Pulverized by bullets

Jeffrey St. Clair

+ America’s shooters–sports and mass–can thank the Mad Bomber himself General Curtis LeMay for the current popularity of the AR-15. In the early 1960s, when the US was scrambling to develop a combat weapon to counter the lethality and reliability of the Soviet-made AK-47, LeMay began talking up a rifle manufactured by his buddies at Colt: the AR-15. The Pentagon brass weren’t convinced, but LeMay plunged forward on his own, ordering 8,5000 guns for the Air Force to use in Vietnam. The purchase increased the press on the US Army to make a decision. Ballistic testing was ordered. The US Army  wanted to find out how fast the gun fired and how much damage a bullet fired from the gun would do. First they used the gun to shoot 176 live goats tethered to a cart on a moving track, from distances of 25 to 500 meters. They measured the entrance and exit wounds. The bullets punched gaping holes in the thick-pelted animals. But the testers really wanted to find out what the gun would do to human heads. Thinking it would be impolitic to use American skulls for target practice, they secured 27 human heads from India and filled the desiccated brainpans with gelatin. Heads were shot from multiple distances by both weapons. The testers compared the explosive power of the AR-15 to that of the Soviet-designed AK-47. After mapping the blood splatter patterns, the Pentagon determined that the AR-15 was the more powerful weapon, since it shattered the heads into more fragments than the AK-47.  Later the Pentagon also did “field testing” of the destructive power of the weapons in Vietnam. A survey of enemy Killed in Action reports showed that many PLAF fighters were decapitated when hit in the head by bullets fired from M16s (AR-15). (See C.J. Chivers’ book on the development and rivalry between the AK-47 and the M-16, The Gun).

+ Though the exploding head tests were enough to convince Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to rush the rifle into mass production, the results were almost certainly cooked. The AR-15/M-16 was never a match for the AK-47. In the humid and wet conditions of Vietnam, the M-16 tended to corrode and rust. It routinely jammed and misfired. Many grunts in that war started using AK-47 taken from captured or killed Vietnamese soldiers.  “We called it the Mattel 16 because it was made of plastic. At that time it was a piece of garbage,” according to former Marine Jim Wodecki.  (See: Misfire: the Tragic Failure of the M16 in Vietnam by Bob Orkund and Lymon Dureya.)

+ Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician who treated the victims at the emergency room of Uvalde’s hospital, testifying before Congress on what he saw: “Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, over and over again, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue to their  identities was their blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.”