Original subtitles

July 2nd, 1967.

A clearing along Route 561,

just south of the demilitarized zone in

Quang Tri province.

Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 9th

Marines is moving through chest-high

elephant grass when an entire NVA

regiment opens fire from three sides.

Within minutes, the company [music] is

being torn apart.

A young Marine drops to one knee, raises

his rifle, and pulls the trigger.

Nothing happens.

The bolt is locked.

A spent casing [music] is welded into

the chamber.

He fumbles for the cleaning rod taped to

[music] his stock, jams it down the

barrel, and tries to punch the casing

out.

NVA soldiers are 15 m away and closing.

He never finishes the job.

When the bodies were recovered days

later, dozens of Marines were found

exactly like that.

Slumped over their rifles, cleaning rods

extended down the barrels, killed in the

act of trying [music] to fix the weapon

that was supposed to save them.

The M-16 was supposed to be the most

advanced infantry rifle in the world.

Lightweight, lethal, revolutionary. The

future of American firepower.

Instead, [music] in the jungles of

Vietnam, it earned a nickname whispered

in fear up and down the chain of

command.

The Mattel toy.

And worse, the widow maker.

So, how did America's miracle rifle

become the weapon its own soldiers were

terrified to carry into combat?

The story begins not in Vietnam, but in

a small California workshop in 1956.

A self-taught engineer named Eugene

Stoner, working for a company called

ArmaLite, was sketching something that

would have looked like science fiction

to any soldier of the previous

generation.

No wood, no heavy steel, a rifle built

from aluminum forgings and plastic

furniture weighing less than 7 lb

loaded.

By 1959, the design had a name,

the AR-15.

Stoner had thrown out almost every

assumption about what an infantry rifle

was supposed to be.

Instead of a heavy .30 caliber round,

>> [music]

>> his rifle fired a tiny 5.56

mm cartridge at over 3,200

[music] ft per second.

The bullet was so fast it tumbled on

impact, tearing wounds far worse than

its size suggested.

A 20-round magazine, minimal recoil,

controllable on full automatic.

The rifle it was meant to replace, the

M14, was a wood-stocked 9-lb monster

that kicked like a mule and burned

through ammunition no [music] soldier

could carry enough of.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay tested

the AR-15 at a barbecue in 1960,

shooting watermelons apart,

>> [music]

>> and immediately ordered 80,000 of them.

By 1962, special forces advisers in

Vietnam were carrying it into the

jungle.

It was the future of infantry warfare,

and it was about to fail

catastrophically in the worst possible

place.

The Army didn't want Stoner's rifle.

The Ordnance Corps, the institution that

had designed every American service

weapon for over a century, viewed the

AR-15 as an outsider's toy.

Lightweight, plastic, built by an

aircraft company.

When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

forced them to adopt it in 1963,

the Ordnance [music] Corps got their

revenge in the specifications.

The first decision was the deadliest.

Stoner had designed his rifle around a

specific propellant called IMR powder,

clean burning and stable.

The Army switched it to ball powder

without telling him.

Ball powder burned dirtier. [music]

It increased the rifle's cyclic rate

from 750 rounds per minute to over 900.

It coated the gas tube and chamber in

carbon residue with every shot.

The Army then took over the task of

coming up with a tech data package for

the ammunition. And they did.

And they specified rather loosely what

they [music] what they really wanted.

And uh

that

turned out to be a very bad [music]

situation because what they did do

is they specified for instance muzzle

velocity [music]

and chamber pressure and nothing else.

Which meant [music] that the gas port

pressure, where the pressure's tapped

off to operate the mechanism, wasn't

even specified [music]

in the in the uh tech data package.

So, the Army then

um

allowed this to happen.

And

the ammunition [music] that started

coming down the supply line to meet the

Army requirements

was really loaded with a different

propellant than what we ever used in the

weapons before that. It was namely it

was a ball propellant

rather than the IMR propellant.

The second decision compounded the

first. Chrome lining the chamber and

barrel, a feature standard on Soviet

weapons, was rejected as unnecessary,

too expensive.

The third decision sealed the fate of

thousands of American soldiers.

Cleaning kits were not issued with the

rifles.

Troops were told the M-16 was

self-cleaning.

A comic book style manual was

distributed instead of a proper field

guide, the same manual that would later

earn the rifle [music] its first cruel

nickname.

In the humid jungles of Vietnam, the gas

impingement system that vented hot

carbon directly back into [music] the

chamber became a corrosion machine.

Spent casings began welding themselves

to chamber walls.

Each decision alone might have been

survivable.

Stacked together, they were a death

sentence waiting for a war.

By 1965,

the M-16 was no longer an experiment.

It was standard issue.

American soldiers and Marines pouring

into Vietnam carried it into [music] a

climate it had never been tested for.

Triple canopy jungle,

90% humidity,

red dust that turned to paste in the

rain.

The first warnings came from the Ia

Drang Valley in November 1965.

Soldiers of the First Cavalry Division

reported their rifles jamming after just

a few magazines.

But the worst was still coming.

On July 2nd, 1967,

during Operation Buffalo near Con Thien,

a company of Marines from the First

Battalion, 9th Marines, was ambushed by

an NVA regiment.

When the bodies were recovered, dozens

were found slumped over their rifles,

cleaning rods extended down the barrels,

trying to punch out spent casings welded

into the chambers.

They had died disassembling their own

weapons.

On Hill 881 South, a Marine named

Michael Cherwonak [music]

wrote a letter to his parents that would

later be read into the Congressional

Record.

He described watching friends die

because their rifles wouldn't fire.

The technical failure was called a

failure to extract. [music]

Heat, carbon, and corrosion fused the

brass casing [music] to the chamber

wall.

The bolt would tear the rim off the

casing, leaving the rest jammed in

place.

A 1967 Congressional [music] survey

found that nearly 50% of Marines in

First Corps had experienced malfunctions

in combat.

The most expensive [music] rifle ever

issued to American troops was getting

them killed.

The men in the bush gave it the names

that stuck.

The first came from the comic book

manual, the plastic furniture, the

futuristic look that made the [music]

rifle seem more like a child's toy than

a weapon of war.

They called it

the Mattel toy.

It was meant as a joke.

It stopped being funny the first time a

Marine watched his [music] rifle jam in

a firefight.

The second name was darker.

The widow maker.

That was what the grunts called it when

officers weren't listening.

A rifle that killed the man holding it

more reliably than the man it was

pointed at.

The third name was simpler, more

neutral, and it would outlast the war

itself.

The black rifle.

Across the lines, the North Vietnamese

had their own verdict.

Captured M-16s were often stripped for

parts and discarded.

NVA soldiers preferred their AK-47s,

and they had earned that preference in

blood.

Back in Washington, [music] the scandal

was no longer containable.

In May 1967,

Congressman Richard Ichord opened a

subcommittee investigation that would

tear the Army's evasions apart.

Marines testified about cleaning their

rifles four times a day and still

watching [music] them fail.

Officers testified about burying their

men with cleaning rods in their hands.

The Army's claim that [music] the M-16

was self-cleaning collapsed under sworn

testimony.

The fixes came fast. Chrome-lined

chambers and barrels, a redesigned

buffer to slow the cyclic rate, proper

cleaning kits issued to every soldier, a

new field manual.

By 1968, the M-16 A1 was a fundamentally

different weapon.

But the reputation was already burned

in.

The name had stuck.

The redemption came slowly.

Through the 1970s, with chrome-lined

chambers, [music] proper cleaning

protocols, and a generation of armors

who finally understood what the rifle

needed, the M-16 began to earn a

different [music] reputation.

By the 1980s, it was considered one of

the most accurate and reliable service

rifles in the world.

The M-16 A1 gave way to the M-16 A2 in

1983,

with a heavier barrel and three-round

burst.

Then came the M4 carbine, shorter,

lighter, adopted across the entire US

military.

More than 60 years after Eugene Stoner

sketched his first design, his rifle is

still in service.

American soldiers carried it into

Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia,

the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Allied nations adopted it.

Variants of it are produced in dozens of

countries.

The Mattel toy had become the standard

of the free world.

But the men who carried it in 1966

[music]

and 1967

never forgot.

For them, the M-16 was always the rifle

that jammed in the Ia Drang,

the rifle that killed Marines on Hill

881,

the rifle their friends were holding

when the bolt locked up and the NVA

closed the last 10 m.

No upgrade, no manual, no chrome lining

could undo what they had [music] seen.

The deeper truth of the M-16 story is

that the rifle itself was never the

failure.

Eugene Stoner's design was brilliant.

The 5.56 [music] mm cartridge was

revolutionary.

The lightweight construction was decades

ahead [music] of its time.

What failed was the institution that

issued it, the Ordnance Corps that

resented its outsider origins, the

bureaucrats who switched the powder to

save money, the officers who declared it

self-cleaning [music] and didn't issue

cleaning kits,

the chain of small decisions, each one

survivable alone, that combined into a

death sentence for the men carrying it

into the jungle.

It is the oldest pattern in military

history.

Soldiers pay in blood for decisions made

by men who will never hear a shot fired.

The M-16 is still in service today.

The men who first carried it are not.

They were given the future of warfare,

and too many of them died trying to make

it work.

If you want more stories like this, the

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