It is perhaps the most potent question to echo from the Cold War: Who lost Vietnam? Well, there were certainly many factors, but an important new book, by C. J. Chivers (exclusively excerpted in Esquire's new November issue, and soon on this website), forces us to consider this: For the first time in human history, a poorly trained peasant army humbled a great power with the gun its fighters carried in their hands — the AK-47. Chivers's story is about that gun, its history, and its relationship to the catastrophic failures of the M16 during the 1960s. Above, you can watch the gun in action, and below, we take a moment to ask Chivers some questions about the gun and his work. You can also read more about the book on Chivers's website.

TIM HEFFERNAN: Would you call the AK-47 a great invention?

C. J. CHIVERS: Without question the AK-47 was a remarkable invention, and not just because it works so well, or because it changed how wars are fought, or because it proved to be one of the most important products of the 20th century. The very circumstances of its creation were fascinating. The rifle is essentially a conceptual knock-off of a German weapon that had been developed by Hitler's Wehrmacht in the 1930s and 1940s, and it came together through not only the climate of paranoia and urgency in Stalin's USSR, but also via the ability of the Soviet intelligence and Red Army to grasp the significance of an enemy's weapon and willingness to replicate it through a large investment of the state's manpower, money and time. It was a characteristically Soviet process, and an example where centralized decision-making and the planned economy actually combined to design and churn out an eminently well-designed product. We spend a lot of time denigrating the centralized economy, for good reason. But it just so happened that what the centralized economy of a police state really wanted, it got. It couldn't make a decent elevator, toilet, refrigerator, or pair of boots. But the guns? Another story altogether.

TH: How, after all of these decades, did you put together the story of the Marines' Hotel Company, and get your hands on the documents from Colt's Firearms, and from inside the military?

CJC: It took years of digging, travel, and patience. In 2003, I found declassified references to the Pentagon's cover-up of jamming M16s in the National Archives. At about the same time, a librarian in Missouri sent me reams of records from the archives of the late Representative Ichord, who led a special congressional sub-committee into the M16's failures in Vietnam. In the box was a copy of the letter that Lieutenant Michael Chervenak, in a state of controlled rage, had written to Congress and to two newspapers after 40 rifles jammed and Hotel Company was outgunned, costing several Marines their lives. It started there. I found Mike [Chervenak] — he was practicing law in Maryland — and began corresponding with him from Russia, where I had moved. Eventually I met him in a steakhouse in Maryland on a trip home, and I brought his letter to show him. He didn't take it when I handed it across the table. I'll never forget what he said: "I don't need to read it. I remember every word." It had been 40 years. I said, "You're still pissed off, aren't you?" He looked like it was the stupidest question he had ever heard. "Chris," he said. "It was unconscionable what they did. We're not talking about issuing bad mess kits here. We're talking about rifles." Then came a breakthrough. About a year later, I flew twice from Moscow to the U.K., to spend weekends going through an unsorted collection of small-arms-related records at a defense college in the English countryside. There were 60 big cardboard boxes, it took me four full days to look at everything in them. In one box were records from 1966 through 1968 from the desk of the president of Colt's Firearms, which made the M16s that had been failing. As I read each piece of paper, I almost fell over — among them were letters from Colt's engineers in Vietnam confirming everything Mike had said, and detailing many of the precise problems with the rifles that Colt's and the Pentagon were sending to combat. Even the engineer sent to investigate his allegations agreed with him, in writing. I moved back to the U.S. in 2008 and began to track down more former Marines from Mike's battalion in 1967, including several from the firefight that had enraged Mike. They shared their memories with me, and passed me from vet to vet. Mike had been punished for daring to speak out, and had never been publicly vindicated, though all of these vets stood by him. Simultaneously, I was in a public-records fight with the Army to release more records, which I finally won in 2009. As all of this came together, the circle had closed and the truth could be laid bare, almost 45 years later. All I had to do was find the time to write it.

TH: Is the AK just a tool, turned to good or ill by people? Or has it actually spurred evil (or violence, anyway) by its very nature?

CJC: The automatic Kalashnikov is a tool, an implement designed for ordinary men, without much training or undue complications, to kill other men, and to be used in the conditions in which wars are often fought. But it's only a tool, and while its ready availability in many unstable lands can be seen as kindling violence, this is not simply because of the weapon's qualities themselves. It is because of the quantities of the weapons that have been made, whether anyone besides the minds that organized police states wanted the rifles or not. Many of the Eastern bloc countries that used the weapons were brittle and corrupt, and they lost custody of huge stockpiles of their unused guns. Blaming the rifle itself doesn't quite make sense. Armies and arms manufacturers will always make weapons. The problem here lies with the abundance, not the existence, of the Kalashnikov line. Certainly the Kalashnikov's ease of use and durability make it desirable for all sorts of people up to no good. But rifles are rifles — there are many other choices out there. You see the Kalashnikov almost everywhere there is fighting because there are so many of them.

TH: Is it the signature weapon of the 20th century? The 21st? Will the AK still be killing in 2110?

CJC: The Kalashnikov was the most important firearm of the last 60-plus years, so much so that there really is no second place. It is not going to be unseated from its place any time soon, certainly not in our lives.

TH: What's memorable about being shot at by AKs — what makes it different from, say, being shot at by a sniper? What does an AK bullet sound like when it goes past your ear? When it hits the wall you're crouched behind?

CJC: Actually, in a lot of circumstances, the Kalashnikov is poorly used by people who are not especially good shots, or who are outright bad shots. In these cases, the rifle's weaknesses emerge. As far as accuracy goes, the Kalashnikov is stubbornly mediocre, and the ease with which it can be fired on automatic means that many people fire it on automatic when they would be better served firing a single, aimed shot. These factors combine in a phenomenon many people who have been shot at by Kalashnikovs have come to be grateful for — a burst of bullets cracking by high overhead. There have been many times when we have shaken our heads in relief and gratitude that the nitwits with Kalashnikovs on the other side of a field don't quite know how to use the weapon in their hands. Getting shot at by a sniper is a much different experience, and far more frightening. But either experience is, to borrow your word, memorable. These memories are pretty much all bad.

TH: M16 or AK-47: Which would you bring to a gunfight?

CJC: Remember, I'm not a Marine anymore, and I never carry weapons on the patrols I cover, so I have to answer theoretically. But ask a Marine or Ranger, and you'd probably get an answer like this: It depends on the gunfight. For the sake of argument, let's talk about the rifles only — not the modern rail systems and optics and lights that are available that can make carrying a modern M16 an utterly different experience from carrying a Kalashnikov with iron sights. If we are talking only of rifles, I'd say this: If the ranges are short, the vegetation thick, and the climate damp, and I was still in uniform, I'd almost certainly opt for a Kalashnikov. In the desert? Give me one of the current variants of the M16. The M16 was long ago debugged. Its performance problems are nothing like those of the mid-1960s. And in arid climates, ranges tend to stretch out, and there really is no comparison between Kalashnikovs and M16s at longer ranges. The longer barrel of the M16, its better sights and smoother trigger, and the ballistics of the cartridge it fires, all make it much more likely to hit something at, say, 200 or 250 or 300 yards, and beyond. At these ranges, Kalashnikovs almost always miss, even when people trouble to aim them.

TH: What led you to this book project?

CJC: Everywhere I went on my job covering conflict, the Kalashnikov was the predominant arm. And after writing in the New York Times about how records that another reporter and I had found from the Taliban and al Qaeda showed that an introduction to the Kalashnikov was the opening class at the terror and insurgent schools in Afghanistan, a former professor suggested that I consider looking at the weapon at book length. That was almost a decade ago. The suggestion became an obsession. Teasing out how any product goes from its quiet development to near ubiquity in its niche or market would be an interesting project, and the Kalashnikov came with an almost unending list of sub-themes. How did the weapon become an icon and symbol of so many contradictory things? How was it really designed? Who was really behind its development? Why and how exactly did it spread? Where did it fit in a fuller historical context? What were its effects, beyond the effect we covered here in Esquire, of prompting the Pentagon to field a rifle to match it, when that rifle was not yet ready for war? Why are there so many of them? How does it compare to other choices? And, of course, a large bit of the work was about what the rifle actually does to the people its bullets strike — this is unavoidable, even necessary, because in this examination is a view of what this tool was intended to do, and what it really does. And all of these lines of reporting offered a chance to tell rich, character-driven histories, which for a writer is a goldmine. Some days I worried: The Kalashnikov might seem a challenging subject, because it is so widely known. But it helped that much of what people think they know of the Kalashnikov is wrong. In some ways the reporting and writing became an assault against all of the propaganda, and a gentle correction to many of the errors that still inform the popular imagination surrounding the world's most abundant weapon.

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