"Joe Haldeman - 1968" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

until the last man comes through. And he knew there were enemies behind him, unless the OP had been
shooting, at ghosts.

Of course they were always behind you in this country. And in front of you and on both sides, and up in
the trees and even underground. And he had a weapon that fired one round at a time and had to be
reloaded manually.

The Black Death (2)
The M16 that Spider carried in 1968 was the retarded child of an elegant parent, the Armalite AR-15,
designed by weapons genius Eugene Stoner. The AR-15 was an ideal weapon for jungle
warfare-lightweight, reliable, deadly. Its tiny 5.56-millimeter bullet was more lethal than the
7.62-millimeter one it was designed to replace, because it tumbled end over end inside the victim's body,
tearing a wide swath of destruction rather than punching a neat hole straight through. If it hit a bone, it
could glance off at any angle; there were stories of bullets that would hit a man in the leg and rip all the
way up through the body to exit through the top of his head.

But the U.S. Army did not accept the AR-15 without modifications. The bullet tended to wobble at
minus 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which could be a real disadvantage if we declared war on Antarctica, so
they increased the "degree of twist" in the rifling, which stabilized the round in frigid weather, but also
reduced the amount of tumbling inside the victim, and thus the weapon's lethality.

Another problem was lubrication: The technical manuals that accompanied the M16 recommended the
same lubrication procedures as for its predecessor, the M14, but the two weapons are as dissimilar as a
sportscar and a pickup truck. The conventional lubricant, W-L-800, decomposed in Vietnam's humidity.

What really destroyed the M16's efficiency, though, was a change in its propellant powder, from IMR
("improved military rifle") to slower-burning conventional "ball" powder. This increased the cyclic rate of
fire from 700 to 1,000 rounds per minute, which caused the weapon to jam. It left a residue that gummed
up the barrel and the action. When Colt tested M16s in 1965, it found that none of its samples failed if
they used IMR, but half of them did on ball powder.

At first the military denied that this was thereal problem. The real problem was that soldiers were being
lazy, not cleaning their weapons properly. The U.S. Congress didn't think much of this attitude when one
of their number read them a letter a wounded marine wrote home to his mother:

We've been on an operation since the 21st of last month. We left with close to 1,400 men in our battalion
and came back with half. We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. We left with
73 men in our platoon and came back with 19.

You know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. the M16. Practically every one of our dead was found
with his rifle torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

After some years, too late to help Spider and his contemporaries, the M16 was retrofitted with a
chrome-lined chamber and a buffer modification to slow down the cyclic rate of fire, which made it a little
more reliable-though still not as good as the original, using IMR. Why did they continue to use ball
powder? It was a complicated skein of interservice rivalry, bureaucratic inertia, and porkbarrel politics
that has never been unraveled, and never will be. A pity, since it would be nice to be able to point a
finger: This man's inefficiency, or ego, or avarice, killed more American GIs than any division of
Vietnamese.