Coming Soon in Esquire: How They Were Betrayed.

Monday, October 11 2010

Coming Soon in Esquire: How They Were Betrayed.

THE RIFLES THAT FAILED, AND THE MEN WHO SUFFERED.

This is Staff Sergeant Claude “Ed” Elrod, USMC, in the lowlands of the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam. The photograph was taken on July 21, 1967, early on the second day of Operation Bear Chain, a mission to interdict supply caches used by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army along the main highway running south along the coast toward Hue City, Da Nang and Saigon. Staff Sergeant Elrod commanded a rifle platoon on this day. His presence on the operation had seemed unlikely. He had been struck by a bullet and hit with shrapnel in June. But the bullet had missed bone, and he’d been patched up. The day before his bandages had been removed and he had been flown from a naval vessel off the coast back ashore with his unit, First Platoon, Hotel Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines.

Minutes after this photograph was made, Staff Sergeant Elrod and his platoon were ambushed as they walked across this open ground near the village of Ap Sieu Quan. In the battle that followed, almost half of Hotel Company’s new M-16s jammed. Trying to fight back with rifles gone silent, several Marines were killed. More than two dozen were wounded.

The unnecessary bloodshed and lives lost were tied to an American rifle and ammunition combination that was not yet ready for war, a circumstance directly related to the AK-47’s breakout and global spread. My investigation into the flawed introduction of the M-16 and of the young soldiers and Marines — who were knowingly failed by the Pentagon, a prominent American firearms manufacturer, and their own commanders and generals — became “The Accidental Rifle,” a chapter in THE GUN.

Writing in BOOKFORUM, the author Andrew Meier described the chapter this way: “The story of the bastard birth and rushed introduction of the M-16 into the US Armed Forces on the eve of war in Southeast Asia is not new. But Chivers reports it in the investigative tradition of Seymour Hersh, combined with the precision of John McPhee. These pages are not about the pitting and rust inside the rifle, but the confluence of greed, lies, bloodlust, and—he does not shirk from revealing—a murderous lack of conscience… …In the bravura account of the M-16 saga, we’re reminded that THE GUN is nothing less than a history of modern warfare.” (The full review is here.)

Much of the material used in this chapter has never been publicly revealed until now. This newly unearthed material includes internal documents from the manufacturer, Colt’s Firearms Division and letters from Colt’s engineers in the field in Vietnam that make clear that Colt’s knew that its rifles were failing, even as it publicly insisted the rifles were performing well. It also includes declassified memoranda from the Pentagon in which the same Army officers whose duty it was to remedy the early M-16’s problems discussed instead the need to suppress public knowledge of jamming rifles (even as they knew G.I.s were getting killed due to rifle failures). And it includes macabre ballistic studies conducted at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and then covered up by the Army’s senior leadership. The results of these studies, had they been circulated within the Pentagon as it was making its decisions about rifle selection, might have exposed some of the hype surrounding M-16 lethality for what it is. But the Pentagon was too embarrassed to admit what it had done. And there is more.

Esquire has prepared an adaptation of this chapter for its November issue. I won’t give away the arc of the story here.

There will be other adaptations and articles from THE GUN, in Wired, Military History Quarterly, Popular Mechanics, Foreign Affairs, The Daily Beast, and more. There will be a podcast reading and I will be taking questions on the At War blog and at Field & Stream. On Tuesday, October 12, NPR’s Fresh Air will broadcast an interview about THE GUN. More on all of that soon.

First things first. Esquire’s adaption of “The Accidental Rifle” should be in subscribers’ hands any day, and on newsstands within a week. Below is its opening spread. Ed Elrod, and many other Marines, and several people who failed them, are within.

A NOTE ABOUT THE M-16

The M-16 and its ammunition, and their descendants, remain contentious subjects. A clarifying note is necessary: “The Accidental Rifle,” and Esquire’s adaptation of it, deal with the early variants of the M-16. Design and manufacturing shortfalls of these early variants were addressed in the 1960s, and the ammunition was long ago replaced. The current M-16 variants (and their M-4 carbine cousins) are very different rifles, and they fire very different ammunition. This is not to say that these rifles and their ammunition do not have their critics and are not the focus of lingering reliability and stopping-power concerns. It is to say that the arguments surrounding their performance are of a different order and character from what American troops and their allies suffered in Vietnam.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The image at the top of the post is from the personal files of Ed Elrod. The image at the bottom of the post — an annotated version of Nick Veasey’s x-ray of a loaded, folding stock Kalashnikov — was provided by Esquire.