American Rifle - Alexander Rose [205]
The Battle of Ia Drang that November provided him with the evidence he needed. Following a repulse at Plei Me, where North Vietnamese troops had assaulted a Vietnamese-American Special Forces camp, Colonel Hal Moore’s First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry was ordered to pursue and eliminate the enemy. At Ia Drang, American forces entered into a new phase of the war by directly attacking massed formations of the North Vietnamese army rather than coping with Vietcong guerrillas.
As elite helicopter-borne air cavalry, the American battalion was armed with the scarce M16s.72 Their rifles inflicted heavy casualties: at least fourteen hundred. When his platoon became pinned down by a machine gun in a bunker, for instance, Lieutenant Walter Marm, Jr., knew they would die if they stayed where they were. “The first thing I did was fire a grenade launcher at the bunker. Then I took two grenades and an M16 rifle and went straight up,” he recalled. “I pulled the pin of a grenade and just lobbed it over. After it went off I went around to the left, saw some movements and fired. I fired six times, but didn’t know then how many there were.” The same lieutenant who had resisted his father’s efforts to teach him how to box (he didn’t like fighting, he explained) had killed, it turned out, eighteen men. He was awarded the Medal of Honor.73
Afterward Colonel Moore attended a meeting of senior commanders, wrote General Westmoreland in his memoirs, and “at the conclusion Moore held up an M-16 rifle, a newly developed, relatively light, fully automatic weapon. ‘Brave soldiers and the M-16,’ said Moore, ‘brought this victory.’” Westmoreland added that when “Moore and many of his soldiers told me that the M-16 was the best individual infantry weapon ever made, clearly the American answer to the enemy’s AK-47,” he agreed that the M14 was too heavy for Vietnam and asked McNamara “as a matter of urgency to equip all American forces with the M-16 and then also to equip the ARVN [South Vietnamese army] with it.”74
But Pentagon officials, Westmoreland believed, failed to see the urgency of his plea and did not approve his order for 170,000 M16s for U.S. forces and a request for 123,000 more for his Vietnamese allies. Part of the reason for the go-slow from Washington, particularly regarding rifles for ARVN units, was that McNamara was still uncertain whether American troops would be drawn down in Vietnam over the next couple of years. Once they were withdrawn, he was worried that the brand-new M16s supplied to the ARVN would find their way into the hands of the Communists. Publicly announcing a general M16 distribution would signal to Americans and Congress that President Lyndon Johnson was preparing for a long-term commitment to the beleaguered country. At the same time Colt was reaching what it called its “point of no return”: without further orders of M16s to keep them in clover, its suppliers and the foundries would soon have to convert their machinery and production lines to other uses.75 Worried that he might be left with a pile of M14s and no more M16s in that event, McNamara authorized 179,000 M16s but stipulated that just 9,000 of them were to be re-served for especially trustworthy ARVN allies.76 Within three months Westmoreland was cabling home for more, 100,000 at