The Gun

General Westmoreland’s frustration and Colt’s sales push worked in concert in October 1965, when Hall sent a letter to a brigadier general he knew who managed logistics in Vietnam. Hall informed the general that “effective the following January [Colt’s] would stop producing rifles for the Army and he was fighting a war without any support.” If this was meant to be incendiary, it had its desired effect. The brigadier passed the letter to General Westmoreland, who called Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., Democrat of Georgia. Russell, an ally of President Johnson and one of the deans of the hill, was touring Vietnam at the time as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Russell called McNamara on December 7 and issued a naked political threat: “Buy 100,000 rifles today, or I’m releasing the story to the press.” Hall was summoned that day to Rock Island Arsenal to sign a contract.³⁵ Colt’s position and profits were preserved. General Westmoreland would get his guns. For those who think that the United States chose its primary infantry rifle through orderly deliberation, or that systems analysis led to organized decision-making, the episode showed how things actually worked. This was how troops in Vietnam would receive their weapons, including the unready M-16s soon to be put into the hands of Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines.

After all these years of dysfunction, scandal was not far off. But first came celebration. At Colt’s Firearms Division in Hartford, General Westmoreland’s end run meant salvation. In 1963, Colt’s had posted a million-dollar loss. It had hired and trained new workers and lured managers from other firms, staking its future, even its survival, on a gun without a market.³⁶ Floated by the Pentagon’s order, the company entered a boom. The return on the AR-15 investment was at hand. When Colt’s bought the manufacturing rights from Fairchild in 1959, it had gambled on a concept more than a product. ArmaLite’s rifle had been rejected by the Pentagon. It had no powerful backers in the army or the Marine Corps. No domestic orders were expected. The nation was at peace. Almost seven years later, with the signing of the contract in December 1965, Colt’s effectively became the sole- source provider of a weapon demanded by the army for an expanding war. The M-16, once roundly rejected, stood the chance of becoming the United States military’s primary firearm, which would mean the allies would be seeking a new class of assault rifles, too. The company grew. Between May 1966 and April 1967, as rifle production jumped at the Hartford plant, Colt’s military division hired 510 new employees.

Excitement surrounds a winner, and Colt’s was suddenly a winner. The accompanying promotional push was striking, both for Colt’s good luck and for the degree to which the gun press helped the company along. As part of the public-relations effort, William J. Curran, Colt’s advertising and public-relations manager, succeeded in publishing a story under his byline in Shooting Times, naturally touting the M- 16.³⁷ Gun companies and gun magazines have long had relationships beyond cozy. And now, when gun journalism was needed, Shooting Times failed. The magazine promoted the rifle further with a follow-up the next month. The second article detailed how Colt’s provided the editors an M-16 for test-firing. The editors avoided putting the gun through what they called a “torture test,” and were principally interested in its accuracy, its ease of use, and its bullets’ penetration of various items the authors judged common to the battlefield, including bunkers and steel plates. But a funny thing happened on the way to plinking the selected targets. Of the first 450 rounds fired, the brand-new M-16 malfunctioned eleven times. Might not this have been the story? Not in Shooting Times. The writer, Major George Nonte, passed off the poor performance as related to one bad gun and not indicative of M-16s as a class. It was, Nonte wrote, “only logical to assume that any deficiencies such as those noted would be corrected (or the gun would be rejected) in the course of final inspection.” He continued: “Before any single gun is actually accepted by Army resident inspectors and delivered to the military establishment, it must pass extensive firing tests.”³⁸ This was not quite so. In fact, each rifle at Colt’s factory had to fire only thirty-three rounds to pass its acceptance test, and the army would later admit that in order to ensure a high acceptance rate, the acceptance test was skewed in Colt’s favor. Colt’s was allowed to conduct the tests with ammunition containing IMR powder—not the ball powder the rifles would fire in Vietnam, which was known to cause a higher rate of malfunctions.³⁹

The stories went to print even as the army conducted a survey of the small-arms use of 121 soldiers on infantry, cavalry, or airborne duty in Vietnam. Almost 90 percent were carrying M-16s. The results both confirmed the nature of ground fighting in the war and suggested that the M-16 was not ready for the job at hand. Eighty percent of the participants said they normally fired at enemy combatants within two hundred yards, and 95 percent said the enemy was within three hundred yards. Seventy-nine percent said that most or some of the time they fired at night, when more than half never saw the opposing soldiers clearly. Moreover, 95 percent of the combat veterans said that when they did see Viet Cong and NVA soldiers, the enemy was either running, prone, or in some sort of hiding.⁴⁰ What all of this meant was that one touted feature of the M-16—an ability to strike and penetrate steel helmets at five hundred yards—was almost irrelevant in jungle war. This was a dispiriting finding, given that the desire for this long-range performance had led the army to accept a propellant that made the rifle less reliable. And the soldiers’ narrative comments hinted at burgeoning problems. Some soldiers liked the M-16. But many others said that while it was a good rifle when it worked, it jammed. Ominously, several soldiers pleaded for cleaning equipment.⁴¹

The National Rifle Association also was ready to give the rifle a boost, and prepared an article for the American Rifleman that praised the M-16. The article, published several months later, asserted that the rifle “bears up well under harsh field conditions” and that “dust, dirt, and rain do not make the M-16A1 less functional provided minimal care is exercised.” As with the stoppages mentioned casually in Shooting Times, the NRA’s article carried a strong whiff of the malfunctions plaguing the rifle. It mentioned problems with dirty chambers, extraction, and jamming, but only briefly. The American Rifleman concluded, without offering evidence, that the rifle “is proving itself in Vietnam.”⁴² The gun press, with access to arms and arms companies that the traditional media could not match, was missing the biggest small-arms story of the war. The troops would have to find out the truth themselves. They would get that chance.

In summer 1966 as General Westmoreland’s M-16s were arriving in Vietnam, soldiers receiving the new weapons were finding them hard to clean, fussy, and prone to untimely stoppages. The scale of the problems was severe enough that in fall 1966 the army requested help, and teams of technicians from the Army Weapons Command and Colt’s were dispatched to investigate. In meetings with several combat units, the inspectors from Colt’s discovered that “weapons were in an unbelievable condition of rust, filth, and lack of repair.” They also noted that the troops had received insufficient marksmanship training, and “there was a shortage of technical manuals, there was a shortage of cleaning equipment, there was a shortage of repair parts, and there was a shortage of officers and NCOs who knew anything about the maintenance of the rifle.”

The fielding of the M-16 had stumbled badly. In a flash, a disturbing reputation had taken shape. When M- 16s worked, they were excellent. But with unsettling frequency, after a bullet was fired, the empty cartridge case would not extract. It remained stuck in the chamber. The process of firing—not only on automatic, but at all— abruptly ceased. Making matters worse, sometimes the bottom of a spent cartridge case was torn away, which made it exceptionally difficult to remove the remainder manually. This was in some ways a familiar story. M-16s and their ammunition created jams as surely as Gatling and Gardner guns had early in their long period of manufacture. Moreover, as these problems were being reported, the weapons, billed as being assembled from modern components that gave the rifle an unsurpassed durability, were literally rotting in the troops’ hands. Another group of Colt’s specialists traveled to Rock Island Arsenal to inspect rifles returned from Vietnam. Robert D. Fremont, a former ArmaLite employee who had joined Colt’s, reported to Hartford that “the exteriors of most weapons were corroded and the bores and chambers almost universally fouled and dirty, showing evidence of real neglect.” Fremont suspected maintenance was a problem, because soldiers either had not been issued proper cleaning equipment or had not been trained. But he sensed as well that perhaps the M-16s were not yet suited for combat duty. There was too much rust and corrosion. He recommended “an investigation as to the possible use of stainless steel for barrels or chrome plating the chambers and bores of the AR-15 weapons in order to combat corrosion and neglect.” Fremont reached a conclusion that the army’s leadership and the president of Colt’s Firearms Division, Paul A. Benke, would not utter in public. “Colt’s weapons,” he wrote, “are sadly lacking in corrosion resistance.”⁴³

It was a damning statement, though the public—and the troops—would not hear it. For the manufacturer of a weapon distributed by the United States for jungle war, it must have been surprising. The M-16 was nearly ten years old, and the manufacturing steps necessary to ensure corrosion resistance were no secret. But the army and