American Rifle - Alexander Rose [207]
Others were not so fortunate. During the vicious fighting in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh in early 1967 (a prelude to the more famous siege of a year later), the Marines bitterly joked that their newly issued M16s, owing to their plastic stocks, had been made by Mattel. Near battle’s end, three Marines and a navy hospitalman were found dead, clustered together. “All three of their M16s had jammed,” remembered Private Tom Huckaba. One of them had tried to free up the mechanism using the Bowie knife he had always carried. His friend “took the Bowie knife and stuck it in his belt. He was hit later on. We threw the knife away after that, figuring it was a jinx,” said Robert Maras, another private.87
Initial reports of fatal M16 malfunctions sometimes made soldiers wistful for their M14s, but the issue should not be exaggerated. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of bullets would be fired using ball powder during the Vietnam War, and the introduction of a recoil buffer in December 1966 reduced the cyclic rate to a sustainable level. During tests in the Panama Canal Zone, new-model buffered M16s fitted with chrome-plated barrels (to reduce residue corrosion) and firing ball powder actually outperformed those firing a “stick” propellant successor to IMR.88 In spite of the weapon’s apparent problems, soldiers wanted M16s, and there were reports that GIs issued with M14s were spending $600 of their own pay to purchase black-market ArmaLites (list price: $100)—much as their Civil War ancestors had bought Spencers at their own expense.89 Even the rifle’s toughest critics had to admit that M16s could kill more men, more quickly, than an M14. Outside Khe Sanh, Corporal Thomas Wheeler of the Marines dropped to one knee, pulled the trigger of his M16, and killed four of the enemy in short order with a single magazine.90 At Dak To in 1967 Specialist Fourth Class Bruce Benzene of the 173rd Airborne Brigade mowed down six North Vietnamese soldiers in one spray before being killed himself.91
When asked for his views, General S. L. A. Marshall, author of Men Against Fire, conceded that there had been operations where the failure rate had been high enough to warrant investigation, but he insisted that the M16 was the right gun for Vietnam fighting. Nevertheless, he correctly highlighted the principle that “it is not a perfect rifle. There is none such, and try as we will, we will not find one in the future.”92
Because it had been rushed into production, and designed just as quickly, the M16 would require years’ worth of finessing to work at 100 percent efficiency. This was unfortunate—and in the M16’s case needless deaths were tragically suffered—but inevitable. The failure of advanced technology to deliver perfect performance from the outset had long dogged firearms development. When the Springfield Model 1873 rifle and its copper-cased .45-70s were introduced, noted arms historian Philip Shockley, some “failed to function when fired rapidly which was due to the softness of the... shell casing... Powder residue, gases and grease did foul the receivers . . . And jamming, if one can accept the contemporary comments, was constant.”93 And after the slaughter of Custer’s Seventh at the Little Bighorn, newspapers charged that their Springfields’ alleged cartridge-extraction defect left hundreds