moscow, spraying it with Kalashnikov fire.

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, early 2006

The fourteen Marines, ready to dash, waited for the signal. It was a cold February morning on a firing range just inland from North Carolina’s coast. The Marines, members of Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, were preparing for a deployment in the Anbar province of Iraq, and on this day they had set aside their M-4s and M-16s. In front of them, a short jog away, were fourteen Kalashnikov assault rifles, disassembled, unloaded, resting on the ground. At the signal, the Marines were to sprint to the rifles, reassemble them, perform a function check, load a magazine, and fire into a man-shaped target, aiming for the face and chest. Their rifles were a mix of Kalashnikov variants. They came from Romania, Russia, China, and North Korea. One was an original AK-47 from Izhevsk, assembled from solid machined steel, date-stamped 1954.
¹
It was fifty-two years old—almost three times the age of some of the men about to fire it.

The Corps had a nickname for this test:
Just In Case.
In the tour ahead for these Marines, their officers wanted to be sure that they could pick up a Kalashnikov, in any condition, whether from an allied Iraqi soldier or from an insurgent in a close-range fight, and use the weapon immediately and well. The signal was given. The Marines were sprinting. Thirty seconds or so later, the first of them were firing. Holes began to appear in their targets’ heads.

After almost six decades, the long travels of the Kalashnikov assault rifle had achieved the inevitable state: full saturation. Decades earlier the first AK-47s had left Soviet hands, and in the years since they had become the hand weapon of choice for strongmen, criminals, terrorists,
and messianic guerrilla leaders. In time the Kalashnikov had also become a preferred arm for those who fought against the Soviet Union or Russia, and those who organized genocide. And now it was institutionalized in the training of American infantrymen. It could not, with all prudence, be any other way. In the battles ahead, every one of these Marines would encounter Kalashnikovs in the hands of allies and enemies alike. To see Marines prepare themselves around these simple facts, training with the signature socialist arm on one of the most prominent American military bases, was to grasp the extent of Kalashnikov saturation in modern war.

What does saturation mean? It would be naïve to think that war would stop without these weapons. It wouldn’t. It would be just as naïve to think that many of the consequences of war as it has been waged in recent decades might not be lessened if these rifles were in fewer hands, and not so available for future conflicts. For how long will battlefields be so? The answer is straightforward—as long as the rifles exist in the outsized numbers the Cold War left behind.

Much attention is paid to accountability, security, and destruction of potential materials for weapons of mass destruction. With lesser urgency and smaller budgets, efforts to secure and destroy antipersonnel land mines have become widely accepted. In the past decade or so, similar attention has been given to efforts to eliminate stocks of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons, whose existence threatens the security of air transportation. The notion of regulating military firearms and destroying excess stockpiles enjoys much less support and faces considerable opposition, no matter that illicit uses of assault rifles have killed and wounded far more people than have all of these other weapons combined.

There are many reasons for this. Part of it is that surplus small arms are regarded as foreign-policy tools to be kept in reserve. Part of it is that to many government officials, honest and corrupt alike, surplus small arms are commodities, items to be converted to cash. Part of it is the manner in which priorities are set. Infantry arms that are loose in the field are exceedingly difficult to account for or collect. Surplus arms, locked up in armories, do not seem to cry for attention. Domestic and international politics play a role, too. The governments most responsible for the widespread distribution of military assault rifles—Russia, China, and the United States—have, for different reasons, shown little to no interest in destroying their excess weapons or those of other governments, even
when they are not needed by standing military forces, and even when they endanger their own troops.