The Gun (95 page)

Results of the students’ timed drills with Kalashnikov assault rifles—part of the curriculum in Soviet schools. The log book was a marker of both the rifles’s ease of use and the extent to which assault rifles had penetrated Soviet society. The practice persists in post-Soviet Russia. (
Photos by Joseph Sywenkyj
)

The Kalashnikov’s durability in the field and its ease of use, along with its slight recoil, have made it a weapon most anyone can use. These traits, coupled with its near ubiquity, have made it a primary arm of child soldiers. A boy soldier in the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka, 1992. (
Photo by Suzanne Keating
)

Drawing by a former child soldier from the Lord’s Resistance Army, an millennial insurgent group that originated in Uganda in the 1980s. Armed with simple and lightweight assault rifles, the group has survived more than a quarter century in the field. (
Photo by C. J. Chivers
)

KILLING TOOLS, AND OBJECTS WITH MANY MEANINGS, AND REACTIONS

After its introduction, the AK-47 crept into national and insurgent propaganda alike, and can be seen in statuary, symbols, banners, and posters from Central America to North Korea. The caption reads of this poster was typical of its form: “Imperialism and all anti-revolutionists are paper tigers.” The weapon has similarly been appropriated as a mark of martial credibility and determination by dictators, criminals, rascals, and jihadists, a malleable icon that can convey whatever those who carry it wish to convey.

In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Army held classified tests examining the weapon’s lethality against that of American rifles. With cadavers procured in secret from India and with live goats, testers at Aberdeen Proving Ground fired into defatted and decapitated human heads that had been filled with gelatinous pseudobrains. The tests—hurried, macabre, free from peer review or public scrutiny, and ultimately useless—were a milestone of strange Cold War “science.” An embarrassed army covered them up for nearly fifty years. The effects of a bullet fired by an early American assault rifle passing through a human head were recorded, on a high-speed camera. The so-called terminal effects of an AK-47 round were displayed on another panel, after a tester fired into the skull. (
Photos from
“Wound-Ballistics Assessment of M-14, AR-15 and Soviet AK Rifles,”
U.S. Army, 1964
)

Sometimes, choosing not to display a Kalashnikov can have meaning, too. A member of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, the Palestinian terrorist group, brandished an M-4 in an interview with the author in 2002. Carrying a rifle used by Israel signified defiance or fighting skill—to acquire its enemies’ rifles, the group depends on corruption or battlefield capture. Displaying the enemies’ guns is a common propaganda device, used the world over. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)

Among those who use them, assault rifles can be intensely personal objects or symbols with many meanings. In 2009, an Afghan National Army soldier in Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, decorated his Kalashnikov with unveiled images of women—a seeming rebuke to the Taliban. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)

EVERYMANS’S GUN

By the time the Kalashnikov line had entered its second half-century of service, it was firmly entrenched as a primary tool of violence in destabilized lands. The Soviet Union had fallen, the Warsaw Pact had dissolved. The armories and stockpiles were loose, and the weapon was so common in the field that it was scarcely remarked upon. Its effects were easy to find, and chilling. A wounded Taliban fighter, captured by the Northern Alliance in late 2001, on the approach to Kabul. The man was dragged from hiding onto a dirt road, and executed in a frenzy. What the Kalashnikov era has often looked like, in a way rarely documented by camera. The rifle is still used in crackdowns, too. (
Photos by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)

Karzan Mahmoud, at far right of bottom row. A bodyguard for a Kurdish prime minister in Northern Iraq, Mahmoud was shot repeatedly by assassins with Kalashnikovs not long after this photograph was taken in 2002. The doctors documented twenty-three bullet wounds in his shattered frame. Mahmoud survived. Later, he wondered whether Mikhail Kalashnikov feared for his soul. (
Photo courtesy of Karzan Mahmoud
)