American Rifle - Alexander Rose [208]
M16 jamming there was, but the problem appears to have been exacerbated by soldiers not maintaining their weapons. This was not their fault. Those early arrivals who had been handed an M16 on their arrival in theater received virtually no advice on how and when to clean their weapon. One inspector reported that he “had never seen equipment with such poor maintenance... [On some rifles] you could not see daylight through the barrel. The barrels were rusty, and the chambers were rusty and pitted.”95 This oversight was entirely the army’s responsibility: its own instruction manuals, which appeared to have been lifted verbatim from Colt promotional pamphlets, claimed that the M16 required hardly any upkeep, and while there were sufficient cleaning rods and patches in Vietnam, they were not properly distributed to soldiers.96 At one point there was just one cleaning rod for every four soldiers; the “men in the rear” were donating them “to the grunts before we headed south so we’d have enough,” recalled Navy Cross recipient Corporal Frederick Monahan.97 Once the army got its act together in the late winter of 1966 and issued adequate instructions, the number of jams began rapidly declining.98
On December 6 of that year Westmoreland ordered a further 100,000 M16s—68,000 for the army, 32,000 for the Marines—and his request was granted the next day.99 Eleven days later McNamara received the final word on the M16 for which he had been waiting. Dr. Jacob Stockfisch, an expert economist, had spent six months breaking down all available data and reported to the secretary of defense that the M14 ought to be immediately executed. In every test M16-armed teams were “superior to squads armed with 7.62mm weapons in target effects, sustainability of effects, and overall effectiveness.”100 At the end of the day, Stockfisch was merely confirming what everyone already knew: the rifle of today was the M16; that of the past, the M14. Crucially, Stockfisch’s coup de grâce exemplified the dilution of the army’s progressive-marksmanship tradition and its merging with the diehard way of war.
The end, now, was inevitable. McNamara directed that all M14s in Vietnam be replaced by M16s. Those M14s stockpiled in government armories, even brand-new ones, were destroyed by shearing them in half with a blowtorch, although a few were kept around for use as sniper rifles.101 There remained, however, the question whether U.S. troops in Europe would also hand in their M14s. Dealing with NATO friends and Vietnamese foes simultaneously would be too painful a headache.102 The chief of staff, General Harold Johnson, however, was asked to assure allies that soldiers in Europe would not carry M16s until at least 1972—long enough for Washington to arrange sufficient carrots and sticks to keep the Europeans docile.103 On the first day of January 1967 Lieutenant General Victor Krulak confirmed to reporters that even the Marines, traditionally the holdouts in these matters, would be converting to M16s “in the spring.”104 On February 23, 1967, the U.S. government officially approved the M16 as its standard rifle.105 The space-age gun remains in service to this day, but the Iraq War has resurrected, yet again, the question of the American rifle.
The HK 416
Chapter 12
THE RIFLE OF
THE FUTURE
At roughly seven in the morning on March 23, 2003, Iraqi soldiers and gunmen ambushed an American eighteen-vehicle convoy as it blundered, bewildered and lost after taking several wrong turns, through the outskirts of An Nasiriyah, an unremarkable city in the southeast. Of the thirty-three soldiers present, eleven were killed and seven were captured (including Private Jessica Lynch, later, most famously, rescued).
Four months later the army released its report on the destruction of the 507th Maintenance Company detachment. Buried in its pages lurks an implicit acknowledgment that malfunctioning M16s might well have contributed to the loss. Regarding six personnel who escaped under fire by maneuvering their