trusted, its other characteristics were moot. Being a bayonet holder was not enough.
Gunnery Sergeant Elrod kept his AK-47 that day, and he carried it for several more months. He set it aside only when he rotated back to the United States.
CHAPTER 8
Everyman’s Gun
Q: You said you killed an army officer?
A: He was on a treetop on a small mountain near Kilak, Okidi Hill. The commander was in a tree. He was on a patrol or an observation post.
Q: What happened?
A: We were three. We came from behind. We saw him and he didn’t see us. The commander was using his radio. The officer was not alone—the others were down below, cooking. They opened fire on us.
Q: And then?
A: The officer fell from the tree. It was my accurate fire that shot the officer.
Q: After you knew he was dead, and the fighting was over that day, what did you think of the operation?
A: I was so happy because I knew I would be promoted.
Q: What was your new rank?
A: I didn’t get promoted.
Q: There were other operations?
A: My own group killed my mother. It was announced on the radio. I was involved in a raid, and later I learned my mother had died in the raid.
THE EIGHT YOUNG PALESTINIAN MEN, DRESSED IN TRACK SUITS, reached the barrier outside Munich’s Olympic Village in the darkness just after 4:00 A.M. on September 5. The fence was neither tall nor topped with razor wire, and an easy climb for a young man, even a young man with a duffel bag. The athletes and officials participating in the 1972 Summer Olympics slept on the other side. Though the compound was guarded, the security was relaxed, even casual. The West German government, eager to exorcise the memories of Hitler’s Olympics in Berlin in 1936, had chosen a low-key police posture: an unarmed security staff, unimposing barriers, a climate of trust and accommodation rather than suspicion and control. The organizers had dubbed the competition “The Carefree Games.” Like this motto, the public-relations ambition was unsubtle. The XX Olympiad was to be a global affirmation of Bavaria reborn, and a declaration of decency for a nation that had returned from fascism to the civilized world.
The men in the track suits were members of the Black September terrorist organization, a recently assembled cell directed to exploit the Games’ officially friendly atmosphere. A police reconstruction would later claim that two of the cell’s members had infiltrated the village weeks before and taken temporary jobs on the Olympic staff. The commander, Luttif Afif, a thirty-five-year-old emigre who had lived in West Germany for several years, had worked as an engineer; his deputy was a cook.1 Afif had patiently watched this same section of fence the night before and observed athletes returning from parties outside. The athletes had scaled the barrier, dropped into the compound, and continued toward their apartments. No guard had stopped them. They passed unchallenged into the secure zone. Afif decided that his cell would imitate this behavior. The killers would masquerade as athletes coming home.
That night, before leaving their hotel, the Arabs slipped into athletic suits and packed their weapons into gym bags printed with the Olympic logo. Into each duffel they stuffed hand grenades, first-aid gear, amphetamines to ward off sleep, ropes cut to lengths ready for binding hostages, sections of pantyhose for masks, and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Six of these rifles had been flown into Germany from Algiers, via Paris.2 The world had not yet adapted to the idea that calculated menace, in the form of attacks upon civilians, might lurk anywhere. This was before air passengers and luggage were as a matter of routine thoroughly screened. The Kalashnikovs, tools designed for infantry, were in Munich to be used to corral and kill civilians. As they lifted each firearm and slipped it into the kit, Afif and his deputy gave it a kiss. “Oh, my love,” they said.3 Then the team set out, into the night.
One operating tenet of Black September was its almost airtight secrecy. Even now, as they moved toward their crimes, six of the terrorists—Palestinians from refugee camps who had been trained in Libya—did not know what they had been ordered to Munich to do. Afif briefed them in a restaurant. They were to seize members of the Israeli delegation from their beds and then leverage their lives in a hostage siege. The world would be forced to hear the group’s demands, including the release of more than two hundred prisoners, most of them Palestinians in Israeli jails. Afif had the list ready. For Black September, hostage-taking was not unfamiliar. Another cell had hijacked a passenger jet, Sabena Flight 572, several months before, and demanded a similarly extensive prisoner release. Israeli commandos stormed the aircraft as the terrorists waited on the ground. The prisoners remained behind bars. This time Black September had bolder plans and a grander stage. With an international press corps assembled for the Games, a hostage seizure in Munich would bullhorn the Palestinians’ grievances as never before. Israel rarely bent to threats, the more so when demands were issued in public. Live television coverage was a more realistic aspiration than freeing prisoners in a swap. Afif told his cell what to expect. “From now on,” he said, “consider yourself dead.” Their status was predetermined, their fates known: “Killed in action for the Palestinian cause.”
At about 3:30 A.M. the men stepped into taxis and were driven toward the section of fence Afif had selected. They arrived unmolested and met a group of Americans headed inside at the same time. The two teams —the athletes and the terrorists—helped each other over the top, gym bags and all.4 Afif hurried his group toward 31 Connollystrasse, a residence where more than twenty Israelis slept. A new age of terrorism, long in the making, was about to introduce itself. By sunrise, eight men with assault rifles would command the attention of the world and change public security as it had been understood.5
The hostage siege in Munich, televised live worldwide, marked the next leap in the spread of automatic rifles, and the last tactical breakout, when assault rifles were applied to uses that the men and the governments that had given them their shape and numbers had not foreseen. Their steps in this direction, and use as a preferred tool for terror, predated Munich; there are earlier examples.[29] But September 1972 in Munich brought the day that it became clear that whatever the Kalashnikov once was, whatever it had been meant to be, it had assumed a fuller and more universally dangerous character. After Munich, the Kalashnikov’s utility in crimes against civilians and public order would be demonstrated repeatedly, in hijackings, hostage seizures, assassinations, suicide rifle attacks, and summary executions, sometimes before video cameras, designed to sow hatred and fear. The rifles’ toll would become larger and their uses more ghastly with the passing years. They became requisite weapons for the massacres in Baathist Iraq, in Rwanda, and in the former Yugoslavia, for lawless formations of child soldiers, and for political crimes intended to jolt the world, from the Chechen and Ingush siege at a public school in Beslan to the Lashkar-e-Taiba raid into Mumbai. By the time the Kalashnikov line was a half-century old, its appearance as a central killing instrument in many of the most disturbing acts of political violence was no longer a shock. It was a norm. The people’s gun, defender of Russian soil and socialist ideal, had evolved into a familiar hand tool for genocide and terror.
The processes that completed the Kalashnikov assault rifle’s march out of communist garrisons were not random. They resulted from deliberate socialist arms-manufacturing, stockpiling, and transfer practices, followed by many means of distribution—some legal, some not—that followed.
After the establishment of Kalashnikov factories in the 1950s and 1960s, the early circulation of rifles followed predictable paths. The Soviet Union and other communist nations armed the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, equipping ideological partners for a war carried by ideological currents. Similarly, the gifts of
