![]() ![]() The explanation most often suggested was that the infantryman carrying a normal rifle felt that his actions were ultimately futile. The nearer a soldier with an M-1 stood to the BAR man, the more likely he was to fire. (The rifles that the other soldiers carried, M-1s, were “semiautomatic,” requiring a separate trigger squeeze for each round.) Within a combat group, firing would begin with the BAR man and spread out from him. These were essentially portable machine guns, which could spray out bursts of continuous fire. It turned out that one group of soldiers was an exception to this rule: those who carried the Browning automatic rifles (BARs). This finding prompted the Army to take a closer look at the weapons the soldiers used. Marshall found that nearly four fifths of combat soldiers never fired their weapons during battle. In studies of combat units during World War II, S. 30-caliber bullet, which it chose to describe as “full-sized.”Ī second discovery about weaponry lay behind the design of Eugene Stoner’s AR-15. 27-caliber range but the Army, for reasons that were partly technical but largely traditional, refused then and for the next thirty-five years to change from the. As early as 1928, an Army “Caliber Board” had conducted firing experiments in Aberdeen, Maryland, and had then recommended a move toward smaller ammunition, perhaps of the. 30-caliber that had long been standard for the Army. The AR-15, the precursor of the M-16, used. Wyman, the commanding general of the Continental Army Command, had asked Stoner to design a rifle precisely to take advantage of the “payoff” of smaller bullets. … this is what makes a little bullet pay off so much in wound ballistics. … While a little bullet, being it has a low mass, it senses an instability situation faster and reacts much faster. 30-caliber, this might remain stable through a human body. When they hit something, they immediately go unstable. And they are stable as long as they are in the air. … What it amounts to is the fact that bullets are stabilized to fly through the air, and not through water, or a body, which is approximately the same density as the water. Stoner: There is the advantage that a small or light bullet has over a heavy one when it comes to wound ballistics. You have greater velocity but the bullet is lighter. Ichord: One army boy told me that he had shot a Vietcong near the eye with an M-14 and the bullet did not make too large a hole on exit, but he shot a Vietcong under similar circumstances in the same place with an M-16 and his whole head was reduced to pulp. The answer emerged in the following grisly exchange. During the early stages of the congressional hearing, Ichord asked Eugene Stoner, the designer of the original version of the M-16, to explain the apparent paradox of a small bullet’s destructive power. A large artillery round might pass straight through a human body, but a small bullet could act like a gouge. Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers had made a discovery in the science of “wound ballistics.” The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into human or (for the experiments) animal flesh. Yet it is a pure portrayal of the banality of evil. The hearing record, nearly 600 pages long, is a forgotten document, which received modest press attention at the time and calls up only dim recollections now. Much of the credit for the hearings belongs to the committee’s counsel, Earl J. The subcommittee, headed by Representative Ichord, a Democrat from Missouri, conducted a lengthy inquiry into the origins of the M-16 problem. By the middle of 1967, when the M-16 had been in combat for about a year and a half, a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their unreliable equipment and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen to attract the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, which formed an investigating subcommittee. ![]() The M-16, was a brilliant technical success in its early models, but was perverted by bureaucratic pressures into a weapon that betrayed its users in Vietnam. The rifle was known as the M-16 it was a replacement for the M-14, a heavier weapon, which was the previous standard. During those years, in which more than 40,000 American soldiers were killed by hostile fire and more than 250,000 wounded, American troops in Vietnam were equipped with a rifle that their superiors knew would fail when put to the test. One can argue that they should never have been sent there, but no one would argue that, once committed to battle, they should have been given inferior equipment. Between 19, more than a million American soldiers served in combat in Vietnam. ![]()
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