American Rifle - Alexander Rose [194]
Notwithstanding its barrel failure, the AR-10 found some interested parties abroad, but major customers eluded them.14 ArmaLite had over-hurried the AR-10 to get it ready for Springfield, and there remained a host of annoying bugs (mostly to do with flash suppression, extractor breakage, and ejection failure) that should have been caught earlier and dealt with. At the time, however, the Infantry Board happened to be run by Colonel Henry Nielsen, who had been struck by the civilian (the ORO and BRL) think tanks’ emphasis on using small-caliber bullets to achieve volume of fire. Nielsen discussed his thoughts with General Willard Wyman, the commander of the First Division during the D-Day landings, then of the Ninth Corps in Korea, and later of the NATO Land Forces in southeastern Europe. In 1955 he had been appointed head of Continental Army Command (CONARC).15 Privately, having seen an AR-10 demonstration for himself, Wyman had arrived at the same conclusion about small-caliber bullets. Neither man, of course, could go public with his misgivings: Nielsen was merely a colonel, and the Infantry Board was in any case officially committed to the M14 project, while a general in Wyman’s position could not be seen as under-mining settled policy.
Late in 1956 Wyman and Nielsen paid Stoner a quiet visit and out-lined to him their idea of a perfect rifle. Could Stoner, they asked, adapt the AR-10 to fire a bullet smaller than the standard NATO 7.62mm/.30-caliber? The trio agreed that Stoner should begin—discreetly—a project that would allow the AR-10 to propel a 55-grain .22-caliber bullet at 3,250 feet per second.16
Thus was the genesis of the AR-15. As his colleagues Robert Fremont and L. James Sullivan struggled to downsize the AR-10 to chamber a smaller caliber, Stoner sought a suitable ammunition for his purposes. He settled on a common commercial round intended for varmints, the Remington .222. (Stoner’s variant was actually a .223.) In the mean-time Wyman talked privately to General Maxwell Taylor, the chief of staff, about postponing a decision on the T44 until the AR-15 could show its stuff.
Wyman’s actions betray a man with nearly fifty years of conservative military experience behind him (he graduated from West Point in 1918) and one of utterly conventional taste. (Ethel, his wife, wrote cookbooks filled with local recipes that Wyman—a “tired little bear,” she called him—dined on every single night.) Yet he introduced shockingly radical changes to the army, all while not unduly upsetting the upholders of the status quo. Perhaps he took after Ethel in this regard. At the zenith of mid-1950s American-cooking provincialism, she bravely managed to sneak a few exotic “foreign dishes”—“Teriyaki steak,” helpfully de-scribed as “Japanese” by the Washington Post, and lasagna—into a cook-book entitled Festival Foods of Virginia, a collection of Jamestown-area culinary delights.17
Like Ethel and her delicious Teriyaki steak, in 1957 General Wyman smuggled an innovative program into the army’s standard basic training for recruits through CONARC’s Infantry Human Research Unit.18 It was called Trainfire, and it implicitly accepted that modern warfare would be conducted at reduced ranges and would require more bullets. Older training programs had emphasized a soldier’s levelheadedness to perfect the art and science of fine shooting under fire; the army filmed a training series in 1942–43 called Rifle Marksmanship with the M-1 Rifle in which the unflappable instructor advises his pupils not to blaze away in a firefight but to instead “stay cool and shoot straight . . . and you’ll live to tell your girl about it.” But in the Trainfire scheme teachers went to great lengths to demonstrate the animalistic fury and confusion of warfare.19 They set targets at a maximum of three hundred yards—all the while keeping the true distance from the recruits—camouflaged them with brush, and manipulated them so