American Rifle - Alexander Rose [195]
In that kind of close-quarters fighting, soldiers were taught not to be sparing of ammunition—bullets were cheaper than men—and to empty their clips into anywhere or at anything they suspected an enemy to be lurking (to “spray and pray”). Wyman, like the NRA, blamed the in-creasing number of rounds fired to produce a casualty on the “general decline in our male population’s familiarity with the rifle”: during the First World War an enemy casualty was produced for every 7,000 rounds expended, but in World War II that figure fell to 25,000 rounds, and during the Korean War to 50,000. But he, unlike the NRA, believed such statistics to be of minor interest. Of far greater influence was the introduction of “weapons with greater rates of fire and the doctrine of the volume of fire versus aimed fire.” The horror stories about the decline of all-American marksmanship, thought the diehard-minded Wyman, were wrongheaded and irrelevant.21
(The Marines thought very differently and held the line for long-distance shooting practice. It was at this time, December 1956, that Marine recruit Lee Harvey Oswald, training on the range at five hundred yards, obtained a test score of 212—two points more than were needed to qualify him as “sharpshooter.” When Oswald assassinated President Kennedy at distances of between 177 and 266 feet, his shots were easy ones.22)
In the spring of 1957 Stoner informed Wyman that the gun was ready to be prototyped. In an instance of monumentally bad timing, Wyman ordered ten of them at the exact moment when Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker announced the adoption of the M14. Disappointed but undaunted, Wyman urged Stoner to continue developing the AR-15, and he would try to arrange a new set of tests—against the M14. In March 1958 the original ten rifles were ready.
Wyman by that time had succeeded in persuading chief of staff Maxwell Taylor to give the rifle a chance. That summer Colonel Nielsen’s Infantry Board put the AR-15 through its paces at Fort Benning. The Ordnance men who were in charge of the M14s were cheered, initially, by the M14’s superior penetration, but the grins vanished when the AR-15 fired 3,578 rounds compared to the M14’s 2,337 in the same amount of time. Embarrassingly, the “battle-ready,” army-approved M14 malfunctioned at a rate of 16 rounds per 1,000, or three times that of the AR-15, a rifle in its mid-development stage. Moreover, the AR-15 had an almost supernatural lightness, upon which those who handled it inevitably commented. With 120 rounds in magazines, the AR-15’s total weight was just 9.61 pounds, compared to 16.34 pounds for an M14 similarly equipped. Most devastatingly, the Infantry Board’s subsequent report recommended the AR-15 as its “preferred replacement” for the brand-new M14.23
Ordnance had once before sunk a rival gun—the FN-FAL in 1953—by subjecting it to cold-weather testing. Now it was the AR-15’s turn. For his part, Stoner had had no idea that any arctic tests were being conducted until someone at Fort Greely called him up and asked if he could send them a few spare parts. Stoner, who flew to Alaska as soon as he could, was horrified to discover that there were no instruction or maintenance manuals available. The staff had been cleaning and disassembling the weapons by guesswork and substituting homemade parts for precisely engineered ones—hence the awful report that the Testing Board subsequently submitted.24
The arctic imbroglio