The Gun

78. Accounts of these inspections and function tests held at sea were shared with the author by former Marines who participated in them, including officers and staff noncommissioned officers who supervised them. These include Mike Chervenak, Chuck Chritton, Ed Elrod, Tom Givvin, Ray Madonna, Chuck Woodard, and Dick Culver.

79. Text of letter from First Lieutenant Michael P. Chervenak, USMC, to the Barnesboro Star, the Washington Post, Senator Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), and Congressman Richard Ichord (D-Mo.), as published in the Barnesboro Star, August 10, 1967.

80. A copy of the letter to Representative Ichord is on file at WHMC-C, U. Mo.

81. Personal communication to author from Thomas Tomakowski.

82. Personal communication to author from Charles Woodard.

83. From Hallock’s brief biography in “The Hallock Soldier’s Fund and Metro Works Columbus Home Ownership Center.” Hallock entered the real estate business and died wealthy. He is a member of the OCS Hall of Fame at Fort Benning.

84. “Report of the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program of the Committee on Armed Services,” October 19, 1967 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office).

85. William G. Bray, “The M-16: A Report,” Data, April 1968, p. 6.

86. Lieutenant Chervenak’s letter took a winding course to public light. The Barnesboro Star published it in August. Senator Kennedy never replied. Representative Ichord’s staff lost the letter (for which the congressman later apologized). The Washington Post held it, inexplicably, for three months. Throughout summer and fall 1967, as the M-16’s problems were a national story, no one helped Hotel Company as its new rifles continued to jam.

87. The letter was a black mark on Lieutenant Chervenak’s otherwise promising career. Although promotion from first lieutenant to captain is almost automatic, the more so in times of war, Lieutenant Chervenak was denied promotion when his time came. He served an extra year in the lieutenant rank. This effectively docked his pay.

88. Lieutenant Givvin wrote a letter detailing his platoon’s experience in the same fight, and it was forwarded to the Marine Corps, which did not investigate. Lieutenant Charles Chritton, who was briefly the commander of Foxtrot Company, wrote to Congress describing his company’s experiences with the rifle. One of the senators from his home state read the letter at a press conference on Capitol Hill, but there was no official reaction. The letter to the Washington Post changed the conversation.

89. Letter from Kanemitsu Ito to William H. Goldbach, vice president and general manager of Colt’s Military Division, December 3, 1967.

90. Dick Culver, “The Saga of the M-16 in Vietnam (Part 1).” Culver served a career in the Marine Corps. Some of his experiences with the M-16 when he commanded Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines are posted on www.bobroher.com, p. 5.

91. Letter from Ito to Goldbach, December 3, 1967.

92. Patent No. 3482322, “Method of Preventing Malfunction of a Magazine Type Firearm and Gauge for Conducting Same.” Filed with U.S. Patent Office on November 6, 1967.

93. Letter from Kanemitsu Ito, Colt’s field representative, to Misters Benke, McMahon, Hall, Fremont, December 9, 1967, re: “Return from Bear Cat to Saigon.”

94. Daniel C. Fales, “M16: The Gun They Swear by… and At!” Popular Mechanics, October 1967.

95. “Memorandum for Record, Debrief of Colt’s Vietnam Field Representative—Mr. Kanemitsu Ito,” December 28, 1967. Prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Engle, Project Manager Staff Officer, Rifles.

96. Personal communication to author by Paul A. Benke.

97. Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Harcourt Books, 1999), p. 164.

98. “Memorandum for Army Chief of Staff, G4, Fact Finding Visit to 199th Infantry Brigade,” March 28, 1968, by Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Semmler, Chief, PM Rifles, Vietnam Field Office.

99. Personal communication to author from Jack Beavers.

100. Contents of tape recording received from K. Ito and J. Fitzgerald, September 27, 1968.

101. Letter from John S. Foster, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, to Representative L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, February 2, 1968. On file at WHMC-C, U. Mo.

102. The poem, “Rifle, 5.56MM,XM16E1,” is by Larry Rottmann, who served as an Army public-affairs officer in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Excerpted with permission of the poet from Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans (1st Casualty Press, 1972).

8. Everyman’s Gun

1. This is the official German version; Abu Daoud, who claimed to have organized the attack, later said it was false. As with many accounts of terrorism, many sources contradict one another. Given the speed with which the terrorists located the Israelis’ apartment, their prior infiltration would seem probable.

2. “Munich 1972: When the Terror Began,” Time, posted August 25, 2002 on www.time.com.

3. Ibid.

4. Simon Reeve, One Day in September (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), p. 2.

5. This section was assembled using information from several sources, including Serge Groussard’s The Blood of Israel: The Massacre of the Israeli Athletes (New York: William Morrow, 1975), the most thorough and painstaking account of the act, by a journalist who covered the siege live and then investigated it. Reeve’s One Day in September, and reconstructions by Time magazine were also helpful, as was a visit to the site as part of a lecture series on the attack for students of the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, attended by the author in 2005.

6. Personal communication to author from Lin Xu.

7. Mike O’Connor, “Albanian Village Finds Boom in Gun-Running,” New York Times, April 24, 1997. The factory manager is quoted as saying production reached twenty-four thousand AK-47s a month.

8. Descriptions, and a limited selection of photographs from within the Artemovsk cache, were provided by several people who have been inside the caves. The author was denied entry.

9. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 302–3.

10 The account of Fechter’s killing at the Berlin Wall was assembled from German newspaper and academic accounts, as well as from records in the archive of the Stasi, the West Berlin police, and the Ministry of State Security. Von Schnitzler’s quotation is from the transcript of the program he hosted, Schwarze Kanal (Black Channel), on GDR-TV, August 27, 1962. Research conducted by Stefan Pauly.

11. From “Meeting Notes taken by Chief of the Hungarian People’s Army General Staff Karoly Csemi On Talks with Soviet Generals to Discuss Preparations for ‘Operation Danube,’” July 24, 1968, in The Prague Spring ’68: A National Security Archive Documents Reader” (Central European University Press, 1998), p. 277.

12. OTIA 6129 Technical Report, bullet, ball. Report a.k.a. “Preliminary Technical Report, Egyptian 7.62mm, ball.”

13. Neil C. Livingston and David Halevy, Inside the P.L.O. (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990), p. 38.

14. On visits in the United States, Kalashnikov has been gracious about the M-16, and complimented Eugene Stoner in person. Later, he placed flowers on Stoner’s grave. But Kalashnikov is both competitive and attuned to his audiences. In Russia, away from Americans, he routinely criticized the American rifle. A sample, from public remarks at Rosoboronexport’s offices in Moscow in April 2006, in the presence of the author: “They said that an