THE GUN.

A Reporter’s Notebook from Band-e Sardeh in Ghazni Province, beside a man-made lake. Where the Soviet Union (with its Afghan partners) invested heavily for decades, the American military (with its Afghan partners) is having a second go. 

Three decades of war in Afghanistan, and of competing ideologies and ideas, often promising the same things, including security, prosperity and peace.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Soviet-era refuse, of many types. TOP: A stripped BTR armored personnel carrier. SECOND FROM TOP: A stripped Soviet tank, beside new piles of gravel waiting to be spread on a base being rebuilt. THIRD FROM TOP: A row of AMD-65s, one of the Pentagon’s main rifle buys. BOTTOM: Detail of optics on a Romanian PSL sniper rifle. By the author.

Today we’re wrapping up a post for the At War blog that will present an insiders’ account of Joseph Kony, the bizarre and feared leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who remains at large in the face of nearly universal calls for his arrest. (I’ll put the link here when it posts, likely on Friday. Update: here it is.) Mr. Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a host of crimes related to the macabre insurgency he has led for almost a quarter-century in Uganda, southern Sudan, and of late in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The post will mark a new phase for this blog, and also the start of a fresh use of the At War site, in which I will be making publicly available several of the reference materials dug up during the years of researching THE GUN.

Why? THE GUN was nearly an eight-year project. Throughout those years I was often frustrated that important materials were very hard to find. Many government reports had never been placed in the trust of public archives, or remained classified and withheld from public view. Others simply had been lost, or were scattered about the world in far-flung libraries, or had been tucked away in in the personal collections of veterans, historians, ballisticians, enthusiasts and more. As my collection grew, gradually overtaking my garage, I told myself that I would not do what many other researchers have done, which is to complete a project, box up the more rare of the supporting materials, and forget about them, thereby making follow-on researchers repeat the struggle to locate valuable references for their work. This is one reason THE GUN is laden with end notes and footnotes — I wanted to offer the sources transparently and point readers and researchers to them. (My motivations here were fuller than this. Too many books about conflict, tactics, and the tools of war have no footnotes at all and the merits or veracity of some claims are impossible to examine; I didn’t want THE GUN to be of that stripe.)

In the months ahead, and when time allows, I’ll post materials I have plucked from archives or that have been shared to me by sources, so that original references can be accessible to anyone who might want them, for whatever use. Some of these documents will be technical — such as those related to military firearms research. I have, for example, a full copy of the infamous and oft-hyped Thompson-La Garde pistol tests, which as far as I have been able to tell is available nowhere on-line and is an intriguing read by itself. I have a similar set of reports related to research into the mechanisms of wounding.  Other references will be historical, bureaucratic or political, such as a desk memo from late in 1962, with its deeply irritated tone, from Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense. This is the memo that put the Pentagon on the path to adopt the M-16.

And there will be much, much more. My only real restriction is time, which is ever short.

The first document to undergo this treatment will be the portrait of Mr. Kony made by senior L.R.A. defectors in collaboration with a former American military attache in Uganda. I had a chance to photograph one of the only two printed copies I know to exist at the time. (I have since found the original, which was shared with me this week by its principal compiler and editor.) The post on The New York Times site will provide a fuller explanation and account of the document, and describe its origins. The full document has been converted by The New York Times into a .pdf, and will be included with the post.

Meanwhile, please look at the images posted here now. They also provide a portrait of Mr. Kony, although an indirect one. These are sketches and drawings made from repatriated child soldiers from the L.R.A. Together they provide a visual interpretation of many of the L.R.A.’s tactics — the raids on villages and settlements, the mass abductions, the burning of villages and displacement of civilians, the collective punishment, the use of fear as a tool, the ambushes of civilian traffic, the indoctrination of child-soldiers, and, ultimately, the L.R.A.s frantic fighting against Ugandan government forces, which eventually obtained helicopter gunships to terrify the child-soldier units and help expel them from Ugandan soil.

During reintegration to civilian life, child soldiers are often encouraged by counselors and aid workers to sketch out their memories from the field. In their silent way — made with nothing but looseleaf paper, magic markers and crayons — they hint at horrors most people cannot fathom.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The opening image is a wire photo of Mr. Kony, who in recent years has had little contact with the world oustide of the L.R.A. The others are all stills of drawings and sketches by former child soldiers. The stills were made with the permission of World Vision, Gulu, by the author, in 2007.

The At War blog has run several posts this year on the tools of war, including posts covering rifles and automatic weapons in Taliban service in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban, judging from American collections after firefights and from caches, have put the martial refuse of past empires to effective use. The rifle above, a Lee-Enfield bolt-action model manufactured in 1915, is one example. It was collected by the Marines in Marja earlier this year, and after The Times published information about it, several readers wrote to say how fascinated they were that such weapons were still in service.

Today on At War, At War will publish a post about an even older rifle. (I’ll post the link after its appears; it’s difficult to sync posts from a tent in Afghanistan, so forgive me if there is a delay.) A close-up of the rifle is below. It’s a Martini-Henry, with roots in the 1870s, when the first specimens of this line were issued to British troops.

Rifles of this vintage, while they survive in Afghanistan, are not common. The At War post describes a practical reason way, which might also explain this weapon’s poor physical condition. And because they are not a factor in the fighting, I have not invested time in studying them, at least not with the energy that I have looked at the weapons that still wound and kill large numbers of people, Western and Afghan. (Those seeking more information on this particular line of rifles, take a look at www.martinihenry.com or, for more detail, www.martinihenry.co.uk.)

Are there older rifles out there in the Afghan hinterland? Probably, and if they turn up around me I will post images of them and descriptions of how they came into American or Afghan government possession. Tyler Hicks and I are in the process of booking several extended trips to Afghanistan next year. Maybe the 2011 hunting will be as rich as that of past years.

To settle another question (hello to the amazing Colin Smith, who survived), one reader had guessed that At War might be posting an image of a jezail — the 19th century muskets once carried by many an Afghan. Colin, I have seen jezails in Afghanistan, but only as curios in shops, never in the field. And the jezails that I have seen may have been reproductions made in western Pakistan for sale as souvenirs, so not as old as the Martini-Henry above.

For those interested in other weapons in Taliban possession, I will have more posts soon, both here and on At War. Tyler and I have become busy again with Charlie Company, 6th Battalion of the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade. The weather has lifted in southern Afghanistan and the fighting — and the wounding — have resumed. The schedule is erratic and unpredictable, so they may have to wait.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Images of two antique rifles captured by U.S. Marines in Helmand Province in 2010. The date stamp is clearly visible on the Lee-Enfield rifle at top, just forward of the decorative green tape. (Highlights in green, the color associated with Islam, are often seen on captured Taliban weapons.) The date stamp is not visible on the Martini-Henry rifle shown near the middle of this post. Do you have insight on the weapon’s exact vintage? Send an email to thegun.book@gmail.com. Photos by the author.

Visitors who have spent any time on this site have noticed its appreciation and respect for photographers who work in conflict zones, whose work is prominently displayed and attributed.

To be clear, I don’t mistake myself as a photographer. I have the good fortune of working with some of the very best in the business, but the pictures I make with the cameras I carry serve more as helpful documents or visual notebooks for future reference (think, xerox machine with a lens) than as art. I also carry a back-up camera for Tyler Hicks, which has proven valuable on days when his equipment has failed, as both of his Canon SLR’s did in a firefight in 2009 when he ended up jumping into the Korengal River to escape a kill zone. He shot the remainder of that fight, and some of the awful aftermath, with my point-and-shoot. Lately, I’ve been carrying our back-up in a waterproof dive case, which has kept it alive in dunkings in Afghan canals.

For today’s Reporter’s Notebook, I turn over the floor to Ryan Conaty, a photographer living in Providence, R.I., whose recent email to the site needs no further explanation than his own:

…In 2003 I was on an assignment for La Prensa in Waspan Nicaragua. A representative from the World Bank was there to talk to folks about their goat herding. Some soldiers had been sent along to keep an eye on him and when he was done with his presentation they were to give us a ride to our next stop. In preparation for the long ride over dirt roads we packed a cooler of beer but we’d forgotten a bottle opener. As we tried to figure out a solution one of the solders (who’d clearly encountered the problem before) realized our situation, picked up his rifle and called us over. I’ve attached the picture I took of our savior with his AK in action.

The soldier in Ryan’s photograph at the top of this post is using the front sight as a bottle opener, a purpose it seems to serve well.  This reminds me of a similar story, in which the Finnish Army recalled from service and replaced the magazines issued for their Kalashnikov knock-offs because Finnish troops were using them to pry the tops from bottles of beer, too. Such service was damaging the magazines, prompting a new design to be worked out in which the magazines could not be applied, to borrow a non-proliferation term, to this dual use.

Thank you, Ryan. Much about THE GUN is grim, dismal, bleak. It is not a hopeful book. Having the chance for a smile is welcome. And yes, as you said in the follow-up email in which you granted me permission to post this photograph, I now owe you a cold one. For the rest of you, I have some video of a Kalashnikov being put to another use as well. I’ll fish it out of the hard drive and post it soon either here or on At War.

*It should go without saying, but then again you never really know. So here goes: For those of you with Kalashnikovs at home, don’t try replicating this behavior, especially in the manner of this helpful but apparently none too bright soldier, who, you will notice from Ryan’s photograph, has not removed his rifle’s magazine.

Since Simon & Schuster launched the North American edition of the THE GUN last month, emails from readers has been flowing into this website. It’s been very generous, gratifying and interesting. Thank you to all of you who have taken time to write.

Several of you have shared links, photographs, suggestions and more. And several of you have agreed to let me post some of your words or other material here. This is easier for me to do on nights and weekends, as I am tied up most days with my work at The New York Times. When I am in the United States, I work in a shed in Rhode Island. Lately my days have been consumed by long hours of shed time to get traction on ongoing projects. But now is Saturday night. This gives a chance to look away from other work and put up one of the most interesting offerings so far from a reader of THE GUN.

Take a close look. It’s a watercolor painting of a Vietnamese guerrilla cleaning his Kalashnikov. Its origins are not fully certain, but the gentleman who shared it, Jeff Janey, said that when it was given to him, more than a decade ago, the man who passed it along said it had been captured in a raid of a Viet Cong bunker. Whether this is the case is hard to say today, but the painting certainly does imitate the broad-necked, thick-limbed determination of much of the Communist propaganda genre. (Those who have roamed the former Soviet Union know exactly what I mean). As Mr. Janey mentioned in his first email to me, it also captures the significance of this weapon to the Vietnamese, who found in their AK-47 and Type 56 rifles that they carried more than a match for the rifles of their American foes. This was the Kalashnikov’s true breakout period, and the war in which it forged its enduring reputation.

Here is Mr. Janey’s account of how the painting came into his possession: “The watercolor artist is unknown and I can’t confirm the provenance of it. I got it from a Army LTC* in Alabama (Fort Rucker) who I served with. He has a large collection of militaria and he gave it to me in 1999. It was folded in half so sorry for the crease in the paper. He told me that he got it from a Vietnam Vet. The Vet told him that he found it in a VC bunker they raided during the war. Not sure of year or Province in Vietnam.” [*LTC = lieutenant colonel]

Thank you, Jeff. To the extent that this site can be a storehouse (and clearing house) for all manner of material related to the AK line — good, bad, ugly — it will be exactly the kind of site I craved for as I spent years researching the significance of the Soviet Union’s most important product, and its effects on our world. 

To better understand the Kalashnikov’s significance and roles in Vietnam, readers can start here.

I’ll have more comments and materials from readers later. I need to round up a few more clips and reviews and get them up on the site, too. I also owe a shout-out to the Barbarian Group.  Meanwhile, here is another image from Mr. Janey, of a Vietnamese mortar crew.

On Sunday Tyler Hicks and I observed new Afghan soldiers training at the Kabul Military Training Center, or KMTC, outside the capital. The trip was one of several we made as part of an effort to look at what’s in the Afghan security force pipeline as it recruits, trains, equips and fields new units. This is among the most important steps in the plan for NATO to begin withdrawing Western combat forces from Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. After years of reporting for the field, almost always at the small-unit level and in remote places, Tyler and I have been interested in comparing the new recruits to the soldiers who were previously minted as “battle ready,” but whose performance, in the main, has been disappointing — to put it nicely. (cf, here, here or here.)

We won’t disclose our impressions here. These will be the subject of coverage soon to be published in The New York Times. Suffice to say that during our visits to training sites this week, we observed the instruction and the practice, and we saw and met with the veritable legions of new soldiers with their new American M-16s. Given the amount of money now flowing into the effort, the state of their training activity was high. 

On Sunday, we were escorted part of the time by First Lieutenant Joel Newburn, an infantry officer in the 10th Mountain Division, which has assigned a battalion to the the now busy work at the KMTC.  Lieutenant Newburn later sent me a thoughtful email that, in a discussion about weapons, touched one of the great worries beneath the determined  (and enormously expensive) effort to make viable Afghan government forces.

What if it doesn’t work?

The obvious questions that follow this thought, framed by the White House and the Pentagon, typically ask whether the Afghan government might fall, whether the Pashtun borderlands will become even greater havens for international terrorists,  whether NATO and American stature and power will be discredited and eroded, and more.  Lieutenant Newburn framed the sort of question one would expect from someone who lives at the tactical level, where wars are fought. And what about the guns?

Here are his words:

“I was thinking of this a few months ago: the English come to Afghanistan with Enfields, the Afghans fight back with muskets. The English leave the Enfields and the Afghans pick them up. The Russians come with Kalashnikovs and the Afghans fight them with Enfields. The Russians leave the AKs* and the Afghans pick them up. The Americans come to Afghanistan with M-16s and M-4s and the Afghans fight them with AKs. This begs the question, when the Americans leave, who will the Afghans fight with our weapons?”

This is an excellent question, and it brushes against the human costs of war, because far from the capitals where the statistics are crunched and the declarations made, conflicts exact their toll weapon by weapon, bullet by bullet, blast by blast, often on people whose fates go unnoticed outside of their immediate circle.

So, what might happen to the guns, or, as Lieutenant Newburn put it, to “our weapons?”

The obvious answer is that experience and history tell us that the guns will be recirculated and reused, locally and abroad. The latter portions of THE GUN examine this phenomemon in some detail, discussing data, for example, that shows where some of the M-16s the Pentagon left behind in Vietnam later turned up, and documenting how Kalashnikovs have moved through one corner of Africa, to arm a particular insurgent group.

In Afghanistan, arms and munitions issued by the Pentagon have often been used by insurgents, (cf, here and here), and some of them can be found in the arms bazaars of Pakistan’s western frontier.  The quantities are not small. But they are only a tiny portion of what might be expected if the Afghan security forces fail. The United States military is now hoping to buck a historical trend, by which outsiders’ proxy forces in Afghanistan have, in the past and in the end, become the clay of future militias, and their issued guns have endured and been tools for violence in ways that those who issued them did not foresee, or wish.                                          

                                                                     *Automatic Kalashnikovs

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

An Afghan police officer with a Romanian-made AKM variant, just before a patrol in June, 2010 in Kandahar. The rifle was made in 1989 — year the Berlin Wall fell, part of the rapidly escalating disintegration of the Eastern bloc, which cast rifles like this into the world in uncountable numbers. The United States military, since 2001, has purchased tens of thousands of Romanian AKM variants for issue to Iraqi and Afghan troops, often with little accountability.  Photo by the author.