The Gun

III. AFTERMATH THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AK-47’S GLOBAL SPREAD

CHAPTER 7 The Accidental Rifle

So carry your rifle (they don’t give a damn),
just pray you won’t need it
while you’re in Vietnam.

—From the poem “Rifle, 5.56MM,XM16E1,” by First Lieutenant Larry Rottmann, U.S. Army, a public affairs officer in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 who said the army forbade all discussion about malfunctioning American M-16s

THE MARINES OF HOTEL COMPANY’S FIRST PLATOON SPREAD OUT as they walked through the shin-high grass. They were gripped by unease. In front of them was their next destination: the village of Ap Sieu Quan, a narrow cluster of buildings surrounded by paddies and dikes just south of the demilitarized zone in the Quang Tri province of Vietnam. From out in the field, the village looked deserted in the rising late-morning heat. The Marines sensed menace awaiting. At least three North Vietnamese Army battalions had infiltrated the area, an agricultural belt in the coastal lowlands where the jungles and mountains drained into the South China Sea. Many of the NVA units were patrolling. Others were dug in and concealed. Hotel Company’s Second Platoon had been hit by a North Vietnamese unit in Ap Sieu Quan a short while before. Now the company was converging. The Marines were exposed as they moved. They saw the low-slung buildings ahead. The only approach passed over open ground. We’re walking across the savannah, Private First Class Alfred J. Nickelson thought, cradling his M-16 rifle and scanning as he kept pace. They can see us for miles.¹

Hotel Company was one of the bloodied outfits in Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, which in 1967 served as a mobile reaction force for much of Vietnam. It was July 21. Early the previous morning, several CH-46 helicopters had landed a few miles to the northwest, left the company behind, and roared back into the air and banked toward the USS Tripoli, their ship, off the coast. The insertion had marked the opening of Operation Bear Chain, a mission to interdict their enemies’ food and ammunition caches along the road running from the Communist-controlled north toward Hue City, Da Nang, and Saigon. The navy and Marine Corps had given the battalion a label: Special Landing Force Bravo. In theory, the battalion resided on amphibious ships as a theater reserve. In practice, its units were constantly ashore, shuttled from fight to fight.² Upon departing the ships, the Marines would remain in the bush for several days to several weeks, then return for a rest and refit, and quickly be sent to the next fight. This had been the rhythm for months. Mission by mission, firefight by firefight, booby trap by booby trap, mortar blast by mortar blast, the rhythm had exacted its toll. The battalion’s ranks had been thinned. The survivors were tired. Even after absorbing the replacements that showed up between operations, the platoons fought at one-half to two-thirds strength, including men who had been wounded but were judged fit enough to send back out.

For the United States military, which had defeated the Japanese army in the early 1940s and repelled communist divisions from South Korea a decade later, the enemy in Vietnam presented a confounding foe. The Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars were marginally educated, lightly equipped, minimally trained. More than half of the NVA soldiers in late 1966 had six years or less of education, and three-quarters of them had less than eighteen months in their army.³ They were peasants, agrarian villagers indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology and fighting according to tactics articulated by Mao. Some of their deficiencies were striking. American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent on missions against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters said they fired their weapons for the first time only in combat.⁴ And yet by summer 1967, as Hotel Company rushed toward Ap Sieu Quan, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month.

One reason for their success was their weapons. Nikita S. Khrushchev was gone from the Kremlin, forced into retirement in a bloodless coup in 1964. But his practice of using arms transfers as a foreign-policy lever continued, and the People’s Republic of China had followed the Soviet example with haste. By late 1964 China had distributed huge quantities of its Kalashnikov assault rifles[19] in Southeast Asia. A large fraction of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army combatants now carried a new assault rifle. In some units the saturation rate was as high as 75 percent, and many soldiers had been given a basic load of 390 cartridges to go with their new gun.⁵ The majority of the combat fatalities among the United States forces were caused by small-arms fire.[20] As the staccato din of the Kalashnikov was heard in battle each day, and American casualties mounted, the Eastern bloc assault rifle at last captured the Pentagon’s attention. Carried by proxies, the main rifle of an army whose nation lacked the technical sophistication to have its own modern gun works, it had become a marker of the Kremlin’s influence on how war was experienced by combatants of limited means. No young army or guerrilla force had ever gone to war with more rifle firepower, with more ability to fight a technically and materially superior foe in a straight-on infantry encounter. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were beneficiaries of a new form of martial leveling. Indigenous forces had long faced outsiders backed by industrial economies and the guns they produced. The firepower disadvantages had been extreme. Armed with rapid-fire arms and ammunition stores the local men could not hope to match, conventional soldiers had maintained influence over distant lands with small expeditionary detachments. The AK-47 provided a complication: The locals could now fight like never before. The class of fighter that had stepped from the rubble in Budapest in ones and twos—the Kalashnikov-carrying guerrilla, a common man with portable and easy- to-use automatic arms—was now in the field by the tens of thousands.

On this day, before Second Platoon had moved ahead to sweep Ap Sieu Quan, Hotel Company had been told that the village had been cleared by an American unit the previous night. Until the platoon was ambushed near a church within the little village’s confines, the Marines were not expecting a fight. The North Vietnamese soldiers were dug in. The platoon could neither budge them nor get itself out. The company commander, Captain Richard O. Culver, Jr., directed Staff Sergeant Claude E. Elrod, First Platoon’s commander, to push off the NVA and retrieve the American casualties, weapons, and radios. The other platoons moved to close off the village.

As the distance shrank, Staff Sergeant Elrod moved near the front of his platoon, between his radio operator and a three-man M-60 machine-gun team. Sweat rolled down his light frame. Ordinarily a lieutenant would lead a rifle platoon, but the battalion was short of officers. Too many officers had been shot. The staff sergeant had joined the special landing force just after the battalion had participated in the fight for Hills 861 and 881, one of the bitterest battles in the war. Upon checking into Hotel Company, he learned that the executive officer, First Lieutenant David S. Hackett, a Princeton graduate, had been shot through the head and killed. The Second Platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Bruce E. Griesmer, had been wounded. A new officer, First Lieutenant Michael P. Chervenak, had arrived to take Lieutenant Hackett’s place. Officers were otherwise in short supply. Staff Sergeant Elrod was told he would lead First Platoon. That was two months ago. Already he had been wounded. He had been hit with shrapnel and a rifle bullet a few weeks before. The bullet had passed through his side without striking a vital organ or severing a major blood vessel. The shrapnel injuries had been light. Luck had kept him alive. The corpsmen on the USS Tripoli had removed his stitches the day before. Now he was in- country again, leading his platoon, heading toward another village on another operation in the kaleidoscope of action that defined the battalion’s tour of some of the worst of Vietnam.

Staff Sergeant Elrod was crossing the last dike before the village when a bullet smacked a bamboo branch near his head. He heard Kalashnikov rifles firing as he dropped. Down the Marines of First Platoon went, shouting,