The Gun

Colt’s had neglected to follow them. At the same time, an army review team was finding that the army had issued new weapons but not the necessary cleaning gear to go with them.[26] Lieutenant Colonel Herbert P. Underwood, visiting Vietnam from Rock Island, watched the troops make do. His letter back to Colonel Yount detailed a supply failure. It also revealed his own uncertainty about the army’s state of knowledge of the weapons it was handing out.

The 173rd uses some field expedience, primarily for cleaning the chamber and the bore of the weapons. They either use a piece of commo wire, a shoe lace or a nylon cord which they carry with them. They take a 30 caliber patch cut it in half, fold it once and loop the string or what ever it is to the center of this patch. Then using oil they pull it through the bore of the weapon starting from the chamber. As they do this, they clean both the chamber and the bore and then dry it off. They also put a little bit of oil on it. I have not been able to find anyone that does not put a little bit of oil in the chamber of the weapon to prevent it from corroding. I try to discourage it, however I am not completely convinced myself that if you leave the chamber completely dry you won’t have a problem resulting from corrosion, even if you cleaned your weapon every day.⁴⁴

No one, it seemed, was quite sure what to do with this new rifle, not even the officers issuing it. Lieutenant Colonel Underwood had other problems to report. “The 173rd Airborne Brigade tells me that they have had at least 10 weapons, if not more, to blow up in the same manner as the exhibits that we had sent to us,” he wrote. In at least one of these cases, the American soldier firing it was killed.⁴⁵ The problems were multiplying. Of 2,000 M-16s tested at the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, 384 malfunctioned.⁴⁶ One company, B Company of the Twenty-sixth Infantry, made a list of malfunctions that read like a roll call: 527042 Gorton, 54 rounds fired, 2 failed to extract; 701693 Mason, 2 rounds fired, round stuck in chamber, 60 rounds fired, 1 failed to extract; 531240 Coolet, 60 rounds fired, 1 failure to extract, 1 failure to feed, 40 rounds fired, 1 failure to chamber; and on it went, man by man.⁴⁷

Three weeks later, David Behrendt, a Colt’s engineer temporarily assigned to Vietnam, mailed two audiotapes back to Colt’s officials in Hartford. Behrendt groused that while from the air Vietnam was beautiful, “when you get down on the ground and walk around, it’s something else, kind of cruddy. I told Jim I’ll be glad to see a blonde again. Everything around here is black hair and slanty eyes.” Behrendt had better reasons to feel indisposed. Many M-16s were jamming, and almost all were corroded. Working alongside soldiers at American bases and outposts, Behrendt restored most rifles to working order after cleaning them and replacing parts. But it was not a good sign that a corporate engineer with a bag of parts was required to keep a new rifle in service. Combat equipment was supposed to be more hardy than that. Behrendt noted, too, that the ball powder was making the M-16 run fast. Engineers at Colt’s had been working on a replacement part—a buffer inside the return spring—that would slow the weapons down. But none were yet in Vietnam. Speaking into a tape recorder halfway around the world, he urged action.

All the rifles have an extremely high rate of fire which isn’t helping us in the least bit. You better get that new buffer over here right pronto to stop some of this malfunction. It sure will help. Finishes have been wearing off many of the weapons and I’ve actually seen holes eaten right through into the charging handle area and along the lower receiver area, underneath the dust cover. You can see right into the magazine. Carrying handles are pretty well eaten up on many of the weapons. Rust is covering quite a few of them.⁴⁸

Behrendt’s second tape detailed similar problems: “oily chambers, dirty chambers, dirty ammo, corroded ammo, or bent magazines, lips in particular.” One infantry company had a 30 percent failure rate, Behrendt said. The problems did not recur on the next operation, after the company commander emphasized rifle cleaning. This was typical of the mixed reports making their way back to the States. There were many problems, though it was also possible to find troops who liked the M-16. But Behrendt put the positive comments in perspective. “This was the only unit that has been completely satisfied with the rifles,” he said. The experiences elsewhere were disquieting. “We took three rifles to the range,” he said. “This was with another unit. The rifles were pulled from their storage area and the condition they were in was the way they would be taken to an operation with the magazines they were going to use. On the three rifles tryed [sic], two of them failed to extract on the first round fired. One rifle fired 63 rounds before it failed to extract.” Behrendt cleaned the rifles, replaced the extractor springs on one of them, and repeated the test the next day. With new ammunition, they worked well. With older ammunition, the jamming began on the fourth round fired. Behrendt said the platoon sergeants who watched the test were convinced the rifles could work. He was not sure they would be able to convince their men. And once again it was not a good sign that a Colt’s engineer had to work on rifles one day for the rifles to function the next. He also had more bad news.

I collected as many carriers and bolts as I could. Most of them are pretty much destroyed or battered up. I don’t know why this is occurring. The men say they just fire and it happens. I’m sending a couple of barrels back with Jim for further investigation, I cleaned these barrels, chamber area especially as best I could, took them to the range and we still had the same fail to extract problem.⁴⁹

Colt’s data was accumulating. Another of its representatives in Vietnam, J. B. Hall, summed up the situation. Hall had met officers who fought during Operation Attleboro, one of the largest battles to date. The operation had been a startling experience for American troops. They faced heavy Viet Cong automatic-rifle fire from the dense vegetation. And their M-16s jammed. “There is no question that soldiers in Vietnam are losing confidence in the M- 16 rifle,” Hall wrote. “It is imperative that we take all steps possible to correct the situation.” Hall’s report was the most urgent, and it included a list: plate the bore and chamber with chromium, install heavier buffers, correct the corrosion problems on receivers and barrels, and find a way to cover the magazines when not being fired. On an internal Colt’s channel, Hall offered a candid recommendation: “a crash program to provide a better weapon.” Like Fremont, he also framed the problem in a way that the army and Colt’s would never publicly dare. “While it is very true that there is a lack of rifle discipline by commanders, the statement that the M-14 fires with dirty ammunition while the M-16 doesn’t, is a hard argument to counter.”⁵⁰ This was exactly the case: When the same GIs in the same climates and conditions carried M-14s they had no problems like they did with their M-16s. Did not this suggest that the source of the problem was not the troops, but the rifles?

A little more than two weeks later, in early November 1966, the latest news of the M-16’s poor performance in Vietnam reached top channels in the army. Colonel Yount visited the Pentagon to brief now-Colonel Hallock. Colonel Hallock’s interest in the M-16 was zealous and personal. He had been an early supporter of the rifle, and a supervisor of Project AGILE more than four years before. The meeting marked a potentially agonizing moment. The SAWS test had zeroed in on problems with misfeeds and fouling related to ball powder. The new weighted buffer had been identified as a fix for at least part of the problem. But the buffer was available only for newly manufactured weapons at Colt’s factory—not for the scores of thousands of rifles already in Vietnam. The weapon Colonel Hallock had advocated was failing, and as near as he could tell, the failures were getting American soldiers killed. What to do? Colonel Hallock filed a classified memorandum for the record based on his meeting. It left no doubt that the army had long understood the scope and nature of the M-16’s problems, had done little to resolve them, and still was moving slowly to help soldiers with malfunctioning weapons in Vietnam. Colonel Hallock described his conversation with Colonel Yount.

I asked if he had a plan to retrofit the weapons in the field with this buffer and he said he did not. First production of the new buffer, he said, would be in January and they would go on new weapons. He said that if the buffers were sent to the field for the old weapons they would not be available to go on the new weapons that also are going to the field. I asked if he had plans to get a special priority to increase the production rate and speed up availability of the buffer and he apparently did not. I also asked about clearing up the fouling caused by ball powder. He did not say that anything definitive had been done to correct the problem.

I asked him if there were any reports yet from Vietnam indicating the occurrence, in fact, of the excessive malfunctions that one would expect to be occurring in the field as a result of breakages and malfunctions induced by excessive cyclic rate and the malfunctions induced by fouling, complicated by difficult cleaning conditions in jungle