My Kindle Clippings/2016

April

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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 117-21  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 10:51 AM

At its height in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Chaco Canyon proto-city probably had a population of 4,000–5,000 people, while the surrounding network of villages may have housed 25,000–50,000 people. Two hundred and fifty miles of roads, some of them paved with cobblestones, connected Chaco and the surrounding villages. No one knows why Chaco Canyon was abandoned around 1150, but there is evidence prolonged drought caused a famine. There may also have been violent upheaval; the oral histories of Navajo pueblo-dwellers recall Chaco as a place where “people got power over other people,” suggesting exploitation and social unrest.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 149-53  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 10:54 AM

LIE: The Puritans came to America to establish religious freedom. THE TRUTH: The Puritans came to America to escape other people’s religious freedom. The story starts in 1593, when radical Protestant “Separatists” emigrated from England to Holland, where they could live in peace, without being hung or jailed for religious nonconformity. That led to a new problem for the Puritans: the easygoing Dutch allowed people to practice all sorts of crazy religions, including Judaism, Catholicism, and eventually even atheism–the horror!
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 172-75  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 10:57 AM

Like the rest of us, you probably bought the ol’ Thirteen Colonies story, but it’s not an accurate depiction of colonial America for most of its history. In 1606 King James I chartered just two companies to settle North America, the Virginia Company of London and the Plymouth Company. As settlements were founded, each new city was recognized as its own colony: for example, Connecticut actually contained 500 distinct “colonies” (or “plantations”) before they were merged into a single colony in 1661.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 180-81  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 10:58 AM

So technically, there were just 12 colonies in 1775 and 13 states in 1776.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 458-59  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:11 PM

In Turkey tobacco use could bring the death penalty in the 1630s, and in Russia the first offense brought deportation to Siberia; the second, execution. But none of these had much effect: tobacco was so habit-forming that users would risk death just to get their fix.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 462-63  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:11 PM

While they had barely scratched out a living before discovering tobacco, the first Virginia colonists became incredibly wealthy, and their success attracted thousands of imitators. Predictably, trouble followed.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 465-67  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:12 PM

Over the seventeenth century, the success of Virginia’s tobacco planters attracted increasing numbers of poor but ambitious young Englishmen. Enticed to the New World by the promise of endless free land, these new colonists were surprised to find that all the good land had already been claimed.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 613-16  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:24 PM

Above all, the new taxes angered American colonists because they were given no say in how the British Parliament decided that money should be raised or spent. This violated the 1689 British Bill of Rights, which said no subject of the English crown should be taxed without representation in the official legislature. But Parliament went ahead and granted itself the power to levy new colonial taxes–a power that members were thrilled to abuse.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 654-57  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:28 PM

beginning in 1766, when he helped his former prime minister, William Pitt, persuade Parliament to repeal the hated Stamp Act. Grateful colonists erected statues of George III and Pitt in New York City. In fact, every unpopular colonial tax on the books was eventually repealed at the king’s request, or at least with his consent, except for one: the Tea Act of 1773.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 660-64  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:38 PM

Boston, as usual, opted for a more violent solution: the Boston Tea Party, in which 50 colonists–not very convincingly disguised as tea-hating Mohawk Indians about 300 miles from home–dumped all the tea in Boston Harbor. At this point, George III went from nice to nasty. It was one thing to protest taxes on paper, but destruction of property was a villainous crime. More importantly, George III wanted to keep his right to arbitrary taxation. In fact, that was the whole point of the Tea Act: George III said Parliament had to hang on to at least “one tax to keep up the right.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 729-30  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 03:45 PM

the plan for the final victory that ended the Revolutionary War–the siege of Yorktown–was suggested to Washington by General Comte de Rochambeau of France.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 849-52  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 09:09 PM

The main denomination was intended to correspond in value to the Spanish real de a ocho, or piece of eight–the standard Spanish coin at this time. To mix things up a bit, the Founding Fathers called their version, with the same monetary value, a dollar, an old North European monetary unit from the German word Taler, a short form of Joachimstaler–a coin minted in the Joachimstal valley of Bohemia in the sixteenth century.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 993-95  | Added on Friday, April 08, 2016, 09:19 PM

This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride. –Napoleon Bonaparte, 1804
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1069-74  | Added on Saturday, April 09, 2016, 02:17 AM

Along the way, he also helped develop America’s first fire department and first library, as well as the concept of daylight savings time. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ben Franklin the inventor was his refusal to patent any of his ideas, so that the widest possible number of people could benefit from them. As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. –Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, published 1790
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1350-52  | Added on Sunday, April 10, 2016, 02:42 PM

Soon, the party became better known by its nickname, the “Know-Nothings,” stemming from the answer members gave when asked about their secret meetings. But after sweeping into power in local elections in 1855 in Chicago and Boston–both cities with large Irish populations–the Know-Nothings rapidly faded from the scene.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1357-61  | Added on Sunday, April 10, 2016, 02:42 PM

Reaching out to German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, the Tammany politicians handed out crooked city contracts and public jobs (especially with the police) and arranged for the mass naturalization of immigrants, who then became voters. They also stood up for tenants against greedy landlords and helped workers organize unions. Just how corrupt were they? The most famous leader of the Tammany machine, Boss William M. Tweed is believed to have stolen about $200 million from New York City–the equivalent of $8 billion today.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1699-1702  | Added on Monday, April 11, 2016, 11:20 AM

After the war ended in 1865, the North tried to “fix” the South by making Southern whites as angry as possible. Unsurprisingly it didn’t turn out too well. The decade-long phase known as “Reconstruction” stalled in the face of Southern opposition. Embittered whites rolled back the reforms that had extended political and civil rights to freed slaves. Meanwhile, hard-core Confederate veterans formed new paramilitary organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, to scare blacks into submission.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1748-53  | Added on Monday, April 11, 2016, 11:25 AM

Shall we sink down as serfs to the heartless, speculative Yankees, swindled by his tariffs, robbed by his taxes, skinned by his railroad monopolies? –Democratic newspaper editor And that’s exactly what happened. In 1828 Northern congressmen passed a protectionist tariff (nicknamed the “Tariff of Abominations” by the South) so outrageous that the British responded with a counter-tariff of their own. The tariffs doubly affected the South, hurting cotton sales while making imports of manufactured goods more expensive.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2067-69  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:00 AM

In the fall of 1867, the KKK began “night-riding” to intimidate blacks in rural Tennessee–the first known instance of organized, large-scale racial persecution by the secretive group. In April of 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, allowing Grant to suspend habeas corpus to fight the KKK in South Carolina.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2069-71  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:00 AM

But these early signs of progress proved fleeting. After a decade of Reconstruction, it became clear the federal government would never be able to crush entrenched white resistance across the South.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2073-78  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:01 AM

Eventually the Republicans just gave up, effectively cutting loose Southern blacks, as part of one of the dirtiest political deals in U.S. history–and that’s saying something. In 1876 the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote, but the election was still up in the air because of disputed counts in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Realizing the Republicans were probably going to steal the election anyway, Southern Democrats cut a secret deal giving Hayes these states, and the presidency, in exchange for withdrawing Union troops from the South. In the process, they were screwing over their own candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, but as a New York Yankee and former War Democrat, he was almost as bad as any Republican.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2088-89  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:03 AM

Planters were legally exempt from military service, but in 1861 Forrest enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private and was quickly elevated to colonel on account of his wealth.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2241-46  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:18 AM

However, Vanderbilt–who was worth about $180 billion in today’s U.S. dollars–was not a man to be trifled with. Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. –Cornelius Vanderbilt There was only one way this could end: Vanderbilt organized a coalition of half a dozen Central American states opposed to Walker, raised a rebel army in Costa Rica, and toppled the filibuster’s year-old regime.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2250-54  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:18 AM

in pursuit of mankind’s eternal nemesis–the whale. By the early nineteenth century, they had the enemy on the run. The peak harvest came in 1840, when Yankee whalers brought in 11,593,483 gallons of whale oil to feed the American demand for lamp fuel. But as the supply diminished, the price went up, and even more whalers went into the business. From 1823 to 1846, the American whaling fleet increased from 203 to 736 ships, and they chased whales all the way from New England to the waters off Alaska; from there it was just a short trip down the Aleutian and Kuril island chains to the coast of Japan.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2272-75  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:20 AM

To make sure the foreigners saw nothing of Japan, wood and silk screens were erected along the entire route, concealing practically everything but the cobblestone streets. To be on the safe side, the town was also guarded by thousands of samurai, brought in especially to make sure the Americans wouldn’t somehow slip unnoticed into Japan.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2283-85  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 11:22 AM

Known as the Meiji Restoration, in one incredible decade, Japan jumped from feudalism to an advanced industrial economy. But this didn’t mean everything was peachy: although they ended up agreeing to Perry’s demands, Japan’s leaders weren’t about to forget the fear and humiliation inflicted by the Westerners.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2441-43  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 02:05 PM

During this period, cities took the leading role in the U.S. economy. Foreigners continued to pour into the United States, but more of them settled in urban areas–a big change from the 1840s to 1870s, when huge numbers of Europeans (especially Germans) had flocked to the Midwest.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2485-89  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 02:09 PM

Southern Democrats–or “Dixiecrats”–instituted requirements for voters, including literacy tests and poll taxes. Of course, both measures excluded poor whites too. In Alabama, the number of eligible white voters decreased from 232,821 in 1900 to 191,432 in 1903. When poor whites protested, legislators in some Southern states responded with “grandfather clauses,” which said a man could vote if his grandfather had voted in 1867 (the year before freedmen got the vote). These tactics, upheld by the Supreme Court well into the twentieth century, effectively sidelined black voters.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2528-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 02:15 PM

These fears weren’t groundless. Indeed, radical anarchists–most visibly those from Germany, Italy, and Russia–were the nineteenth-century equivalent of modern-day terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Forming autonomous cells, they pursued their fantastic vision of a world without government through assassinations and indiscriminate bombings–dignifying terrorism as “propaganda of the deed,” a term invented by the Russian group “People’s Will.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 2818-20  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:43 AM

Eugenicists also believed that society was actively undermining the process of natural selection through benevolent institutions like public education, charity, and social welfare. These programs had the unintended consequence of enabling “inferior” individuals to have more children, reversing the natural order of things.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2869-73  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:50 AM

When Congress did get around to passing eugenics laws, it focused on limiting immigration by “undesirables,” including whole races and nationalities. Urged by lobbyists from groups like the Immigration Restriction League, the main targets were Slavs and Jews from Eastern Europe and Italians, who were supposedly less intelligent on average. In 1924 Congress invited Harry Laughlin–a former high school principal and the director of Eugenics Record Office–to testify on the subject of mentally defective immigrants. This led to the Immigration Restriction Act, effectively ending immigration until after the Second World War.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2882-84  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:53 AM

Riding the rails, itinerant black musicians were able to share local songs and styles and were also exposed to various kinds of white music, including Scots-Irish ballads that evolved into modern country music; in fact, there was a great deal of overlap between country music and the blues
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2898-2900  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:54 AM

Yes, it’s true: when the fizzy soft drink was first formulated, Coca-Cola contained small amounts of cocaine, which probably made it mildly habit-forming. But it turns out the early business dealings surrounding the “Pause That Refreshes” were far more nefarious than any of its ingredients.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 2917-20  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:57 AM

1892 Candler decided to ditch the whole legal mess and create a new corporation, The Coca-Cola Company (note the important difference). If this all sounds a bit shady and illegal, well, it probably was: Candler supposedly forged Pemberton’s signature on the 1888 bill of sale–and his decision in 1910 to burn the company’s early corporate records doesn’t exactly allay suspicion. But as the old American saying goes: “Whatever!”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 2923-25  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 10:57 AM

Bottling Coca-Cola allowed the beverage to expand into retail distribution, via general stores, as well as restaurants and hotels, which didn’t always have soda fountains. Of course pharmacies continued to sell the fountain drink. Operated by “soda jerks,” these were informally known as “dope shops” because of the cocaine content.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2993-96  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 11:09 AM

All of this changed, however, with the invention of the internal combustion engine by an Italian engineer, Pietro Benini, in 1856. The internal combustion engine operated on the same basic principle as the steam engine–raising and lowering pistons to turn wheels or propellers–but it made the process more efficient by replacing super-heated water vapor with flammable diesel or gasoline, providing far more horsepower from a much smaller unit.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3035-38  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 11:40 AM

Before long they owned the largest oil refinery in the world, and in 1870, the brothers created a new corporation, Standard Oil of Ohio. The duo borrowed heavily to acquire new competing refiners, but John was able to achieve substantial savings elsewhere by striking secret deals with railroads that gave Standard Oil rebates for its high-volume oil shipping business. These methods allowed him to drive competing companies into bankruptcy and buy them cheaply.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3040-42  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 11:40 AM

Rockefeller’s achievements didn’t just benefit his own bank account. By creating economies of scale, he could offer consumers better quality kerosene at a lower price. But after achieving dominance in kerosene refining, there was nothing left to do but take over other parts of the supply chain.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3210-15  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:03 PM

After American trade with Germany was severed by the British blockade, trade with Britain and France grew even more important. During the war, American exporters supplied both countries with vehicles, fuel, food, and consumer goods, allowing the Allied Powers to devote their own industry exclusively to armaments–and American exporters were making out like bandits. Then bankers got in on the act: starting in 1915 American banks loaned Britain and France hundreds of millions of dollars to continue buying American goods. These war financiers feared that the debts might never be repaid if the Allied Powers lost. With so much trade and money at risk, these business interests were all the motivation that the United States needed to get in on the Allied action.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3226-28  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:07 PM

The German strategy almost worked: in the last two years of the war, U-boats sank 8.9 million tons of shipping, and the effort nearly starved Britain into surrender. But it also gave Wilson the support he needed to get Congress to declare war in April of 1917.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3302-6  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:17 PM

When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history … The disillusion was so complete, that some of those who had trusted most hardly dared speak of it … Was the treaty really as bad as it seemed? What had happened to the President? –John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3313-18  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:21 PM

the deception was a big deal. It triggered a wave of outrage across the German political spectrum–left, right, and center–which almost never agreed on anything. If Allied diplomats didn’t understand why this was a problem, then they’d just have to wait and see. It wouldn’t be long. To this day, nobody really knows what Wilson was thinking. It’s possible he deliberately deceived the Germans–but the implication that he drew up an idealistic peace program as part of the biggest con job in history just seems too perversely cynical. Alternatively, it may have just slipped his mind; there are, in fact, questions about Wilson’s mental health during this period. In April 1919, while in Paris, he suffered a minor stroke, which can change one’s personality and cause disordered thinking.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3396-98  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:44 PM

Don’t forget about food! Road-tripping builds an appetite, but in an era before effective health regulations, drivers were understandably leery of catching salmonella at some roadside greasy spoon. New national restaurant chains sprang up to meet this demand, offering travelers alimentary assurance with a standard menu and prominently displayed promises of cleanliness.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3441-43  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:49 PM

Counterintuitively, some forgiving and forgetting would actually have been more beneficial to the United States: putting cash in European pockets would have allowed them to buy more American imports, and the United States could have used its leverage to demand an end to protective tariffs. Renewed trade could also have tied Europe together, possibly averting another war.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3459-62  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:51 PM

Meanwhile, the German government, infuriated by the French occupation, had a brilliant idea for paying off its debts: print more money! This scheme triggered hyperinflation, and by November 1923, the average price of consumer goods in Reichsmarks was an incredible 260 million times what it had been in January of that year.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3465-72  | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2016, 02:52 PM

Finally, in 1924 the United States took action and proposed an awesomely ridiculous scheme that “solved” the problem. The “Dawes Plan” (named for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Dawes) called for billions of dollars in new American loans to Germany, which Germany would use to pay reparations to France, so France could pay Britain, and Britain in turn could pay America. The circular scheme ended up being just as futile as it sounds, since all the loans were basically wiped out by the Great Depression. No country benefited, and everyone suffered. Just canceling the debts really would have been the smarter move. This would all be sort of comical, in a Three Stooges kind of way, except for the terrible long-term results. The French occupation of the Ruhr inspired a fresh surge of anger in Germany, multiplied by the economic meltdown that followed. As various groups vied to grab the reins in an unsteady German state, one crazy contestant rose to prominence. In 1923 a war veteran named Adolf Hitler led his tiny Nazi Party in a (failed) attempt to seize power in Munich. Thanks in part to the Dawes Plan, he’d be back.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3536-40  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 11:24 AM

An emotional style focused–paradoxically–on minimizing emotion, “being cool” likely began in African-American culture as a way for individuals to passively deflect the psychological hurt inflicted by white racism. In American Cool, effortless mastery of both oneself and one’s context became expressed through verbal and body language, or lack thereof: the cool American is calm, unfazed, even slightly jaded or blasé. This new emotional minimalism was part of a long-term shift in what society modeled as “proper” emotional behavior.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3560-64  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 11:27 AM

Originating in the 1910s–1920s and first popularized by jazz idol Lester Young in the 1930s, the idea of “cool” quickly spread through mainstream culture, giving rise to scores of expressions: you can “be cool,” “stay cool,” “play it cool,” “keep your cool,” “lose your cool,” “cool it,” “cool your heels,” or “cool your jets.” We all want to make a “cool million,” and someone can be a “cool customer,” “cool cat,” “cool as a cucumber,” “coolheaded,” or just “real cool.” Before long (surprise!) the concept was co-opted by corporate America and soon anything could be cool.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3567-69  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 11:28 AM

Of course, cool wasn’t the only new slang being slung in America. “Hip” and “hipster,” coined by jazz musicians, referred to the typical position of a supine opium smoker, lying sideways on his or her hip, leading to the coded inquiry: “Are you hip?”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3571-75  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 11:49 AM

On March 4, 1918, a deadly influenza virus surfaced among American soldiers in Fort Riley, Kansas–followed by Queens, New York; Charleston, South Carolina; and Detroit, Michigan, later that month. Small and isolated, Fort Riley is definitely the odd man out in this list, prompting an obvious question: why there? Since it’s unlikely the flu actually came from Kansas–most flu strains originate in poor countries where peasants live in close proximity to infected livestock–an innocuous precursor was most likely brought to Fort Riley sometime before the first outbreak.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3592-97  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 11:51 AM

With the earth encircled by disease, the toll was truly epic: altogether the pandemic infected about 500 million people and carried off 50 million–100 million victims. The death toll was two or three times the total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, and probably more than those killed by the Black Death in medieval Europe. In the United States alone, the flu killed 675,000 people, about six times the number of American soldiers killed in World War I. And actually, more than half of the 110,000 American war dead–57,000–also died from the flu. This global decimation was especially shocking because most of the casualties were young people, reversing the usual pattern for influenza mortality.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3667-70  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 01:49 PM

Close the medical school, get rid of the student body, build a new medical school on the Johns Hopkins model, get new chairmen and start over. –advice to philanthropist Robert Brookings on how to improve the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 246 | Loc. 3765-68  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 01:55 PM

To paraphrase Shakespeare: some countries are born great, some achieve greatness, and some spill something that smells like greatness on themselves after falling asleep on the couch. That last would be America. Having turned its back on international affairs after World War I, the United States had to be roused awake and then dragged kicking and screaming into World War II–after which it ended up a “superpower.” Some countries have all the luck.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 3940-45  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:09 PM

From the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 to the end of the war, the number of German troops deployed on the Eastern front never sank below three-quarters of Germany’s total strength. As a result, the Eastern front saw mind-boggling casualties: just under 90 percent (3.2 million) of German combat deaths and three-quarters of German tank losses occurred there. On the Soviet side, 11 million soldiers died, including 2 million in German POW camps. Combined with civilian deaths, the total Soviet toll came to an astonishing and horrifying 25 million, compared to 1.3 million combined military and civilian deaths for the United States, U.K., and France.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 4113-15  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:24 PM

Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it is ours. –FDR, to the British ambassador Lord Halifax, 1944
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 4164-67  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:43 PM

After the war was over, Luciano, who had been freed and deported to Italy by the U.S. government in recognition of his wartime service, started getting involved in organized crime’s new high-growth business, drug smuggling, almost certainly with the knowledge–and maybe even help–of the CIA. The postwar Mafia drug-smuggling operation evolved over time, and it was thanks to the mob’s BFF, the CIA, that the most profitable network–“the French Connection”–came about.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 4168-75  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:44 PM

In 1947, CIA spymasters employed two Corsican brothers, Antoine and Barthelemy Guerini, to break up strikes by communist dockworkers in the port city of Marseilles, France. Once in control of the docks, the Guerinis went into business with Luciano. Beginning in 1951, raw opium harvested in Turkey was smuggled overland to Beirut, Lebanon, refined into morphine base, and then shipped onward to Marseilles, where Corsican drug chemists turned it into heroin. From Marseilles the heroin was distributed all over Europe as well as to the United States via merchant ships sailing from northern European ports. After New York City customs officials caught on, smuggling shifted south under the direction of Santo Trafficante Jr., one of the most powerful mobsters in American history. The boss of the “Tampa family,” controlling Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean, Trafficante established new routes running from Marseilles through Cuba, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, onward to Puerto Rico, and finally to Miami for distribution across the United States.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 4177-78  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:45 PM

The Mafia’s only concession? They agreed to limit heroin sales to African-American neighborhoods, figuring the government wouldn’t care as much about addiction among minority populations. (They were right.)
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 4271-77  | Added on Friday, April 15, 2016, 02:54 PM

The same year that saw the invention of the atomic bomb also gave the world another hot device: the microwave oven. The principle behind microwave cooking was discovered by Percy Spencer, an engineer who worked on radar installations for defense contractor Raytheon. After noticing that a chocolate bar melted after being accidentally placed in front of a new “magnetron” vacuum tube, Spencer experimented with other foods, including popcorn (which worked perfectly) and an egg (not so much). After these experiments, Spencer deduced that the food was being heated by low-density microwave energy that could penetrate solid objects. Using those principles, he designed his first primitive oven in 1945, and by October of 1946, Raytheon had filed a patent for a microwave based on Spencer’s idea.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4447-52  | Added on Saturday, April 16, 2016, 02:31 PM

In short, the United States became a youth culture. The baby boomers were doted on by parents determined to give them all the things they’d missed growing up in the Great Depression–from bikes and baseball gloves to college and cars. The boomers displayed astounding creativity, energy, and sheer precocious self-confidence. As teenagers and young adults, they voiced concern about nuclear weapons, pollution, and racial discrimination. But their larger-than-life qualities could also be weaknesses: self-assurance could turn to arrogance, self-expression to self-destruction. As a result, movements that began with good intentions often ended up far from their original goals. Maybe free love and psychedelic drugs weren’t the solution to the world’s problems after all?
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 4521-23  | Added on Saturday, April 16, 2016, 02:35 PM

In fact, King had paid careful attention to Mahatma Gandhi’s successes in undermining British rule in India, and he came away believing that peaceful action–designed to provoke violent reaction–could strip government of its legitimacy.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 296 | Loc. 4537-38  | Added on Saturday, April 16, 2016, 02:38 PM

They are not the first Negroes to face mobs, they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them. –James Baldwin, August 1960
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 299 | Loc. 4582-84  | Added on Saturday, April 16, 2016, 02:45 PM

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. –James Madison, 1793
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 300 | Loc. 4587-90  | Added on Saturday, April 16, 2016, 02:46 PM

The presidential power grab (and congressional abdication of responsibility) got even bigger with President Lyndon Johnson. The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized the commander in chief to order whatever military action seemed appropriate in Southeast Asia after North Vietnamese forces (allegedly) took a couple of potshots at U.S. Navy ships. This open-ended resolution basically gave Johnson a blank check to escalate the conflict in Vietnam, setting in motion a textbook example of how not to conduct a war–er, that is, “police action.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 305 | Loc. 4673-77  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:04 PM

Overall, the proportion of American workers who belonged to a union fell from about 40 percent in 1955 to 30 percent in 1975–in the private sector. However, the situation was different in the public sector (meaning government jobs), thanks to JFK, who encouraged federal workers to unionize, setting the precedent for state and county employees not long after. From 1955 to 1975, the proportion of public employees who belonged to unions jumped from 12 percent to 40 percent. Insert jokes about the DMV here.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 312 | Loc. 4780-84  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:14 PM

Meanwhile, tobacco companies mounted a furious counterattack, playing up tobacco’s patriotic association with American history and funding studies that blamed the rising prevalence of lung cancer on other plausible culprits, like increasing air pollution. In 1953 the industry came together to create the Council for Tobacco Research, which sought to win over the scientific community with generous research grants, followed in 1958 by the Tobacco Institute, whose main mission was neutralizing negative PR. Beginning in 1954, the industry also trumpeted the cigarette filter, which supposedly made tobacco “safe” (it didn’t).
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 4824-26  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:17 PM

The number of first-time users tripled from 1960 to 1965 to 600,000, then surged to 2.5 million new users in 1969 and nearly 3.5 million in 1972, and continued at that rate for the rest of the 1970s. In total, from 1960 to 1975 over 28 million Americans experimented with marijuana, equaling 13 percent of the population in 1975, with a good number–around 14 million–returning for follow-up experiments.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 4870-74  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:20 PM

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question–"Is this all?” –Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 320 | Loc. 4906-10  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:23 PM

The centerpiece of the “deterrence” strategy was a large nuclear arsenal, and we do mean large: from six fission bombs in 1945, the U.S. stash grew to include 3,057 fission and fusion warheads by 1955 and 31,642 by 1965. The number of high-yield (multi-megaton) devices peaked around 1960; supposing 500 high-yield bombs could wipe out human life on earth, it seems the U.S. nuclear arsenal had enough firepower that year to destroy civilization five times over, give or take an apocalypse.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 324 | Loc. 4968-69  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:27 PM

Neil Armstrong’s astronaut application arrived almost a week past the June 1, 1962, deadline. A friend of his who worked at the Manned Spacecraft Center slipped the tardy form into the pile before anyone noticed the postmark.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 325 | Loc. 4970-72  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:41 PM

The lunar landing was a foreign policy triumph. At a time when televised images of the losing battle in Vietnam were broadcast around the world, Apollo 11 provided undeniable proof of American wealth, power, and technical skill in the form of a riveting broadcast event. The event was watched live by about 600 million people around the world.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5053-57  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 02:49 PM

In 1970 the CIA orchestrated the assassination of the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces and also worked to destabilize Chile with inflation, a collapse of foreign trade, and crippling strikes. Amid this growing chaos, in August 1973 the Chilean parliament asked the military to restore the “rule of law.” Pinochet, the new commander in chief, clearly interpreted this as an invitation to stage a coup, which he did after consulting with the CIA on September 11, 1973. Defiant to the end, Allende was killed when Pinochet ordered planes and tanks to attack the presidential palace.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 5242-45  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:00 PM

They say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems, that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. –Ronald Reagan, 1980
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 5302-9  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:02 PM

History suggested the disillusioned evangelicals would join fundamentalists in withdrawing from politics altogether, but there was a new activist impulse at work, inspired by moral issues: in 1969 evangelicals in Anaheim, California, drew national attention with protests against a sex education curriculum planned for the city’s public schools, followed in 1974 by a similar protest against sex ed in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Then the Democrats surprised everyone by nominating a “born-again” Southern evangelical to run for president in 1976. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter hit all the right issues, lamenting “the loss of stability and loss of values in our lives,” which he blamed on “the steady erosion and weakening of our families.” He promised to tackle divorce, illegitimacy, and drug abuse, but his most important promise was also the simplest: “I will never lie to you.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 350 | Loc. 5356-62  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:07 PM

Toward the end of the Carter administration, the CIA initiated “Operation Cyclone,” delivering money and weapons to the Afghan guerillas via Pakistan, an American ally since the 1950s–but at this point the level of funding ($20 million-$30 million in 1980) was too low to have any real impact on the course of the war. That changed when a U.S. congressman from Texas named Charlie Wilson took an interest in the Afghan resistance and–at the urging of CIA Director William Casey and CIA Afghan task force chief Gust Avrakotos–persuaded Congress to funnel more and more money and weapons to the mujahedin, reaching about $600 million per year by the mid–1980s. Congress also agreed to send billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan to keep things running smoothly, including emergency relief for millions of Afghan refugees. Meanwhile, American allies, led by Saudi Arabia, also poured billions of dollars into the resistance.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 352 | Loc. 5397-5401  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:09 PM

The groundwork for the Internet was laid in the late 1960s by researchers at leading California universities who invented a way to transmit information by breaking large amounts of data into smaller “packets,” which could be sent to multiple computers simultaneously. This pioneering digital network was organized and funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Pentagon’s cutting-edge research and development division, as a way of sharing information between research sites: ARPANET’s first four routers were located at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, and the University of Utah.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 353 | Loc. 5410-21  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:10 PM

In 1988 the Pentagon announced it would phase out ARPANET by 1990, prompting universities, industry, and other civilian users to expand the nonmilitary network. At the urging of these groups, in 1988 Gore authored legislation allocating federal funds to connect 1,000 academic and other civilian networks to form an “information superhighway.” This evolved into the National High-Performance Computing and Communications Act, a $1.7 billion project linking universities, libraries, government facilities, and industrial labs in a common network. The NHPCCA–otherwise known as the “Gore Bill"–also funded computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana who developed Mosaic, the first graphic Web browser, which inspired successors like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. The 1992 expiration date set for funding from the National Science Foundation raised the question of how to finance further expansion. Again, Gore was instrumental in getting Congress to pass the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992, which allowed businesses and individuals to use the Internet for commercial purposes. There was no question Gore understood the broader implications of his policies: rallying support for the NHPCCA in the House of Representatives in 1989, he told committee members, “I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network will create an environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 355 | Loc. 5429-33  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:11 PM

Actually, the optimists were half right. From 1950 to 1975, the number of blacks living in poverty dropped from 75 percent to 31 percent as per capita income rose from $810 to $2,980 ($7,150 to $10,800 in 2008 dollars). Adult illiteracy fell from 10 percent to 2 percent, and the number of African-Americans enrolled in four-year colleges increased fivefold to 665,000. And the numbers don’t lie, right? Well, it turns out these gains weren’t shared evenly by the community: as things got better for the rising African-American middle class, they got worse for an increasingly destitute and desperate “underclass.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 355 | Loc. 5437-41  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:12 PM

the earlier pattern of “white flight” from cities to suburbs, the African-American middle class left ghettoes for suburban neighborhoods with lower crime rates, better schools, and higher property values. From 1970 to 1990, the number of African-Americans living in suburbs jumped from 3.6 million to 10.2 million. However “black flight” contributed to an even greater concentration of poverty in central cities. The total number of African-Americans living in poverty in the ghettoes increased from 2.9 million in 1970 to 5.3 million in 1990, from 13 percent to 18 percent of the African-American population.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 356 | Loc. 5450-52  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:13 PM

Crime rates surged, with the number of young African-American men murdered each year tripling between 1985 and 1992. From 1975 to 1992, the number of African-American men in prison almost quadrupled, to 425,000, or 50 percent of the total prison population. In 1991 the Justice Department estimated that an African-American male born that year had a 28 percent chance of going to prison someday.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5502-5  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:17 PM

From 1975 to 1992, the number of Americans who were obese doubled from 30 million to 60 million, with rates rising in children as well as adults. Average calorie intake during this period stayed the same, at about 2,100 per person. How is that possible? That’s the $46 billion question (the total cost of treating obesity in 1990). Scientists still aren’t sure.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 362 | Loc. 5542-47  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:20 PM

Between rising legitimate costs, pork barrel, and massive fraud, federal spending on Medicare jumped nine-fold from $15.5 billion in 1975 to $136.3 billion in 1992, while Medicaid spending increased 10fold from $6.6 billion to $66 billion. That compares to a mere six-fold increase in total health care spending over the same period. Somehow, the math just doesn’t seem to add up. Of course, it’s not all Uncle Sam’s fault. The private sector had its own issues, like the always fun practice of suing doctors. During this same period, the number of medical malpractice lawsuits soared from 2.5 per 100 physicians in 1975 to 14.1 per 100 in 1992. Some of these were doubtless justified, but profit, as always, was a major factor.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 5760-62  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 03:50 PM

Russia is playing chess, while we are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt them. –Jeanne Kirkpatrick, 1988
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 6023-25  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:06 PM

“Red state” TV viewers can fulminate about the godless perverts sipping lattes and marrying their dogs “on the coasts,” while their “blue state” counterparts can heap scorn on all the stupid hicks who think dinosaurs are a U.N. hoax in “flyover country.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 6061-64  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:09 PM

Of the 35 million immigrants living in the United States in 2008, the total number of foreign-born Spanish speakers constituted just over half–nearly 18 million. With the United States exerting this kind of attraction, it’s not surprising that Hispanics also constitute the largest population of illegal immigrants: 55 percent of the Mexican immigrants, or about seven million people, are living in the United States illegally, along with similar percentages from other Spanish-speaking countries.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 6069-74  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:10 PM

Where 51 percent of the adult Hispanic population had a high school diploma in 1990, the number rose to 59 percent by 2005, while the number holding college degrees increased from 5.5 percent to 8.5 percent. Still, parts of the Hispanic community continue to face some serious challenges: in 2008 the high school dropout rate for Latinos was 17 percent, compared to 9 percent for African-Americans, 6 percent for whites, and 4 percent for Asians. This in turn affects progress in areas like learning English, which correlates directly with employment opportunities and income levels. About 16 million Hispanics, or 35 percent of the total population, have limited or no English.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 6095-99  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:12 PM

Meanwhile, beginning around 1995 real estate prices started to eclipse their rental earning potential at an alarming rate. In other words, the value of residential real estate was no longer linked to its utility; instead, prices kept going up because, well, prices kept going up. What’s that old expression about everything that goes up? From 2006 to 2009, the total appraised value of U.S. residential real estate fell from $30.5 trillion to $24.7 trillion, and if it continues falling in 2010, it could wind up right back where it started in 2000.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 6103-4  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:12 PM

In 2010, there were 19 million vacant homes in the United States–enough to house the population of France at 3.4 people per home.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 6114-21  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:14 PM

All this gave a huge boost to the risky securities market, which in turn gave private lenders a big incentive to offer more risky loans. Following the lead of Countrywide Financial, a big subprime lender, in 2004 many subprime mortgage corporations began using automated loan approval systems, meaning loan applicants were (barely) screened by computers, with scant human supervision. By 2007 a total of $1.5 trillion in subprime mortgages were held by 7.5 million homebuyers–13.4 percent of all outstanding home loans. At the same time, the volume of risky mortgage-backed securities issued annually rose from $87 billion in 2001 to $450 billion in 2006, with private investors taking a bigger and bigger slice. Thus when the real estate market began declining in the second half of 2006, a lot more was riding on it than most people understood–but everyone was about to get a quick tutorial.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 6134-38  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:15 PM

From January to December 2008, total subprime losses in the financial sector almost quadrupled, from $218 billion to $800 billion, rippling outward from the original subprime culprits. Adding up the failures and government-brokered fire sales, bank shareholders lost $7 trillion. Meanwhile, global stock markets lost an incomprehensible $30 trillion in value–yes, that’s $30,000,000,000,000. For comparison, that’s the net worth of Green Bay, Wisconsin, if every resident was Madonna; alternatively, it’s like winning the Powerball lotto jackpot 300,000 times in a row.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 6138-43  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:15 PM

The staggering losses made a government bailout funded by the public (hello, you!) unavoidable. In July of 2008, President Bush signed a bill providing $300 billion in new loans to keep the mortgage market from freezing up completely. As panic set in following the Lehman Brothers failure in September, the U.S. government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (setting aside $200 billion to cover their subprime securities losses), poured another $295 billion into domestic financial markets, loaned $330 billion to foreign central banks to stabilize overseas financial markets, and ponied up $125 billion to bail out American International Group (AIG), an insurance giant that lost tens of billions.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 6182-85  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:18 PM

Within 24 hours of September 11, three aircraft carrier battle groups set sail for the Arabian Sea, and U.S. planes and ground forces began gathering in friendly countries around the Persian Gulf. Under U.S. pressure, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan renounced the Taliban, whom they’d previously supported, and Pakistan opened its airspace to U.S. warplanes. Even Iran, still a bitter U.S. enemy, agreed to rescue any American airmen forced down in its territory.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 6425-26  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:34 PM

When it’s $100,000 of debt, it’s your problem. When it’s a million dollars of debt, it’s the bank’s problem. –Robert D. Manning, author of Credit Card Nation
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 6450-52  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:54 PM

In 1980 there were about 105 million acres of wetlands in the United States, but by 2010 the number had shrunk almost 10 percent to 95 million acres. The country is currently losing about 80,000 acres of wetlands per year–scientists estimate there were over 220 million acres of wetlands before European settlement.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 6514-16  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 04:59 PM

990 about two million Americans were using the Internet–less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population; by 2010, the number had climbed to 200 million, or 63 percent of the total population. This expansion went hand in hand with a tidal surge of online business activity, beginning–where else?–in America.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 427 | Loc. 6541-43  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:02 PM

In other words, in less than a decade, a single corporation saw its value decrease by an amount exceeding the individual GDPs of 180 countries in the year 2000, including Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and Pakistan.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 428 | Loc. 6549-50  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:03 PM

From a mere $19 million in 2000, Google’s total ad revenues increased over a thousandfold to $23.6 billion in 2009.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 428 | Loc. 6554-56  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:04 PM

For once, money is the least interesting part of the story. What’s truly fascinating is how the Internet is changing everyday life for billions of people around the planet. The phenomenon is too wide-ranging, varied, and dynamic to ever accurately describe, but just look at personal ads:
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6567-69  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:05 PM

While it’s hard to judge the company’s claims, one of the most popular online dating sites, eHarmony, claimed to have helped facilitate 43,000 marriages in 2007 alone–about 2 percent of the total 2.3 million weddings in the United States in 2007.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6577-78  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:05 PM

It’s even more amazing that all this complex, sensitive equipment actually works, considering the way these robots are delivered to the Red Planet.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6578-81  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:05 PM

In 2003 the MER missions loaded Spirit and Opportunity onto three-stage Boeing Delta II rockets, which propelled them beyond Earth’s gravity for their 320-million-mile journey to Mars. Six months later, both Explorer spacecraft entered the Martian gravity field in January 2004 traveling at about 12,000 miles per hour.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 6592-94  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:06 PM

Perhaps most incredible of all is the total cost of the missions to date: just $950 million (which is a rounding error in terms of federal spending in the first decade of the twenty-first century). And of course, one of the best things about robots is that they aren’t people, so if you blow them up, no one gets too upset.
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 446 | Loc. 6837-38  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 05:55 PM

Chose not to seek reelection in 1968. Quote: “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 450 | Loc. 6896-97  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 06:00 PM

Quote: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.” Trivia: nickname for chief political advisor Karl Rove is “turd-blossom.”
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The Mental Floss History of the United States (Erik Sass)
- Highlight on Page 487 | Loc. 7464-66  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 06:03 PM

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America. –Otto von Bismarck You can always count on Americans to do the right thing … after they’ve tried everything else. –Winston Churchill
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Dreams in a Time of War (Ngugi wa'Thiong'o)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 376-79  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 06:31 PM

These names and places were vague in outline, and, like those surrounding Harry Thuku earlier, were really shadows in a mist. Was this Hitler, for instance, the same who had refused to shake hands with Jesse Owens? I could understand them only in terms of scary ogres versus heroes in the never-never land of orality. Hitler and Mussolini, who threatened to enslave Africans, were the bad, ugly ogres, the proof of their evil intent being next door.
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Dreams in a Time of War (Ngugi wa'Thiong'o)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 419-22  | Added on Monday, April 18, 2016, 06:34 PM

So we did not spend much time with him, but I hardly slept thinking of the drama that had just ended. It was as if Kabae had jumped out of a story, said a hello, a good-bye, and then jumped back into the story. Hitting my mother’s hut and digging out the truck at night was not exactly the most heroic homecoming for one who had been all over the world fighting ogres, but then his was the first motor vehicle ever to come to our homestead.

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May

The ARRL General Class License Manual (ARRL Inc.)
- Highlight Loc. 1881-82  | Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2016, 12:12 PM

If the ac voltage is at a higher frequency, however, the capacitor never gets sufficiently charged to reduce current very much. So a capacitor blocks dc current, resists low-frequency ac current and passes high-frequency ac current. 
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The ARRL General Class License Manual (ARRL Inc.)
- Highlight Loc. 2057-60  | Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2016, 10:44 PM

If the control grid is at a negative voltage with respect to the cathode (grid-to-cathode voltage), the electrons are repelled and are either slowed down, decreasing plate current, or stopped altogether, called cutoff. Conversely, a positive grid-to-cathode voltage accelerates the electrons toward the plate, increasing plate current. Varying the control grid’s voltage therefore varies plate current, amplifying the input signal. 
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The ARRL General Class License Manual (ARRL Inc.)
- Highlight Loc. 2124-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2016, 10:53 PM

An MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) is a special type of RF IC that works through microwave frequencies. [ G6B02 ] Taking advantage of integration to combine many RF devices into a single package, some MMICs perform several functions. One example is an MMIC that acts as an entire receiver front end. The MMIC is what enables communications engineers to construct low-cost cell phones, GPS receivers and other sophisticated examples of wireless technology. 

June

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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 99-103  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:21 PM

Together these traits meant that once this weapon was distributed, the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained might be able to wield, with little difficulty or instruction, a lightweight automatic rifle that could push out blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields. For the purpose for which it was designed—as a device that allowed ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or undue complications—this was an eminently well-conceived tool.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 105-9  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:26 PM

The acronym abbreviated two Russian words, Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic by Kalashnikov, a nod to Senior Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, a twenty-nine-year-old former tank commander to whom the army and the Communist Party formally attributed the weapon’s design. The number was shorthand for 1947, the year a technical bureau in Kovrov, a city east of Moscow with its own hidden arms plants, had finished the prototypes. In the time since, factories in Izhevsk had been tooled up to produce it. Within twenty-five years it would be the most abundant firearm the world had known.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 115-21  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:27 PM

Unlike the nuclear arsenals and the infrastructure that would rise around them—the warheads, the mobile launchers, the strategic bombers and submarines—an automatic rifle was a weapon that could actually be used. And none of the Cold War’s seemingly infinite and fantastic array of killing tools could more readily slip from state control. In this way, 1949 became the year of a mismatched but fated pair, RDS-1 and the AK-47, whose descendants were to work in consonance and shape the conflicts ahead. The nuclear umbrella froze borders in place and discouraged all-out war between the conventional armies stacked in Europe, helping to create conditions in which the Kalashnikov percolated from continent to continent, nation to nation, group to group, man to man, maturing as its numbers grew and its reputation spread into the age’s dominant tool for violence in conflict zones.
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- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 121-24  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:27 PM

By the early 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had startled its participants and as the war in Vietnam was expanding and quickening, the Kremlin and the White House comprehended that their mutual nuclear arsenals had made total war unwinnable. Small wars and proxies would be the means through which the Cold War would be fought. The Kalashnikov Era had arrived. We are living in it still.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 134-36  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:29 PM

The richer context is this: The automatic Kalashnikov offers a lens for examining the miniaturization and simplification of rapid-fire firearms, a set of processes that when uncoupled from free markets and linked to mass production in the planned economies of opaque or brittle nations, enabled automatic firepower to reach uncountable hands.
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- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 140-43  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:30 PM

In the narrowest sense, these weapons were born of a set of ugly and overpowering political forces of the early to mid-twentieth century. Nazism, Stalinism, and the exigencies of the Cold War combined to give assault rifles their early shape. But their roots reach much further back in time; they are the result of evolutionary processes in firearms and ammunition development and changes in military and economic thinking that accompanied an industrializing and polarizing world.
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- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 152-55  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:32 PM

Last, in the latter half of the Cold War, the chronicle shifts again, to an account of how Kalashnikov-pattern rifles migrated from military possession to guerrillas, thugs, bandits, child soldiers, and a host of other users at odds with the stated, or perhaps supposed, reasons of their design. These weapons began as a means to equip standing armies. But the nations that made them lost custody of them, and then control, and now in much of the world they are everyman’s gun.
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- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 197-202  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:40 PM

Once it grew beyond border and crackdown duty in Eastern Europe, and became an automatic weapon for global combat service, it was instantly a groundbreaking firearm, a weapon that rearranged the rules. In the 1960s, when American Marines encountered AK-47s in urban warfare, at Hue City in Vietnam, they discovered that a single guerrilla with a Kalashnikov could slow a company’s advance; they used cannon to rubble buildings in which AK-toting Viet Cong marksmen hid.4 Its power, today a battlefield norm, was at first of an almost unseen sort, at least among the weapons that could be wielded by one man. Interest in it was immediate.
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- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 225-29  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:42 PM

The rifle assumed uses that were at once soldierly and ceremonial, and over the decades it reached far beyond conflicts in which the Kremlin played a primary role. When Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was mourned in 2004 by his followers in Gaza, his casket was guarded by masked men at the ready with folding-stock AKs. The scene was a throwback. Six years earlier along the Cambodian-Thai border the body of Pol Pot was attended by teenage gunmen carrying an Asian version of the same gun. Mastering a Kalashnikov is one of the surest ways to become an underground fighter in our time.
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- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 240-41  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:44 PM

In Los Angeles they have served bank robbers and urban gangs; in the northwestern United States survivalists squirrel them away in anticipation of the worst.
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- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 254-57  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:46 PM

A single comparison provides a sense of the automatic Kalashnikov’s spread. The second-most-abundant family of rifles is the American M-16 family; fewer than 10 million have been made.6*i Serious estimates put the number of Kalashnikovs and its derivatives as high as 100 million. There could be one Kalashnikov for every seventy people alive.
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- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 286-91  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:50 PM

Even a single Kalashnikov can set a nation in motion. In 1989, after the drifter Patrick Purdy opened fire with a Kalashnikov on a schoolyard in Stockton, California, striking thirty-four children and a teacher, Congress began work on the assault weapon ban. Purdy did not use a true automatic Kalashnikov. His rifle was not an automatic. It had been modified to shoot a single bullet with each trigger pull, making it no more dangerous (and arguably less, considering the medium-powered cartridges it fired) than the rifles in many a deer camp. The facts hardly mattered. The mere appearance of a Kalashnikov in a schoolyard crowded with children, its look, was enough to put Congress in a lawmaking mood.
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- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 366-69  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:57 PM

Yepishev said: “Who needs your truth if it stands in our way?”7 This is part of the nature of official Soviet history, and it frames one of the challenges to objective researchers of the period. And for exactly this reason, Soviet sources are useful, even necessary, when clearly shown for what they are. They go to the very character and motivations of actors involved, and provide readers with a basis for a healthy skepticism of official stories in the national stock.
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- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 383-87  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 01:58 PM

A small number of firearms references have attempted this, at least in part, and the United States military has quietly built an arms database, known as CHUCKWAGON, that provides this service to its users. The Pentagon’s database includes data not just on weapon types by style and serial numbers and their sources of production but also on intermediate handlers, including governments and units that have possessed distinctly identifiable weapons at certain times. But for private citizens, none of the publicly available tools are complete, and all of them have errors.
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- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 572-79  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 02:14 PM

war is an incubator for industry and weapons development, it is also a phenomenon that attracts profiteers and quacks. Ripley faced problems that will always accompany a government that has the power to make an arms salesman instantly rich. Several decades later, the British minister of munitions would describe the phenomenon perfectly; “I was, naturally being deluged at the Ministry of Munitions with letters and calls from people who had some new invention or improvement to propose. The great majority of these ideas were, of course, useless, and many of them came from cranks and lunatics.”)24 In Ripley’s case, the forces working against standardization were extraordinary. Both sides had been unprepared for war when war arrived. The Union Army had grown from 16,000 officers and men to a force of 486,000 in a matter of months,25 and Ripley was tasked with finding them arms and ammunition.
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- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 616-20  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 02:21 PM

The names of these lost sons filled lists in the newspapers around the land, North and South. By the time Gatling wrote Lincoln, about half a million Union and Confederate soldiers were dead, by far the largest toll that the nation had ever suffered in war, and ever would. Hundreds of thousands more men had been wounded. These were staggering numbers for a nation with a population of 31 million. (The proportionate equivalent would be roughly 5 million dead Americans in the first three years of the most recent war in Iraq.) They were even more staggering considering that neither the Union nor the Confederate tallies included civilian tolls.
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- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 620-21  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 02:21 PM

Gatling offered to help end the bloodletting through a counterintuitive means: more efficient slaughter.
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- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1143-50  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 05:12 PM

Lord Chelmsford ordered Ulundi to be set afire. His command had left its camp before 7:00 A.M. It faced the Zulu charge at 9:00 A.M. “Ulundi was burning at noon,” he telegraphed home.56 The British, with their superior firepower, had completed the destruction of the Zulu nation in a morning, though they were on enemy terrain and outnumbered roughly four to one. One British officer and ten enlisted men were killed.57 The rout had reached proportions almost absurd, but was also demonstrative of what rapid-fire weapons could do when applied to people who did not have them, or who were ordered in the open by commanders who did not appreciate how machine gunnery worked. Colonel Custer had left his guns behind. The killing at Ulundi had shown their utility in what one officer called “wars with people who wear not trousers.”58
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- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1513-17  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 05:47 PM

At that moment, Hiram Maxim had effectively achieved what he would be most remembered for. The companies he was affiliated with would sell more guns to many buyers, and he would continue his inventing, and would try to design an airplane. With uncanny martial prescience, he would predict aerial bombing before airplanes had even been made. But the demonstration for the kaiser was his moment. Once the kaiser had seen the efficiency and ease of use of the automatic machine gun, Maxim had offered his weapons for sale to the powers that would become the central military actors in World War I.
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- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1816-22  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 06:56 PM

Churchill was shaken. “I have tried to gild war,” he wrote, “and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.” But he was unable to square the sights before him, acre upon acre of the remains of soldiers on their own land, with his understanding of war waged by a “civilized Power.” There was nothing dulce et decorum about the Dervish dead; nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood; all was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was born in me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2012-14  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 07:21 PM

The attitude was well established in successful military units: Moral force was superior to material might, and men were supreme. In its way, the attitude marked one of the older and more enduring vulnerabilities of military units steeped in their past success and lore.
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- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2165-68  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 07:39 PM

Both comments were instructive. Racism still informed colonial operations. And Captain Meinertzhagen, who published his diaries years later and with the benefit of seeing the outcome on the Western Front, could not, even with the passing of time, understand the technical picture for what it was: Intensive machine-gun fire could hardly be beaten back by men with rifles using tactics of yore.
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2300-2308  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 07:53 PM

It is still twilight when the signal is given and we go over the top, advancing across the open ground with difficulty, as two lines of trenches have to be “jumped” by means of narrow bridges, which causes much congestion. Everyone is in the charge; stretcher-bearers, signalers and the Lewis gunners, and we make our way blindly forward through a chaos of bursting shells and machine-gun bullets. It is only possible to see one’s nearest neighbors in the smoke, the sense of direction is entirely lost, and there is an awful feeling of being very much alone. The noise, which at first was deafening, is hardly noticed after a few minutes, shell splinters and bullets are practically ignored, and dead and wounded lying in the way are only looked upon with a sort of mild interest. The sole idea seems to be to keep on until something happens. It appears as though it would be impossible to get through such an inferno, but at last we reach the trench. The Germans have put up a stout resistance but we managed to get about sixty prisoners before they break away for their own lines.
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- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2329-34  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 07:56 PM

Geddes, satisfied that he had a document that would enable him to deliver more machine guns to the front, presented the memorandum to Lloyd George. Lloyd George was aghast. He had quietly taken to talking on his own with soldiers returning from the horrors of France, and had been told repeatedly that the troops needed more machine guns. As minister of munitions, he had no authority to exceed the secretary of war’s request. He seemed not to care. He almost tore up Kitchener’s memo, but Geddes managed to save it for posterity. Lloyd George then broke policy. “Take Kitchener’s maximum [four per battalion],” he said. “Square it, multiply that result by two; and when you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.”
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2428-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:05 PM

maintained his detachment and dark humor to the book’s end, where he lamented that an inhaler he had designed to relieve congestion brought him no fame at all. “It is a very creditable thing to make a killing machine,” he wrote, “and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”54
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- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2443-47  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:08 PM

Soon, they topped the hill, and raced together Over an open stretch of herb and heather Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned With fury against them; earth set sudden cups In thousands for their blood; and the green slope Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space Of them who running on that last high place Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge. Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge, Some say God caught them even before they fell.
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- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2519-34  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:17 PM

Every day Svetlana Vladimirovna works a long shift at the machining factory beside the smelter at the edge of her city in central Russia. The factory makes the best beds in the Soviet Union, all of them of exceptionally fine steel. But no one in Svetlana’s city, including Svetlana, has a bed. This is an unfortunate but perfectly understandable matter of policy. The comrades who run the factory, and who have designed such magnificent and marvelous beds, better than any beds in America, have decided in the spirit of the revolution and correct socialist principles that they must give beds first to all of the hospitals, and to the army, and to the universities, and to the collective farms, and to many other important institutions necessary for the people and the government in the world’s most rapidly and inevitably advancing socialist society. To do this, the factory must work round the clock. Three shifts a day. And only rarely stopping on holidays. It is understood that the workers need beds. But it is not yet the workers’ turn. Only recently did the cosmonauts receive beds! And so everyone who works at the bed factory returns home after each shift and sleeps on the floor. One summer Svetlana’s sister, Natasha, who long ago married a man in Leningrad and moved away, returned for a visit. She was appalled that after ten years Svetlana still had no bed. After all, Svetlana was strong of hand and skilled with tools and one of the best machinists at the bed factory. “My dear sister,” Natasha said. “You have not been thinking correctly. It is very easy to have a bed. Each day you must steal one piece of bed from the parts bins at the factory and smuggle it home. And after a week or two you must assemble the parts. Then you will have a bed. And you will never again sleep on the floor.” Svetlana listened closely. “My dear sister,” she sighed. “It is you who are not thinking correctly. We have tried this many times. We have stolen the bed parts and carried them home. We have assembled them in the room. And every time, after we finish, we discover that instead of a bed we have an automatic Kalashnikov.”
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- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2662-66  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:28 PM

But little in any independent inquiry into the evolution of automatic arms can compare in degree of difficulty to an examination of the origins of Kalashnikov’s AK-47. The reasons are manifold. First and foremost, the weapon came into existence inside one of the most secretive and paranoid military systems the world has known. Within this system, the state-directed process was long, fundamentally bureaucratic, scattered across multiple cities and testing sites, and conducted in a cone of near silence by scores, if not hundreds, of participants. The rules muzzled
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- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2746-52  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:45 PM

The weapon, which Kalashnikov emphasizes as a defensive tool and a shared monument to the population’s creative energy, was rather a marker of the planned economy under totalitarian rule, a nation that could make weapons aplenty but would not design a good toilet, elevator, or camera, or produce large crops of wheat and potatoes, or provide its citizens with decent toothpaste and bars of soap. This is not to say that the planned economy was completely inefficient, though broadly it was. In the planned economy, when the plan worked, the nation got what its planners ordered. Main battle tanks became sturdy, reliable, and fearsome. Refrigerators barely worked. The AK-47 and its descendants in many ways form an apt emblem of the Soviet legacy, a wood-and-metal symbol of what the socialist experiment came to be about.
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- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2775-79  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:47 PM

Since the October Revolution, the population of the former Russian empire had suffered civil war, collectivization, purges, and labor camps. The revolutionary promises of socialism had given way to the centralization of a police state and single-party rule. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, had grown in size and role, and its secret police had become a principal arm of a government that ruled by violence and fear. By the time of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, show trials had thinned the ranks of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and party luminaries.
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2781-82  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:48 PM

Stalin’s personality cult had overtaken the land, and the national conversation was smothered by official propaganda and state lies. The nation was being consumed by the general secretary’s whim, and the whims of those who acted under his hand.
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- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 2804-13  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 08:52 PM

Stalin knew that large military forces would be necessary to occupy and administer this new socialist frontier, and to face down the West. These forces would need weapons. The timing was ideal for arming them. The Soviet Union had gone through an industrial transformation and remained on a war footing. It now had a labor force skilled in making weapons. Its arms and munitions factories, which had grown in size and number and worked around the clock in the war years, were producing weapons at an extraordinary rate. By one official estimate, in slightly less than four years of war, the Soviet Union managed to manufacture 12 million rifles, more than 6 million submachine guns, and almost a million machine guns—more than 13,000 weapons a day.20 But this was an average over a four-year period during which production in the first years was small. By the end of the war, at least one enterprise, the sprawling gun works at Izhevsk, claimed at peak production to be making 12,000 weapons each day by itself, consuming fifty tons of steel every twenty-four hours.21 This was the state of Stalin’s defense complex as it considered its needs for a new infantry arm, a small automatic rifle that could be issued to every man.
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- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2936-37  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 09:05 PM

Hitler had swung round and become a strong supporter. He renamed Schmeisser’s automatic yet again: the sturmgewehr, or storm rifle, which in translation became assault rifle, the designation that stuck. A new class of firearm had been named.
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3016-22  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 09:14 PM

As weapons go, the PPSh was neither handsome nor refined. It was a triumph of pragmatism, expediency, and unpretentious Soviet ideals. One reviewer said it fit a pattern: “The Russians excel in calculated crudity. In these burp guns, the plumbers have all but eliminated the gunsmiths.”41 Aesthetics matter to many gunsmiths. They mattered not at all to a nation that risked falling under Nazi control. Known among Soviet conscripts as the pe-pe-sha, the dumpy submachine gun was popular with Red Army troops and was regarded well enough that when German soldiers captured them, as they often did, they carried them, too. This is the highest vote of confidence an infantry arm can achieve, and this submachine gun, rushed into production to save the nation, became a familiar prop in Soviet symbols of the Great Patriotic War, appearing endlessly in murals and statuary.
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- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3404-10  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 03:18 AM

Often times designers become affixed to a certain idea and hesitate to discard it. They are so attached to their original concept, you could say, like a spinster to her cats! I am just the opposite. Today this idea seems good, tomorrow I might just toss it. The day after I might do the same until such a point, when I can feel the design is completed. When you work with somebody who is afraid to discard an idea that has outlived its usefulness, you notice that they find it difficult to part with it. They think their accomplishments should last for all times. I am referring here to the need for a certain flexibility (of mind), i.e., the ability to test as many ideas as possible and not get too attached to any one in particular. This enables one to develop models of high reliability. . . . There is no limit to improvement!
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- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3632-36  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 03:42 AM

Yet the assault rifle’s practical merits do not explain the proliferation that followed. The AK-47 was not to break out globally because it was well conceived and well made, or because it pushed Soviet small-arms development ahead of the West.2 Technical qualities did not drive socialist arms production. It was the other way around. Soviet military policies mixed with Kremlin foreign-policy decisions to propel the output that made the AK-47 and its knock-offs available almost anywhere.
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- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3661-63  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 03:45 AM

But even Stalin could not last forever. Someone else would send the rifles around the world. Nikita S. Khrushchev, who would replace him, became the Kremlin’s arms dealer, the man whose government passed the weapons out and whose decisions would serve to expand assault-rifle production to outsized levels.
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- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3666-68  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 03:46 AM

As the AK-47 gained acceptance and approval in the Soviet army, the Kremlin used it as a readily deliverable tool in the game of East-West influence jockeying, both as a diplomatic chip to secure new friendships and as an item to be distributed to those willing to harass or otherwise occupy the attention of the West.
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- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 4037-41  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 12:19 AM

On October 24, the government fell. Nagy returned to office. He tried to balance conflicting pulls, working with the Kremlin while feeling the revolution’s ineluctable draw. The Kremlin escalated. On October 25, Soviet divisions from outside Hungary crossed the border. Hungary, a member of the Warsaw Pact, was being invaded by its fraternal mentor, which had pledged to protect it from invasion. The Soviet military had decided that it must destroy the Corvinists. A conventional idea was settled upon: A Hungarian army unit, working with Soviet armor, would storm the theater.
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- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 4243-51  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 12:36 AM

Once civilians started filling orders, scandal was not far behind. In 1921, a shipment of Thompsons bound for the Irish Republican Army was discovered on a vessel soon to depart Hoboken for Dublin, which nearly caused a major diplomatic row between Washington and London.65 The company’s officers dodged indictment, though suspicions lingered that some of them knew more about the Irish deal than they let on. In 1923 the Saturday Evening Post questioned the merits of the gun’s existence, and worried aloud over the uses to which it might be put. Except as an arm for trench warfare or semimilitary police forces having to deal with armed risings, it is difficult to see what honest need they can meet; yet we are faced with the fact that they exist and are on the open market for anyone who wants to buy them. Here, one would say, is an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.66
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 4264-69  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 12:38 AM

There was also the important matter of scale. Perhaps a few hundred Thompsons reached criminal hands in the United States. They caused minor havoc and national uproar, but the United States took steps for the public’s safety before popular ownership of submachine guns became widespread. It began to make law. In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act, part of a series of state and federal laws that restrict the sale, ownership, or use of automatic arms in the United States. Ultimately, after a brief and noisy heyday, Thompson’s trench broom served to illustrate how stable nations with responsive governments can adjust to shifts in weapons technology. These were not the sort of nations where the AK-47 would leave its longest-lasting marks.
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 4270-72  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 12:38 AM

The AK-47 existed on a different order of magnitude, and was controlled by a different political culture. It was being assembled in enormous quantities by governments that, while they lasted, would show small concern for where the weapons went, or to whom. And after these governments fell, many of their automatic arms cascaded out of their possession. The arms flow began with a trickle. It began with József Tibor Fejes.
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 4274-78  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 02:17 AM

Soon after the cease-fire, the Kremlin adopted a conciliatory tone. It published in Pravda a declaration of respect, equality, and noninterference in the domestic affairs of its European satellites. By all appearances, the insurgents had won. They had forced Khrushchev to accept a new point of view about Soviet relations in the buffer zone. The revolution shifted from violent to political, at least on the surface. On November 1, 1955, Prime Minister Nagy delivered a radio address declaring Hungary’s departure from the Warsaw Pact, and proclaiming its new unaligned status. Hungary was leaving the Soviet orbit.
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 4278-81  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 02:18 AM

For Hungarians the proclamation was a moment of national self-determination. For the Kremlin, the radio address challenged Soviet authority over the nations in its grip and threatened to unravel a carefully choreographed alliance. For Nagy, the address was a reactive step; he had received reports of new Soviet military activities. The conciliatory declaration in Pravda had been a trick. On October 31, Khrushchev had decided to invade Hungary again, and with a much larger force.
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- Highlight on Page 280 | Loc. 4283-89  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 02:18 AM

On November 1 in Washington, Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, addressed the National Security Council after digesting the news. He marveled at the insurgents’ success: In a sense, what had occurred there was a miracle. Events had belied all our past views that a popular revolt in the face of modern weapons was an utter impossibility. Nevertheless, the impossible had happened, and because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not effectively be used.67 Public opinion was not so powerful after all. That night, Soviet troops started a reconnaissance of the capital. On November 3, the Soviet and Hungarian delegations met for negotiations. The meeting ended when General Ivan Serov, director of the KGB and Dulles’s Soviet counterpart, placed the Hungarian delegation under arrest.
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- Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 4294-99  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 02:19 AM

The Soviet army called the crackdown Operation Whirlwind and launched it with the codeword grom, Russian for thunder. Armored divisions rolled into Budapest from multiple directions, this time with an ample complement of infantry. Nagy managed a radio broadcast to say the Hungarian government was at its post and Hungarian troops were fighting. Then he fled to the Yugoslav embassy. János Kádár, a rival politician who had secretly betrayed Nagy and received Kremlin backing, announced that a new government had been formed. The attack was overpowering. Soviet units quickly encircled the Hungarian Ministry of Defense and army buildings and barracks, neutralizing any chance of an organized conventional defense.
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- Highlight on Page 288 | Loc. 4407-10  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 03:51 PM

For Kalashnikov, this period should have been a time of professional and personal satisfaction. Instead it brought troubles. Kalashnikov’s fame had fueled resentment, and as his stature grew he faced a species of social persecution that inhabited the post-Stalin Soviet Union. In 1956, Khrushchev issued a speech to a party congress, “On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences,” in which he denounced Stalin’s brutal excesses and the fealty and adoration that surrounded him.
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- Highlight on Page 301 | Loc. 4615-21  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:18 PM

And one common element of modern infantry fighting involved a reliance not on the precision aimed fire of the individual, but on the massed area fire of the group. The means and style of conventional ground warfare had changed. Concentrated firepower was often used to pin down an enemy as much as to kill him, while friendly troops moved in close. This suppressive fire, studies showed, was frequently applied without soldiers’ putting their weapons’ sights to their eyes, unless a distinct target presented itself, which was often not the case. In firefights like this, what was the purpose of such a rifle as La Garde had championed, which could strike a standing man seven hundred yards away? Soldiers often were relying on volume of fire more than on precise plinking at great range, and creating volume of fire required carrying hundreds of bullets, which was not easy to do if those bullets were heavy and large.
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- Highlight on Page 310 | Loc. 4754-60  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:37 PM

American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent on missions against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters said they fired their weapons for the first time only in combat.4 And yet by summer 1967, as Hotel Company rushed toward Ap Sieu Quan, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month. One reason for their success was their weapons. Nikita S. Khrushchev was gone from the Kremlin, forced into retirement in a bloodless coup in 1964. But his practice of using arms transfers as a foreign-policy lever continued, and the People’s Republic of China had followed the Soviet example with haste.
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- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 4822-26  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:43 PM

Had the early M-16 been a reliable automatic rifle, this might have been a straightforward and simple development, a story as old as war. One side gets a new weapon, the other side matches it in kind. In this way, the war in Vietnam became the first large conflict in which both sides carried assault rifles—initially in small numbers but eventually as the predominant firearm. But the American adoption of assault rifles flowed from reaction rather than from foresight or planning, and it was painful and bungled. The early M-16 and its ammunition formed a combination not ready for war.
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- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4831-34  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:44 PM

The origins of the problems emerge in especially sharp relief when viewed in contrast to the Soviet Union’s much more successful rifle program. The AK-47 and AKM had resulted from methodical state-directed pursuits. The M-16 arrived in troops’ hands by another route. The American system was neither capitalist nor fully state-driven. It was a disharmonious hybrid.
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- Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 4867-69  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:51 PM

For all these reasons, the M-16 was not a ready equalizer. It was the accidental rifle, pushed into service by a confluence of historical forces that left the United States military in a rush and unwilling to explore a wider set of options or a more careful course. These were conditions for disaster, as the Marines of Second Battalion, Third Marines were finding out.
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- Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 4871-75  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:52 PM

Kennedy brought with him Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former top executive at Ford, and a believer in an approach to decision-making called “systems analysis,” which had been conceived in the 1950s at the Rand Corporation. Systems analysis centered on intensive study of problems and options, with examinations of costs, benefits, and risks of potential decisions. Its introduction to the Pentagon, along with a cadre of McNamara’s disciples, who called themselves the whiz kids, was a frontal challenge to the military establishment.
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- Highlight on Page 320 | Loc. 4895-4901  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2016, 04:55 PM

McNamara sensed at least this much. In October 1962, after his aides had examined the gun gap, he wrote a secret memorandum to Cyrus R. Vance, the secretary of the army. The memorandum was a marker of bureaucratic exasperation. “I have seen certain evidence,” he wrote: ... which appears to indicate that: 1. With the M-14 rifle in 1962, we are equipping our forces with a weapon definitely inferior in firepower and combat effectiveness to the assault rifle with which the Soviets have equipped their own and their satellite forces worldwide since 1950. This was a painful declaration for the United States’ most senior military official at the height of the Cold War—a frank admission that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the United States in an important way.
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- Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 5232-38  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 02:02 AM

Firearms and their ammunition form a system. While that system can seem exceedingly simple compared to a fighter jet or a tank, it often is not simple at all. Automatic firearms and cartridges work together in complex ways, and changes to either a weapon or a cartridge can create pervasive disharmonies that can be difficult to pinpoint; ghosts can readily inhabit these machines, and they do. The services and the committee, working through both the government’s arsenal and Colt’s, proceeded to make changes to the AR-15 and the .223 round—more than one hundred in all. Many changes were minor and arcane. Others, including a change to the rifling in the AR-15’s barrel and the addition of a device that could push the bolt forward manually, were significant and consumed months of infighting and interservice positioning. Throughout it all, as the members maneuvered and quarreled, the committee missed a basic step—ensuring that the rifle was resistant to corrosion.
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- Highlight on Page 343 | Loc. 5251-54  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 02:04 AM

McNamara had opened discussions he had not anticipated. The American rifle program, once staid and organized, had become fully disordered. The army had developed one weapon, the M-14, and lobbied for its approval and survival. The air force had snubbed its sister service and adopted the AR-15, which was now called the M-16. McNamara had begun to push the M-16 into select units’ hands. And the Marine Corps was campaigning for the Stoner 63.
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- Highlight on Page 349 | Loc. 5352-65  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 10:25 AM

Moreover, 95 percent of the combat veterans said that when they did see Viet Cong and NVA soldiers, the enemy was either running, prone, or in some sort of hiding.40 What all of this meant was that one touted feature of the M-16—an ability to strike and penetrate steel helmets at five hundred yards—was almost irrelevant in jungle war. This was a dispiriting finding, given that the desire for this long-range performance had led the army to accept a propellant that made the rifle less reliable. And the soldiers’ narrative comments hinted at burgeoning problems. Some soldiers liked the M-16. But many others said that while it was a good rifle when it worked, it jammed. Ominously, several soldiers pleaded for cleaning equipment.41 The National Rifle Association also was ready to give the rifle a boost, and prepared an article for the American Rifleman that praised the M-16. The article, published several months later, asserted that the rifle “bears up well under harsh field conditions” and that “dust, dirt, and rain do not make the M-16A1 less functional provided minimal care is exercised.” As with the stoppages mentioned casually in Shooting Times, the NRA’s article carried a strong whiff of the malfunctions plaguing the rifle. It mentioned problems with dirty chambers, extraction, and jamming, but only briefly. The American Rifleman concluded, without offering evidence, that the rifle “is proving itself in Vietnam.”42 The gun press, with access to arms and arms companies that the traditional media could not match, was missing the biggest small-arms story of the war. The troops would have to find out the truth themselves. They would get that chance.
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- Highlight on Page 352 | Loc. 5390-99  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:01 AM

His letter back to Colonel Yount detailed a supply failure. It also revealed his own uncertainty about the army’s state of knowledge of the weapons it was handing out. The 173rd uses some field expedience, primarily for cleaning the chamber and the bore of the weapons. They either use a piece of commo wire, a shoe lace or a nylon cord which they carry with them. They take a 30 caliber patch cut it in half, fold it once and loop the string or what ever it is to the center of this patch. Then using oil they pull it through the bore of the weapon starting from the chamber. As they do this, they clean both the chamber and the bore and then dry it off. They also put a little bit of oil on it. I have not been able to find anyone that does not put a little bit of oil in the chamber of the weapon to prevent it from corroding. I try to discourage it, however I am not completely convinced myself that if you leave the chamber completely dry you won’t have a problem resulting from corrosion, even if you cleaned your weapon every day.44 No one, it seemed, was quite sure what to do with this new rifle, not even the officers issuing it.
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- Highlight on Page 353 | Loc. 5400-5402  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:02 AM

In at least one of these cases, the American soldier firing it was killed.45 The problems were multiplying. Of 2,000 M-16s tested at the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, 384 malfunctioned.46
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- Highlight on Page 354 | Loc. 5414-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:03 AM

All the rifles have an extremely high rate of fire which isn’t helping us in the least bit. You better get that new buffer over here right pronto to stop some of this malfunction. It sure will help. Finishes have been wearing off many of the weapons and I’ve actually seen holes eaten right through into the charging handle area and along the lower receiver area, underneath the dust cover. You can see right into the magazine. Carrying handles are pretty well eaten up on many of the weapons. Rust is covering quite a few of them.48
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- Highlight on Page 356 | Loc. 5444-52  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:12 AM

November 1966, the latest news of the M-16’s poor performance in Vietnam reached top channels in the army. Colonel Yount visited the Pentagon to brief now-Colonel Hallock. Colonel Hallock’s interest in the M-16 was zealous and personal. He had been an early supporter of the rifle, and a supervisor of Project AGILE more than four years before. The meeting marked a potentially agonizing moment. The SAWS test had zeroed in on problems with misfeeds and fouling related to ball powder. The new weighted buffer had been identified as a fix for at least part of the problem. But the buffer was available only for newly manufactured weapons at Colt’s factory—not for the scores of thousands of rifles already in Vietnam. The weapon Colonel Hallock had advocated was failing, and as near as he could tell, the failures were getting American soldiers killed. What to do? Colonel Hallock filed a classified memorandum for the record based on his meeting. It left no doubt that the army had long understood the scope and nature of the M-16’s problems, had done little to resolve them, and still was moving slowly to help soldiers with malfunctioning weapons in Vietnam.
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- Highlight on Page 357 | Loc. 5461-66  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:13 AM

Far from the war, the two colonels discussed a list of factors compounding the rifle’s poor performance—lackluster weapons-cleaning habits, shortages of cleaning equipment, insufficient training, and a host of jerry-rigged practices by soldiers, including soaking ammunition with oil. This was not how the M-16’s introduction as the primary firearm in Vietnam was supposed to go. And Colonel Yount’s inaction was not how military officers were expected to carry out their duties. Colonel Hallock wanted the problems remedied. But his bureaucratic instincts interfered. He was equally interested in restricting who knew of the problems.
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- Highlight on Page 357 | Loc. 5467-73  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:14 AM

I said, as I have on several other occasions during the last year, that this situation was potentially explosive with the Congress, within Defense, in the Army, and with the public, and that the malfunctions alone could be expecting to be causing loss of soldiers [sic] lives, even though the data showed the XM16E1 to be more effective than other rifles even with the malfunctions. Also, that if there were excessive malfunction rates, the troops would lose confidence in their weapon, even though the causes were not due to weapon design, and that it was a serious thing for the troops to lose confidence in their weapon. I urged again that highest priority be given to correct this situation and also that he consider the security aspect of the information in technical and other channels.
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- Highlight on Page 357 | Loc. 5474-80  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:15 AM

Colonel Hallock stamped his memorandum SECRET HOLD CLOSE repeatedly, and sent it to Dr. Jacob Stockfisch, codirector of the Force Planning and Analysis Office, urging that the gloomy information be provided to the army chief of staff. (Stockfisch’s office reported both to the secretary of the army and the army chief of staff; it was a strong proponent of the M-16.) Read against what was happening in Vietnam, and as more rifles known to be unreliable were being manufactured and issued to men headed to combat, the correspondence was chilling. The military had the option of delaying the issue of the M-16 until its shortcomings were worked out, and to allow troops to carry weapons that worked. But this would have meant admitting to a mistake and sounding an alarm. It would have required an officer to display courage. Instead, corporate instincts and self-protection had trumped integrity and good sense.
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- Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5482-85  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:15 AM

Colonel Yount added that only he and two other people were allowed to keep file copies of his reports. “All other copies,” he wrote, “will be destroyed within 10 days of receipt.”52 At a time when the M-16 program desperately needed candor, attention, and more resources, and when commanders and troops in the field should have been informed of the problems emerging in Vietnam, another cover-up had begun.
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- Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5485-89  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:15 AM

It is easy, based on the existing records, to see Colonel Yount and Colonel Hallock as bureaucratic villains; certainly they acted against the interests of the troops in Vietnam. Their careerist behavior was of a familiar species, and ugly, even unconscionable, when revealed. If some of the men who had been in fighting in which M-16s had failed could have read what Colonel Hallock wrote, they would have demanded investigations. Rage was high enough in Vietnam that no small number of grunts would have wanted to do worse.
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- Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5492-96  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:16 AM

But these two colonels were hardly alone. They were part of a procurement and advocacy phenomenon that had slipped from control. Since early 1963, McNamara’s office had pushed the M-16 along without check. Colonel Yount managed the program, but he did not provide its direction or have control over many of its decisions. With General Westmoreland calling for more rifles, all involved in the rifle program faced internal pressure to keep M-16s flowing off the assembly lines and into Vietnam. And yet it was a fateful moment to choose to play along quietly. It was in many ways a last chance.
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- Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 5496-99  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:16 AM

Effective November 4, the army had decided to adopt the M-16 as its standard rifle. Step by step, decision by decision, without clear signs of institutional intent, the watermelon shoot on Boutelle’s farm and the untrustworthy Project AGILE report had led to policy. The M-16, a rifle with a flawed development history, was to replace the M-14, even though the army knew the powder-rifle mismatch was causing high M-16 malfunction rates, and before a technical solution had been put into place.
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- Highlight on Page 360 | Loc. 5508-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:18 AM

In early February 1967, the armorers for Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, stationed near the coast at Phu Bai, Vietnam, grew concerned about the new rifles in the battalion’s custody. The Marine Corps was beginning to receive its share of M-16s. Though this battalion’s rifles had been used just four times, and only for training, they were already pitted. The armorers reported their concerns and offered other observations as well. The weapons rusted easily; a recessed area on the bolt was difficult to clean; during firing, the trigger pin and hammer pin “tended to work their way out of the receiver.” The armorers also wrote that “we experienced more than a normal amount of ruptured cartridges.”54 The mix of rapid corrosion and cleaning difficulties were an ill-boding combination for a rifle issued for fighting in rain forests and rice paddies. The Marine supply officers seemed alarmed. “This rifle is currently being utilized by units engaged in active combat,” they wrote to the Rock Island Arsenal. “Therefore, an expeditious evaluation is requested.”55 The complaint reached the office of Colonel Yount. Before an army technician was able to examine the weapons, supervisors at the arsenal ordered him to hand out new maintenance instructions that were to be “taken by the user to correct reported problem.”
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- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 5522-28  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:19 AM

Headquarters had spoken. Though the army knew the M-16 had technical problems that needed technical solutions, combat units were blamed for their rifle’s worrisome traits. The troops entered the monsoon season of 1967 with rifles prone to fail, and a bureaucracy ready to scold them when they did. The decisions to blame the infantry, and to keep the problems out of public discourse while issuing more rifles, were untenable. By early 1967, the sense that something was awry had reached Washington. Angry troops were sending home letters. Journalists were hearing complaints. Reports of the AK-47’s reliability were also providing an obvious contrast. The Washington Daily News posed the question. How did the world’s wealthiest nation lag behind communist countries in its most basic fighting tool?
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- Highlight on Page 362 | Loc. 5545-48  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:21 AM

The two weapons were designed in fundamentally different ways and their differences in lineage left the M-16 lacking in reliability for reasons that no manufacturing tweaks or upgrades could entirely fix. The AK-47’s main operating system had been conceived to have a loose fit and massive parts, and the resulting excess energy available in each firing cycle made it resistant to jamming.
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- Highlight on Page 363 | Loc. 5559-62  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:26 AM

The M-16 was the manifestation of a different set of design ideas. Its parts were made to be a snug fit, almost in the manner of a manually operated bolt-action rifle. The tight fit helped make the M-16 more accurate than the Kalashnikov, all the way out to the theoretically impressive five hundred yards. It also seemed to make it undependable. Dust, dirt, sand, rust, carbon buildup—all these things could slow or obstruct the movement of an M-16’s bolt.
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- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 5568-73  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:27 AM

By spring 1967, the problems had become so widely known that Congress took an interest. On May 3, 1967, Representative L. Mendel Rivers, Democrat of South Carolina and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, appointed Representative Richard H. Ichord, Democrat of Missouri, as head of a special subcommittee to examine “the development, production, distribution and sale of M-16 rifles.”57 Ichord steered wide of the question of which weapon was better—the M-14 or the M-16—for Vietnam or elsewhere. He left such questions to soldiers.58 If the military wanted the M-16, so be it. He wanted to know why the M-16 was malfunctioning at an unacceptably high rate.
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- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 5582-89  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:28 AM

Then came the shock. On April 27, the battalion was preparing for combat against dug-in NVA units on Hills 861 and 881 near Khe Sanh. It spent much of the day watching artillery and air strikes pounding suspected NVA positions on the high ground. On April 29, the company moved toward Hill 881 North, and that night, after recovering the remains of a missing Marine, it spent the night in the bush on the approach to the southeast of Hill 881 North. On April 30, the company moved out on foot again, jumping into an attack at first light with Second and Third platoons abreast of each other and moving forward in a battle formation known as “on line.” In Third Platoon, as Second Lieutenant Thomas R. Givvin, the platoon commander, walked uphill he found at least five M-16s with cleaning rods forced down their barrels resting on the ground.60 These were the discards of Marines who had fought on the hill several days before. Hotel Company moved through tall elephant grass and was ambushed at a distance of about fifty meters by the North Vietnamese Army.
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- Highlight on Page 366 | Loc. 5605-14  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:30 AM

Hotel Company had only one platoon—First Platoon—that was still at fighting strength. As the sweat-soaked Marines at last moved near the enemy bunkers, and were preparing to rush, the captain gave an order over the radio to his platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Ord Elliott: Fix bayonets. He was effectively telling men to prepare to fight to the death, hand to hand. The order was superfluous. Lieutenant Elliot had come to the same decision himself. He had already told the men to ready their knives. With bayonets affixed, the officers thought, the Marines whose M-16s failed might slash or stab their way through the bunkers.62 It was 1967, the age of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the B-52 Stratofortress, and the submarine-launched Polaris ballistic missile. A Marine Corps platoon and company commander were preparing their men for an attack in which they would wield their rifles like lances, swords, and spears. And that was Captain Madonna’s assessment of Colt’s assault rifle, circa 1967. “It was a pretty good bayonet holder,” he said. “I knew those weapons were failing. I didn’t know what the rate was, but I knew I couldn’t rely on them anymore.”
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- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 5629-36  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:32 AM

By May 5, the jamming had been widespread enough that sadly surreal scenes unfolded at one helicopter landing zone on Hill 881 North, where wounded Marines, who had been hit in a mortar bombardment, were waiting to be evacuated. Marines who had not been wounded wandered among the casualties, asking their bloodied colleagues if their rifles had worked. When they found a wounded Marine whose rifle had performed well, they asked to trade and exchanged a faulty M-16 for the M-16 that had reliably fired. Other Marines had also found that three pins near the trigger assembly had a tendency to work loose and slip out, rendering the rifles useless.64 Over several days, the Marines’ initial satisfaction with their M-16s had turned to astonishment, then disgust. Emotions were further inflamed by a sense among troops that the Pentagon had failed to provide them with enough cleaning rods, as the army technical team had found when they visited Vietnam six months before.
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- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 5637-39  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:32 AM

Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Before we left Okinawa, we were all issued the new rifle, the M-16. Practically everyone of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.
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- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 5641-45  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:33 AM

There were, as is often the case, grains of truth in the official statements, just as there were errors and exaggerations in some of the troops’ accounts. In the Hill Fights rifles failed; by most accounts, many rifles. But the claim that “practically everyone of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him” was overstatement, at least battalionwide. By seizing on such statements and becoming argumentative, the officers in Washington missed the substantial truth: M-16s were failing at an alarming rate, the failures put lives at risk, and the grunts had lost faith in their rifles and in some cases in their chain of command.
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- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 5655-58  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:34 AM

How this translated into combat was captured in the last minutes in the life of Lance Corporal David C. Borey, a Marine from Massachusetts assigned to Bravo Company, First Battalion, First Marine Regiment. A fellow Marine mailed a letter home describing the skirmish, which erupted after his unit had been airlifted outside Da Nang and was caught in the open crossing a rice paddy the next day. “This is how it happened,” he wrote:
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- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 5658-66  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:35 AM

Like you said, Dad, we are all complaining about the M-16. When it works you can’t beat it but it jams so goddamn easy. The only cover we had was a 5'' dike to hide behind. There was a steady flow of lead going back and forth and we were jaming [sic] left and right. And when they jam the only thing you can do is poke a cleaning rod down the bore and punch out the empty shell. Borey had the only cleaning rod in our group and he was running up and down the line punching out the bores. I knew he was going to get it and I think he did too. A man needed the cleaning rod and Dave jumped up and started running towards him. As soon as he got up he was hit in the foot. He was about 10 feet in front of me and he called to me and said—Hey Bert I’m hit. He couldn’t stay where he was—bullets were hitting the dirt all around him. He had to get back to the dike. I told him to get up and run and I’d shoot grazing fire into the tree line where the VC were. I got three magazines and fired 60 rounds to cover him but as he was running a goddamn VC bullet hit in the back.68
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- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 5666-72  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:35 AM

The wall of silence had broken. One incident after another eroded public confidence. Senator Peter H. Dominick, a Republican from Colorado, visited Vietnam in May 1967 at roughly the same time that Lance Corporal Borey was shot. Dominick inquired about the M-16. He was told it was a good weapon and was invited to test fire a sample rifle himself. Someone produced an M-16 and handed it to the senator, who tried to fire it. It jammed.69 In June, members of Ichord’s panel held their own test fire with an M-16 provided by Colt’s. If any one M-16 might have been expected to perform flawlessly, this should have been it: the test rifle a manufacturer facing congressional investigation presented as a sample to Congress. The subcommittee’s rifle jammed several times.
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- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 5673-75  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:36 AM

The other night we got a radio message from one of our night ambushes. . . . The last words they said were, “out of hand grenades, all weapons jammed.” The next morning when they got to them, their hands were all skinned up and cut and their stocks on their rifles were all broken from using them as clubs.
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- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 5715-19  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:39 AM

Private First Class Nickelson had survived. He rose to his feet but left his jammed rifle in the dirt. He had arrived in Vietnam a month before. Until that day, he had never handled this kind of rifle. In the United States, the Marine Corps had trained him on an M-14. In his one previous firefight, his M-16 had jammed, too—after firing a single round. He had been in two firefights against NVA soldiers with automatic rifles, and he had managed to fire only three rounds back. What good was a rifle that did not work? Nickelson was new to war. He was no fool. He understood this was not right.
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- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 5719-25  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:40 AM

Upon arriving in Vietnam and before being assigned to the battalion, Nickelson had bought a .38 revolver from a soldier who was rotating home. He would carry that until the Marine Corps could give him a rifle he could trust. An officer ordered him to pick up his M-16. Nickelson was incredulous. “Fuck you,” he said. An argument broke out at the edge of the smoking village. Nickelson refused to carry a rifle that did not work. Other Marines intervened. Hotel Company had enough problems. A compromise was reached—he would carry an M79 grenade launcher. Someone produced his new weapon. The Marine who had carried it had been shot; it was available for anyone else’s use. Nickelson slung it and walked into Ap Sieu Quan.
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- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5728-32  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:40 AM

By the time helicopters flew back to the USS Tripoli on July 26, the mood in Hotel Company was dark. The company’s executive officer, Lieutenant Chervenak, had queried each platoon in Ap Sieu Quan and learned that forty rifles had jammed during the battle. Forty rifles. Roughly a quarter of the company had been under fire and unable to fight back. The officers in other companies in Second Battalion, Third Marines told him of similar problems in their own firefights during Operation Bear Chain.
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- Highlight on Page 375 | Loc. 5744-58  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:42 AM

The Corps’ reaction similarly stumped him. The Marine Corps had not been interested in the M-16 throughout the early 1960s.75 But once the Pentagon took its decision, the Corps’ generals adopted the Beltway stance. A din of complaints about M-16 jamming had risen from the ranks. The generals’ replies mixed paternalistic denials that the M-16 was failing with strong defenses of the weapon’s merits. The senior officers followed the army’s pattern: They blamed the troops for the weapons’ problems. At a press conference in Da Nang just after the battles for Hills 861 and 881, one highly decorated commander, Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt of the Third Marine Amphibious Force, delivered a classic performance of an officer who has lost touch with his men. First he declared that the Marines in his command were “100 percent sold” on the M-16. Most of those who had relied on the weapon in battle, he added, “have nothing but praise for it.” This can be read only as a lie. General Walt pressed on. He put blame for malfunctions squarely upon individual Marines and their officers and noncommissioned officers, saying they either had not adequately maintained their rifles or had tried to force too many rounds into their magazines. This was a slap at the men at war. In a booming slip of the tongue, General Walt added that “rumors” of unsatisfactory M-16 performance were started “by a very, very small majority.”76 Not long after the press conference, General Walt was reassigned to Washington and elevated to the post of the Corps’ assistant commandant. In July, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Greene, repeated General Walt’s position, calling the M-16 “ideally suited” for the jungle warfare of Vietnam. The brass had set a tone. With the generals standing behind the M-16, complaints had little chance of finding a supporting audience. The young Marines in Vietnam were on their own.
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- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 5759-66  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:42 AM

One officer responsible for the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s public statements described an official prohibition against mentioning M-16 malfunctions. This was a subject not to be broached in any army comments or in conversations with journalists, along with other topics officially deemed too unsettling for the public’s ears: “the defeat of U.S. units,” “B-52 and other bombing errors,” “female VC,” “very young VC,” and the “use of flamethrowers, hand-held or track-mounted.” MACV31 told all information officers prior to my arrival that the M16 was not a topic for discussion. Newsmen were not to question soldiers about the weapon. No stories about the rifle jamming or malfunctioning were to be written. This was done despite the fact that many GIs hated the M16, felt they couldn’t trust it. And until an order stopped the procedure, carried their own weapons instead: carbines, 45 caliber grease guns, rifles sent from home, captured AK47s, et cetera.
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- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 5785-99  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:44 AM

I am a Marine First Lieutenant and have been serving in a rifle company in Vietnam since the 15th of May. Ever since my arrival, immediately following the battle of hill 881, one controversy has loomed above all others—that of the M-16 rifle. I feel that is my duty and responsibility to report the truth about this rifle as I have seen it. My conscience will not let me rest any longer. The idea of a lightweight automatic weapon is a fine idea and I do not categorically reject the M-16 rifle as being useless. I do believe, however, that there is a basic mechanical deficiency within the weapon which causes a failure to extract. This failure to extract a spent casing from the chamber allows another round to be fed in behind the unextracted casing causing the rifle to jam. When this occurs, a cleaning and rod and precious seconds are needed to clear the weapon. A marine in a firefight does not have those precious seconds. We are constantly told that improper cleaning and unfamiliarity with the weapon cause any malfunction which may occur. Any rifle that requires cleaning to the degree they speak of has no place as a combat weapon. I believe that the cold, hard facts about the M-16 are clouded over by a fabrication of the truth for political and financial considerations. I have seen too many marines hiding behind a paddy dike trying to clear their rifle to accept those explanations any longer. Our battalion has test fired these rifles on numerous occasions, aboard the ship and in the field, to try to find a solution to this problem. All rifles were cleaned and inspected prior to these tests. Having supervised several of these tests, I will swear to the fact that at least 25 to 40% of the rifles malfunctioned at least once under these optimum conditions.
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- Highlight on Page 379 | Loc. 5799-5810  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:44 AM

During a recent fight on the 21st of July, no fewer than 40 men in my company reported to me that their rifles had malfunctioned because of failure to extract. Because of these inoperative rifles we were severely hampered in our efforts to extract a platoon which had been pinned down. Lack of sufficient firepower also caused us great difficulty in getting our casualties out. Having 40 rifles malfunction in any rifle company is a serious matter, and in an understrengthened company such as ours, the gravity of the situation is greatly increased. This problem is increasing in its seriousness and I know that is a major morale problem in the company. Unfortunately, all our complaints and the results of our tests never seem to reach willing ears. I do not mean for this letter to slap at my battalion, the Marine Corps, the Colt Manufacturing Company, the Defense Department or anyone else concerned. It is written out of concern for the safety of the men in my company and of the great morale problem that the M-16 causes. I will stand and stake my reputation on the fact that we have had men wounded and perhaps killed because of inoperative rifles. The men in my company have absolutely no confidence in the weapon they carry, and yet, they will be asked to go on another operation in the very near future carrying this very same weapon. Word will come down from higher up, however, stating that no one will take a negative attitude about the M-16, nor will they speak of the weapon in a derogatory manner to any newsman.
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- Highlight on Page 379 | Loc. 5811-14  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:45 AM

I can only hope that men such as yourself, who are in a position to do something, WILL do something. The search for the truth is paramount in all of us and I ask you to look into this problem and search for the truth there. I will stand behind every word that I have written. I think that this problem has been overlooked too long and too many attempts have been made to gloss over a situation that endangers the lives of men.79
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- Highlight on Page 380 | Loc. 5821-27  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:49 AM

In all of the available records surrounding the bloody introduction of the M-16 to American military service, this stands as one of the few brave and candidly honest acts. The officers behind Project AGILE had produced a report no follow-up studies could support. General Johnson had quietly ordered the rifle into service knowing that it was unreliable. Colonel Hallock and Colonel Yount had enforced a hush about the M-16’s many performance problems, even while agreeing that the weapons’ failures were getting American soldiers killed. Officials at Colt’s were insisting in public that the weapon worked well while they reviewed internal reports that said it did not. It fell to a twenty-three-year-old Marine lieutenant, his unit thinned by casualties while their rifles jammed, to stake his name on the truth.
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- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 5838-48  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:50 AM

A pair of Marines had swung far to the left during the firefight. They dashed through vegetation and surprised the guerrillas at close range. But as the Marine opened fire his M-16 seized up. One round did not extract and the rifle tried to feed a round in behind it, leaving the Marine with a jam that would take many seconds, even minutes, to clear. He was helpless. The Viet Cong turned and killed him. After recovering the Marine’s body and the jammed rifle, Lieutenant Chritton allowed his fury to guide him. He and other Marines carried the dead Marine and his rifle to the battalion command post and entered the tent to confront the battalion commander with the facts. The commander and the executive officer pulled the lieutenant aside, away from the Marine’s corpse. The executive officer produced a camera, placed the jammed rifle on a table, and made a series of photographs. “We’ll take care of this,” the commander told him. But nothing had come of it, and soon Lieutenant Chritton’s dream started to follow him through his nights. In it, he was home in the United States, and he had kidnapped the president of Colt’s and forced him to admit that Colt’s was knowingly selling bad rifles to the government. Lieutenant Chritton was hardly the irrational sort. He certainly was no criminal. He left the Marine Corps and went on to a long civilian career as a lawyer. The dream stayed with him for his remaining months in Vietnam, and it visited him intermittently after he returned home to the United States.
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- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 5849-52  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:51 AM

Back in Washington, Representative Ichord’s subcommittee ground toward its conclusion. The army had stonewalled the congressmen in many ways as they held hearings and lobbed correspondence back and forth with the Pentagon. Important witnesses were never produced. (Colonel Hallock, the supervisor of Project AGILE who later proposed and enforced a cover-up, avoided scrutiny. On May 31, as complaints from Vietnam reached high pitch, he retired.)
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- Highlight on Page 383 | Loc. 5862-64  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:52 AM

Representative William G. Bray, a Republican from Indiana and a subcommittee member, called the collusion “one of the most incredible and inexcusable exercises in duplicity I have ever seen.”85
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- Highlight on Page 384 | Loc. 5874-84  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:54 AM

Twelve days after the release of Ichord’s report, on October 29, the Washington Post, the newspaper of the nation’s political class, published Lieutenant Chervenak’s letter.86 His words had an instant effect. The Marine Corps opened an investigation—not into the causes of the rifle’s failures or the slow reaction by the chain of command to troops’ complaints, but into the officer who dared to write to the Washington Post. General Greene personally called the battalion, looking for Lieutenant Chervenak. By chance the lieutenant was on a rest period in Japan. The brass could not find him. An investigating officer was assigned and canvassed Marines in the battalion, taking sworn statements. He could establish no real wrongdoing. Telling the truth was not legally forbidden, it was just discouraged to tell the truth this way. The offense was a matter of protocol, not of law. When Lieutenant Chervenak returned, the battalion executive officer presented him a letter of reprimand for failure to follow proper channels.87 Lieutenant Chervenak was unmoved. He listened politely. When the major handed the letter to him he did not bother to read it. He was not by nature a troublemaker. But he knew that given the same circumstances, he would do the same thing again.
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- Highlight on Page 384 | Loc. 5886-91  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:55 AM

Marine Corps began facing facts it had ignored. On December 3, a pair of representatives from Colt’s and the Marine Corps caught up with the battalion at a base outside Da Nang. They had been ordered to follow up on the lieutenant’s allegations. Marines gathered in the theater for a presentation, at which the Marine Corps representative, a warrant officer, opened with the familiar lines. He told his audience that the M-16 was a good rifle and if it was failing it was because they were not cleaning it adequately. The Marines shouted and jeered. A near riot ensued. The battalion commander demanded order and quiet. The representative from Colt’s, Kanemitsu Ito, was so shaken he dared not take notes.
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- Highlight on Page 385 | Loc. 5895-5902  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:56 AM

As the Marines filed past to show him rifles that had failed them, he worried that the troops might label him a profiteer as he and the warrant officer condemned pitted rifles. After all, he thought, every rifle to be replaced might be seen as another sale for Colt’s. He decided to let the warrant officer do most of the talking. Quietly, out of the center of attention, he watched. That night, emotionally and physically exhausted, Ito typed a letter and sent it back to Colt’s. He had important news to share. What Lieutenant Chervenak had written to the Washington Post was not quite right. Matters were actually much worse. I walked into a den of angry, feroucious [sic] lions when I visited the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marines. It was really a touchy situation. I would never ask anyone else to be in the situation I was in. The officers and a great majority of the men hated the M-16A1 rifles. They had a right to hate it. The chambers of the rifles were so badly pitted that the only thing they could use the rifles were for a club.89
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- Highlight on Page 385 | Loc. 5903-11  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:56 AM

The examination of 445 rifles found that many had “chambers that looked like the surface of the moon”; 286 rifles were immediately condemned as unfit for combat use. Ito understood how serious this was. He sought as much information as he could get. He looked for Lieutenant Chervenak, but by then the lieutenant had been reassigned out of Hotel Company, and Ito could not find him. Ito read a copy of the battalion’s investigation and discovered it contained ninety-six sworn statements from Marines who agreed with the lieutenant’s letter. If this were not enough, in Hotel Company, where Lieutenant Chervenak had written of 40 jammed rifles, his letter was more than vindicated: 67 of the company’s 85 rifles were so pitted that the warrant officer and Ito replaced them on the spot. And the charge that Marines had not been cleaning their rifles could find no traction here. The company commander during Operation Bear Chain, Captain Culver, had been a member of the Marine Corps’ Rifle Team—a bunch of crack shots. Captain Culver was almost religious about forcing his Marines to clean their weapons. To him, any suggestion otherwise was a personal insult.
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- Highlight on Page 386 | Loc. 5917-22  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:57 AM

Ito saw the problems for what they were. His correspondence to Colt’s did nothing to sugarcoat them. But he was in a difficult position. Colt’s had wanted him to distribute surveys about the rifle. A lockdown was in place. The questionnaires are out of the question. The M-16 rifle is a very hot topic over here. They don’t want any names or units put on paper. I have been asked not to put anything down on paper. Unit COs [commanding officers] and staff officers forbid the use of the questionnaires. I go into the field armed (would you believe) with an M-16 rifle, when I can get one. Everything that I inspect and see, I must keep in my head until I can get to a place to write it down.91
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- Highlight on Page 387 | Loc. 5930-35  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:58 AM

Every time I think that I am tired, I do these things. As I said I have a lot of guts. I wished that others had the guts to look at things I see or ask questions. Some had reasons to hate me yet they like me because I am helping—a few don’t really know. I don’t know what to say to them—there are people with no arms, legs, faces and the rest. These are some of the places I go to find the information I need. I go every place, but I sure wouldn’t ask anyone else to do it.… . . . It is difficult working 18–20 hours a day—7 days a week. Any time I am tired I go back to the 24th, 93rd Evac or the 3rd Field Hospitals.
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- Highlight on Page 388 | Loc. 5937-39  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:58 AM

Even as late as summer 1967, while complaints of jamming rose to a roar, Colt’s executives had been briefing journalists as if nothing were wrong. They told the executive editor of Popular Mechanics that they had received “no official complaints from their customer—the Department of Defense.”
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- Highlight on Page 388 | Loc. 5946-56  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 11:59 AM

In the end, Kanemitsu Ito was a midlevel engineer. He could describe what he had seen. He could share what he knew. But Benke, the man who ran Colt’s Firearms Division, would get the last word. Benke interjected. He told the military officers present that “the observations were based on very brief contact, hearsay, and single pieces of evidence, and that final conclusions would require added review and investigation.”95 By this time, Benke had been receiving frank, descriptive accounts of M-16 failures from his teams in Vietnam for more than a year. The accounts had come from multiple engineers—from Fremont, Hall, Behrendt, and others—and from multiple trips. Each of his company sources had relayed the remarks and experiences of many soldiers. Ito was neither treading new ground nor trafficking in rumor. He was sharing carefully observed details consistent with what others had seen and said. In November 1966, Benke had received a memo from another Colt’s engineer, which summarized “discussions with one brigade commander, four battalion commanders and many other field and company grade officers.” The memo specified “changes and things which should be expedited,” including chrome-plating the bore and chamber, installing new buffers, and applying a better protective finish. More than a year had passed. Thousands of troops in Vietnam still had rifles without these improvements. They continued to suffer malfunctions.
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- Highlight on Page 389 | Loc. 5957-61  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:00 PM

More than forty years later, Paul Benke disagreed with any reading of the record that suggests that Colt’s was not forthright and conscientious, or sold the Pentagon rifles unfit for combat duty in Vietnam. The M-16 rifle program suffered from problems, he said, but these problems were related to interservice rivalries, inadequate troop training, and bureaucratic opposition to the rifle within military circles. The problems with the rifle’s reputation were exacerbated, he said, by the fact that he was opposed to the American involvement in Vietnam.
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- Highlight on Page 390 | Loc. 5968-70  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:01 PM

When provided a copy of Ito’s correspondence and of the memorandum of record from the meeting he attended with Ito in the Pentagon in December 1967, he said, “We never ever ever tried to hide anything.” Their only concern, he said, was that soldiers have the best possible rifle.96
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- Highlight on Page 390 | Loc. 5973-77  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:01 PM

In the matter of a rifle, the defending American troops, after several years in Vietnam, still did not have a fully reliable firepower match. Matters were more dire for the Americans’ Vietnamese allies, who often were armed with surplus weapons from World War II. One of the senior South Vietnamese officers, Lieutenant General Dong Van Khuyen, lamented his soldiers’ predicament against the better-armed foe. “During the enemy Tet offensive of 1968 the crisp, rattling sounds of the AK-47s echoing in Saigon and some other cities,” he said, “seemed to make a mockery of the weaker, single shots of Garands and carbines fired by stupefied friendly troops.”97
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- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 6003-6  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:05 PM

Such was the state of resignation. The M-16, which at the start of the war had been a symbol of innovation and technical promise, had become instead a symbol of the mix-ups of war, and of a dishonest Pentagon and a manufacturer with which it worked. As public opinion on the war shifted, America’s undependable rifle became another element of disaffection, a symbol of failure for a military that had won World War II and for a nation that believed its industry was among the best in the world.
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- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 6007-14  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:05 PM

The M-16 sure is a marvelous gun, and in a god-awful war it provides some keen fun. The bullet it fires appears too small to harm but it makes a big hole and can tear off an arm. Single shot, semi, or full automatic, a real awesome weapon, ’tho in performance sporadic. But listen to Ichord and forget that stuck bolt, for you aren’t as important as a kickback from Colt. So carry your rifle (they don’t give a damn), just pray you won’t need it while you’re in Vietnam. The M-16 is issue, though we all feel trapped. More GIs would protest, but somehow they got zapped.102
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- Highlight on Page 391 | Loc. 5992-96  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:06 PM

In autumn 1968, Ito was back in Vietnam, where he and another Colt’s field representative toured military units around Saigon. They found that many magazines did not seat well on the weapons, which caused M-16s to fail to feed when fired on automatic. They found problems with the selector switch, which was often difficult to turn. And, even after all of the changes, they found that “quite a few rifles are rusting or corroding,” especially around the selector switch. In a tape sent back to Colt’s offices, Ito said that “damaged or poor functioning parts were noted in rifles which were only in use for two months maximum.”100
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- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 6015-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:07 PM

Several months after the fight for Ap Sieu Quan, Staff Sergeant Elrod was reassigned from Hotel Company’s First Platoon to become the battalion’s intelligence chief, and was meritoriously promoted, to the rank of gunnery sergeant. The battalion continued to operate against the NVA in the provinces just south of North Vietnam. Throughout this time, he refused to carry an M-16.
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- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 6020-25  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:09 PM

One day in spring 1968, after a skirmish in a gully near Khe Sanh, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod found an AK-47 beside a dead North Vietnamese soldier. The rifle was in excellent condition. He claimed it as his own, along with several magazines. This was not a trophy. It was a tool. Now he had an assault rifle he could depend on. The AK-47 did not solve all his problems. It solved one problem but replaced it with another. There was a special danger related to carrying the enemy’s weapon: The M-16 and the AK-47 have distinctly different sounds, and whenever Gunnery Sergeant Elrod fired his new weapon, he risked drawing fire from other Marines. He considered this less of a risk than carrying a rifle that might not fire at all.
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- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 6025-31  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:09 PM

A few weeks later, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod was walking across a forward operating base near Khe Sanh with his AK-47 slung across his back. A lieutenant colonel stopped him. “Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?” he asked. “Because it works,” Gunnery Sergeant Elrod replied. “It’s going to get you killed,” the colonel said. Gunnery Sergeant Elrod knew something about how Marines were getting killed. In his experience, this was not one of the ways. “Sir,” he said. “My Marines know what my weapon sounds like. And it works.”
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- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 6031-32  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:09 PM

And that was the basic position from which any discussion about automatic rifles began and ended.
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- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 6039-43  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:10 PM

available data, compiled in the database of the Wound Data and Munitions Effectiveness Team, or WDMET, showed that 51 percent of American combat fatalities in Vietnam during the period under study were caused by small arms, 36 percent by fragmentation munitions, and 11 percent by mines and booby traps. From Ronald F. Bellamy and Russ Zajtchuk, Textbook of Military Medicine. Part I. Warfare, Weaponry and the Casualty. Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries, Chapter 2, Assessing the Effectiveness of Conventional Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1989), p. 65.
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- Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 6048-52  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:12 PM

weight. v Under the license sale arrangement, MacDonald would receive a cut of both Fairchild’fs and Colt’fs future receipts. This included a 1 percent commission from Colt’fs for the selling price of every rifle sold, and 10 percent of Fairchild royalties, some of which were calculated on a sliding scale. For sales to military customers, the combined formula guaranteed him 1.225 percent. These were considerable incentives for MacDonald to try to have the AR.15 adopted by the American military. (For a detailed review of the license deal, see ’How a Lone Inventor’fs Idea Took Fire,’h Business Week, July 6, 1968.)
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- Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 6053-64  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:13 PM

embarrassment had grounds beyond the origins of the cadavers used. The twenty-seven severed heads were ultimately subjected to tests of little apparent value. And there are hints in the report of a lapse of scientific judgment that cast doubts on the value of the entire study. According to the report, Dziemian and Olivier used AR-15 ammunition different from the ammunition the American military used in Vietnam. Throughout the war, American troops would use a metal-jacketed round, just as the military had been using in other cartridges throughout the century. But in the Biophysics Division’s test in 1962, the cartridges were described by Dziemian and Olivier as propelling ’bullets with a lead core and no metal jackets.’h These rounds could be expected to create wounds of a much different nature from those made by military ammunition, and their use in the tests risked undermining judgment about the relative lethality of the tested weapons. But there is a hurdle to knowing with certainty what really occurred: the secrecy and cover-up of the work. Was the reference a clerical error? The photographs of the ammunition released to the author by the United States government were low-quality digital scans and provided no help in determining the bullets’ composition. Ultimately, it is not possible to tell from the records released to date. The study’fs final report did have other clerical errors, so it remains possible that this, too, was a clerical error. This was one of the pitfalls of secret tests, which were subject neither to peer review nor to public scrutiny. Both research lapses and editorial lapses could pass, and did pass, unchallenged.
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- Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 6070-76  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:14 PM

Thomas L. McNaugher, in his rigorous 1984 study, The M16 Controversies: Military Organizations and Weapons Acquisition, emphasized maintenance and noted that by 1970 the rifle was widely considered reliable. The most likely cause for most of the reported problems, based on the records now available, and the accounts of veterans, would seem to be corrosion in the rifles’f chambers. This was caused in some cases by cleaning habits in the wet climate of Vietnam, but from a manufacturing perspective was related more strongly to the failure of the army and Colt’fs to chrome-plate the chambers of all M.16s leaving Hartford until late in 1968. Another likely factor contributing to the failures to extract, though as far as is publicly known the army never conducted extensive tests of the cartridge cases from 1966 to 1968, was that the ammunition cases were too soft and expanded under the pressures of firing, lodging into pitting and tool marks in the chamber.
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- Highlight on Page 397 | Loc. 6077-78  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:14 PM

Rifle cleaning habits were in all likelihood much less of a factor, considering that the same troops, when using M-14s in the same environments, reported few reliability problems.
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- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 6100-6105  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:17 PM

The West German government, eager to exorcise the memories of Hitler’s Olympics in Berlin in 1936, had chosen a low-key police posture: an unarmed security staff, unimposing barriers, a climate of trust and accommodation rather than suspicion and control. The organizers had dubbed the competition “The Carefree Games.” Like this motto, the public-relations ambition was unsubtle. The XX Olympiad was to be a global affirmation of Bavaria reborn, and a declaration of decency for a nation that had returned from fascism to the civilized world. The men in the track suits were members of the Black September terrorist organization, a recently assembled cell directed to exploit the Games’ officially friendly atmosphere.
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- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 6107-10  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:18 PM

cook.1 Afif had patiently watched this same section of fence the night before and observed athletes returning from parties outside. The athletes had scaled the barrier, dropped into the compound, and continued toward their apartments. No guard had stopped them. They passed unchallenged into the secure zone. Afif decided that his cell would imitate this behavior. The killers would masquerade as athletes coming home.
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- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 6118-21  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:19 PM

One operating tenet of Black September was its almost airtight secrecy. Even now, as they moved toward their crimes, six of the terrorists—Palestinians from refugee camps who had been trained in Libya—did not know what they had been ordered to Munich to do. Afif briefed them in a restaurant. They were to seize members of the Israeli delegation from their beds and then leverage their lives in a hostage siege.
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- Highlight on Page 400 | Loc. 6128-31  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:20 PM

At about 3:30 A.M. the men stepped into taxis and were driven toward the section of fence Afif had selected. They arrived unmolested and met a group of Americans headed inside at the same time. The two teams—the athletes and the terrorists—helped each other over the top, gym bags and all.4
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- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 6146-47  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:21 PM

The processes that completed the Kalashnikov assault rifle’s march out of communist garrisons were not random. They resulted from deliberate socialist arms-manufacturing, stockpiling, and transfer practices, followed by many means of distribution—some legal, some not—that followed.
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- Highlight on Page 402 | Loc. 6158-63  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:23 PM

The transfers of assault rifles to Arab governments were scarcely remarked upon as they occurred. Diplomats and commentators concentrated on Soviet military hardware thought to be more menacing—the artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, radar systems, missiles, and aircraft that might change the regional security equation. Rifles were just rifles. Who worried over a weapon with a range of a few hundred meters, which injured its victims bullet by bullet, when a neighboring state was updating its jet fighters and main battle tanks? What was lost to the security experts of the era was a process more dangerous than the introduction to the region of larger-ticket conventional arms: the prodigious migration of the rifle from state garrisons to those bent on unconventional war and crime.
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- Highlight on Page 403 | Loc. 6165-66  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:24 PM

The movements represented a mix of nationalist, religious, and ethnic ambitions, and were organized by leaders willing to exploit arming opportunities made available by the Cold War.
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- Highlight on Page 403 | Loc. 6168-71  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:28 PM

Two phenomena paired to ensure this outcome. One was a socialist behavior: stockpiling, a behavior linked to the excessive rifle production in planned economies. The second was a capitalist axiom: the unrelenting energy of markets. Once excess socialist assault rifles existed, market forces ensured that they moved.
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- Highlight on Page 403 | Loc. 6176-80  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:29 PM

Decades of arms-manufacturing policies in the planned economies of the Eastern bloc had led, by the 1970s, to a material consequence: surpluses of arms without apparent use. The full extent of the Eastern bloc stockpiling is unknown. No thorough historical record has ever been assembled. Nor is it possible for a complete and accurate record to be made. All of the factors related to the socialist arms industry and the associated forms of trade—the conventions of state secrecy, the volume of production over time, administrative incompetence, personnel turnover, pervasive corruption, and other forms of criminal activity—worked to prevent accountability.
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- Highlight on Page 405 | Loc. 6199-6210  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:56 PM

A different set of circumstances filled the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with arms. Throughout the Cold War, the German drive across Slavic soil in the Great Patriotic War was both a fresh memory and a core narrative in Soviet national identity. The Kremlin considered Ukraine a buffer in the event of another conventional war with the West. As Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces arrayed along the borders of the capitalist world, Ukraine was prepared as a second defensive line. Huge stockpiles were cached on its territory, ready to be issued in any number of desperate scenarios. The most spectacular of the storage sites was in Artemovsk, in eastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia. Artemovsk lies in a region atop geological deposits of salt, and when the Soviet army sought a place to hide a reserve of conventional arms, the mines—out of sight of American spy planes—seemed ideal. More than 150 meters belowground, in man-made caverns from which miners had carted away salt, the army sequestered surpluses. The mines became a repository of small-arms firepower on a scale unknown in the West. The tunnels were filled with caches within caches, a layering of small arms reflecting generations of European war. Within them were weapons reaching to World War I, along with arms captured from the Third Reich or donated to the Red Army by the United States during the Lend-Lease program of World War II. Added to these were Soviet arms that the Red Army had used to fight the Wehrmacht, but subsequently replaced.
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 6211-15  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:57 PM

The Artemovsk arsenal was an armory and a warren, a storage network mapped out by logisticians in which crates of weapons were separated by type and stacked toward ceilings, in places ten meters or more high. Electric cables and lights ran along the walls, keeping the place in a dim artificial glow. Beneath this maze and monument to Cold War thinking, farther below the earth, miners continued to extract salt. The depot was sealed off, separated by heavy doors and airlocks, the entrances watched by guards.8 In all, the caves held some 3 million guns.
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 6219-23  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 12:58 PM

Mikhail Kalashnikov had a new role. He was a tour guide. Early in the 1960s, before deposing his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid I. Brezhnev visited Izhevsk as part of his duties as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the union’s legislature. Brezhnev was in his midfifties, dark-haired and emanating the insider confidence of a politician on the rise. Kalashnikov, ever capable of befriending and performing for power, was eager to escort the chairman on his rounds. In the Soviet Union, important decisions rested within few hands. Brezhnev was a potential patron, a man to be solicited, to be known to, no matter what.
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- Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 6240-44  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:00 PM

The exchanges pointed to the perils of the Kremlin’s governing style. A small-arms research-and-development center was a cog in the national security apparatus. Arguably it was an important cog. It was not of sufficient importance for its status to require a decision of the head of state. But the concentration of power in few hands meant an endless scrum for access and favor, and involved the most senior officials in matters better handled by ministries and staff. It also colored the way midlevel bureaucrats acted and thought.
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- Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 6246-51  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:01 PM

As Brezhnev’s power and stature were rising, the assault rifles being assembled in secret in East Germany had found their way to border guard detachments at the boundary with West Germany. The new knockoff was starting to replace the PPSh submachine guns that had been carried by the government’s border guards since the units had formed. The guards stood grim duty. In 1961, the East German government had begun construction of what it called the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, another milestone in doublespeak, considering that the purpose of the wall was not to keep Germans from the west from entering the east, but to stop the flow of émigrés fleeing the oppression and stagnation of the socialist side.
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- Bookmark on Page 410 | Loc. 6280  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:04 PM


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- Highlight on Page 410 | Loc. 6284-86  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:04 PM

The killing of Fechter also fit the use of the assault rifle for which Mikhail Kalashnikov had been rewarded: “reinforcing the power of the state.” Here was the real Kalashnikov, 1962, propaganda peeled away.10
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- Highlight on Page 411 | Loc. 6290-91  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:05 PM

The challenge to Kremlin hegemony was less confrontational than the uprising in Hungary twelve years before. But it was a threat. Its nickname, Prague Spring, suggested it was only a start.
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- Highlight on Page 412 | Loc. 6315-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:10 PM

After Farouk was deposed in 1952, in part because of Egypt’s military failures, the Egyptians lent the fedayeen more support. Unconventional war and sabotage proliferated as other Middle Eastern governments and the Palestinian diaspora followed the Egyptian example. Unable to defeat Israel by conventional means, they maintained pressure in other lethal ways, while seeking a measure of deniability.
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- Highlight on Page 416 | Loc. 6370-74  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:16 PM

Soviet arms designers had watched the American rollout of the M-16 and had examined captured specimens from Vietnam. They had not been favorably impressed with Colt’s rifle. (Kalashnikov himself called it “freakish,” “prankish,” and “capricious,” and something that American soldiers “threw away.”)14 The M-16’s ammunition was another matter. It demanded attention. By the early 1970s, within five years of the M-16’s designation as the United States’ standard military rifle, the Soviet army was at work on its own small-caliber, high-velocity round: the 5.45-millimeter cartridge.
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- Highlight on Page 418 | Loc. 6395-97  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:19 PM

By the 1970s, the Eastern bloc arms stores were proving to be of limited Cold War use, and the risks of the stockpiles and of greater assault-rifle distribution were becoming discernible. The war the rifles were to help the Kremlin win was not fought by the means the stockpilers had planned, and the armories stood as powerful attractants for all manner of opportunists.
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- Highlight on Page 418 | Loc. 6405-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:21 PM

The gun-running business was often quiet and opaque, but one private dealer of the era, Samuel Cummings, an American who decamped for Europe and made his fortune brokering deals, granted moments of transparency. In the mid-1970s, Cummings, by then a minor tycoon, offered a tour to a British journalist of part of his arsenal, and explained how small arms move liquidly from fight to fight. Here, he points out, is a stack of American Garand rifles which were first exported to Germany in the ’fifties for the first German rearmament. When Germany got more advanced weapons they were transported to Jordan in the late ’sixties, and when Jordan got more advanced weapons they were bought by Cummings and shipped to Manchester. From there many of them were shipped to the Philippines, to help fight Moslem rebels financed by Libya, while a few remain in Manchester waiting for customers. Here, just next door to the Garands, are some British Enfield rifles which were captured by the Japanese in Indo-China, then taken over by the Americans and used in Vietnam, before they were bought by Cummings. Here are some Springfield rifles which were first supplied to the French in Indo-China in the ’fifties. Here are Mausers which were brought over to Taiwan by General Chiang Kai-shek when he left the mainland in 1949. Over there are German ME42 guns which were left by Hitler’s troops in Greece, Swedish guns made under license in Egypt and captured by the Israelis, British Sten guns dropped by parachute during the Second World War for the French Maquis, American Brownings for the Dominican Republic, Belgian Mausers from Venezuela, American M16s from the Chilean Army. . . . Cummings knows that his arsenals depend for their stocks on the aftermath of wars.
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- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 6418-19  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:21 PM

Cummings, in one of his signature one-liners, declared the flow of arms “an index of the world’s folly.”
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- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 6421-23  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:22 PM

the durable nature of demand in a world in which the next local struggle was always about to start somewhere, and in which whenever one combatant adopted a new rifle its opponents wanted upgrades, too. There were almost always customers—if the price was right, the supply could be found, and weapons unneeded in one place could be married with a purchaser someplace else.
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- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 6423-24  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 01:22 PM

If, as Cummings implied, today’s arsenals depend on their stocks from the aftermath of yesterday’s wars, then the Cold War had provided the biggest boon of all.
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- Highlight on Page 420 | Loc. 6440-47  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 06:57 PM

Tanzania’s army and a coalition of anti-Amin guerrilla groups invaded. Amin bolted. The disappearance of a commander in chief is never a good sign in a military government, and the Ugandan army took its cue from the boss. Officers and troops disappeared from many barracks. What happened next pointed to the risks ahead in Europe when communist nations crumbled from within. In the northeastern region of Moroto, Ugandan troops vacated their garrison, leaving behind an armory. Moroto was inhabited by the Karamojong tribe, traditional herders who roamed the countryside in search of water and forage for their livestock. Their region was formally Ugandan but never fully under Ugandan control, and as a seminomadic people, many Karamojong saw themselves as unincorporated. They had paid for this perceived backwardness and disloyalty at the hands of Amin and his government. After the evaporation of the army at Moroto, local men looted the base and relieved it of weapons. This marked a consequential rearrangement.
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- Note on Page 421 | Loc. 6447  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 06:58 PM

violence begets violence
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 6450-53  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 06:59 PM

The introduction of Kalashnikovs to the Karomojong multiplied their firepower by a much larger factor than had the introduction of AK-47s to Soviet infantry squads, because the rustlers were not graduating from rifles and submachine guns. They were moving up from spears. In the ensuing years, traditional Karamojong power arrangements eroded, and the elderly leaders were supplanted by younger men leading bands of rustlers equipped with assault rifles. Warlords became a force. Karamojong raiding parties set upon their neighbors and claimed herds owned by the Iteso and Acholi people.
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 6454-56  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 06:59 PM

Government efforts to control the Karamajong proved insufficient. Upheavals in Rwanda and Congo, and the eruption of an unrelated Acholi insurgency, brought more Kalashnikovs into the country. A local arms race matured. Attempts to restrict the flow of assault rifles were futile.
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- Highlight on Page 423 | Loc. 6473-87  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:03 PM

By the 1980s, Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to travel within the Warsaw Pact to observe the production of his rifles elsewhere. He mentioned this desire on a visit to Moscow to the office of Dmitri F. Ustinov, the Soviet minister of defense. Kalashnikov regarded Ustinov as a mentor and friend. The reaction was cold. He sensed his mistake. Hardly had I started to say that I wanted to see a weapons factory in Bulgaria, when Ustinov became gloomy and frowned. He said in a low voice: “Comrade Major.” I was in civvies as usual, but the minister’s tone made me want to rise from the armchair and stand at attention. It should be mentioned that this happened at precisely the time when the Americans had published an insulting story about “the Russian sergeant having armed the whole of the Warsaw Pact,” and they started rapidly raising my military rank. In the morning, I found out that I had been given the rank of senior lieutenant, and in the evening I was already a captain. Obviously, Ustinov personally monitored my “military career,” and that was the case when I found out that I had been made a Major. But that didn’t change anything. I felt a chill go down my spine when the minister said distinctly: “You have not said that. I have not heard you say that. Anything else?”24 Kalashnikov, for all his official achievements, lived within Soviet constraints, no matter that the series of arms carrying his name had entered the official national culture.
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- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 6512-14  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:07 PM

And the preconscription training, the tests held for teenaged boys handling assault rifles as part of their school day, established this: Children, it turned out, could figure out the basics of the Kalashnikov at least as quickly as soldiers could.
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- Highlight on Page 426 | Loc. 6526-38  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:16 PM

The pipeline was an open secret. To feed it, arms were purchased by the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Arabia, and wealthy Arabs, among other sources, and moved by containership to the port of Karachi, where they were received by officers of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence service. From Karachi, most of the arms moved by rail to the Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi, which became an ISI arms depot—a reservoir of arms and ammunition to be sent over the border. The items were sorted there and carried by truck to Peshawar and redirected again, often to warehouses of Afghan commanders and groups fighting inside Afghanistan. The commanders’ logisticians moved the arms to the border on their own fleets of trucks and passed them off to smaller camps, from where they sometimes moved by animal train. The system was slow. At any point after Karachi it could look mismanaged and vulnerable. Ammunition was piled high in Rawalpindi without adequate attention to safety (and in 1988 the Ojhri Camp depot exploded). The routes to the border were watched by Pakistani border guards and police officers who often extracted bribes. Afghan commanders diverted and resold weapons, redistributing them for cash. And inside Afghanistan, the Soviet army, while mostly road-bound, was actively searching for the pack trains. But the pipe was force-fed enough equipment in Karachi that arms and ammunition flowed out the other side, and the mujahideen were outfitted for war in remote terrain.29 It also proved nearly impervious to interdiction at large scale.
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- Highlight on Page 427 | Loc. 6539-43  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:17 PM

I would liken our system to a tree. The roots represented the ships and aircraft bringing supplies from various countries to Pakistan. The trunk lay from Karachi almost to the border, at which point the many branches lay across the frontier. These branches divided into hundreds of smaller ones inside Afghanistan, taking the sap (arms and ammunition) to the leaves (the Mujahideen). Lop off a small branch, even a large one, and the tree survives, and in time others grow. Only severing the roots or trunk kills the tree. In our case only the branches were subject to attack.30
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- Highlight on Page 428 | Loc. 6561-67  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:19 PM

When the researcher traced serial numbers, the discovery was startling. Of almost 3,000 captured M-16s, nearly 1,900 could be traced back to a previous owner. Of these, 1,239 had once been in the inventory of the United States military, including 973 rifles documented as having been in Vietnam. The American military had left them in Asia, where they had been collected—perhaps by a private broker like Cummings but more likely by the intelligence service of a communist government—and shipped back across the sea. Another nearly 600 of the guerrillas’ M-16s had been provided to the Salvadoran government as part of the American foreign military sales program and had leaked from government possession to the insurgency.31 In sum, the United States had armed its foes, indirectly but surely.
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- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6567-68  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:19 PM

The war echoed edicts of Mao: “Guerrillas must not depend too much on an armory. The enemy is the principal source of their supply.”32
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- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 6582-85  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 07:26 PM

The insurgents’ arms-procurement arrangements had progressed, from rifles abandoned by capitalist enemies in Cuba and Vietnam, to interlocking and complementary socialist sources. The socialist system of export had matured. Kalashnikov assembly lines—created under the auspices of defending the Soviet Union and ensuring arms standardization for conventional communist forces—had developed into a supply network for insurgency in the Americas.
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- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 6590-95  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:28 AM

In early 1989, the formerly banned trade union, Solidarność, exacted a commitment from Poland’s communist government to hold elections, which it won overwhelmingly in June, creating an irreparable crack. Events accelerated. Czechoslovakia held its Velvet Revolution in November 1989; the Berlin Wall fell the same month. Romanians revolted in December. Hungary held free elections in spring 1990, and Bulgaria in June. Ukraine declared its independence that July, followed by Azerbaijan and Armenia. Georgia and the Central Asian republics announced their independence the next year. Albania voted its communists from office in 1992.
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 6599-6603  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:30 AM

Fighting broke out between Azeris and Armenians in early 1988, igniting a six-year war. In 1991, Georgia attacked separatist South Ossetia, and Chechnya declared its independence from Russia, setting a course for a larger and more costly war that would see human-rights abuses by Russia and its proxy forces on a grand scale, and the separatists’ adoption of the tactics of terror. Yugoslavia was fracturing, heading into a series of ethnic wars. Civil war erupted in Tajikistan in 1992, the year fighting broke out in Transnistria, and between Georgia and the Abkhaz.
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 6610-12  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:31 AM

Nearly a year passed before the West German Bundeswehr, the federal defense forces, assumed responsibility for East German arms stores. By then, the depots were no longer full—large numbers of weapons had drifted from state custody into the possession of collectors, criminals, and faraway rebel bands.
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- Highlight on Page 433 | Loc. 6628-35  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:37 AM

In the early 1990s, Albania maintained a veneer of control over its postcommunist affairs. Appearances did not hold. Its leaders knew little of business, and beneath their assurances that an orderly transition from totalitarian bunker state to market economy was under way, the country’s economy was carried along by Ponzi schemes fronting as legitimate investments. A large fraction of the population poured savings into these traps. In 1996 the end came. The schemes ran dry. The funds defaulted. The population’s savings vanished. Panic came quickly as the pyramids collapsed. In 1997, public anger turned to rage. Rioting broke out early in the year, driven by popular fury at the government for not protecting the people from nationwide fraud. Citizens ransacked government buildings and turned on the army and the police. Just as had happened in Moroto in Uganda, crowds seized the state’s guns. The Kalashnikov factory at Gramsh was picked clean. Armed gangs formed, and in many regions anarchy prevailed.
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- Highlight on Page 433 | Loc. 6636-41  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:38 AM

the government offered an assessment of what it had lost, the numbers were staggering: nearly seven hundred thousand firearms, 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition, more than 3 million hand grenades, and a million land mines. As much as 80 percent of the army’s small arms were missing. Researchers later claimed the official estimates were low.36 Some of these weapons were recovered through government offers of amnesty. Most were not. Many went north to the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which at the time was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. The next year, the KLA was fighting a war against Serbian troops.
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 6643-46  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:39 AM

The remnants of the Soviet army lacked the organization, will, and resources to carry all its equipment. It did try to carry much of its weapons and ammunition. Many columns reached Russia. Others made it only to Ukraine, where their journey stopped. Ukraine, already a prestaged conventional arsenal, became an arms dump along the army’s road home, a nation where rail cars crammed with munitions were abandoned in the open air.
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 6648-50  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:39 AM

After trying to count its inheritance, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed to own between 2.44 million and 3 million tons of ammunition in as many as 220 depots, and an estimated 7 million military small armsvii—roughly one hundred firearms for every soldier.
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- Highlight on Page 437 | Loc. 6699-6701  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:46 AM

Once the payments from Africa were posted in his offshore bank accounts, Minin dispatched planeloads of Ukraine’s weapons—made for the Cold War, cached in European bunkers, marooned by the Soviet collapse, and tended by government officials both incompetent and criminal—on their journey to Africa, thereby moving guns from a northern Cold War front to the postcolonial power struggles to the south.
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- Highlight on Page 438 | Loc. 6702-6  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:46 AM

These were not ordinary thugs. The RUF, among its many crimes, specialized in mutilation. In raids on villages along the Liberian border, it captured civilians and amputated limbs by hacking them off. It then released survivors and burned down villages as warnings to others. Its leaders with time were indicted on war-crime charges, as was Charles Taylor, who helped ferry them their guns. Sierra Leone and Liberia were not the only African countries to suffer from war criminals emboldened by excess Soviet guns, nor were they the only African countries that suffered atrocities and mutilations at such men’s hands.
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- Highlight on Page 438 | Loc. 6708-9  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2016, 01:47 AM

acronym AK meant not just the Automatic by Kalashnikov. The letters stood for something more: the Africa Killer, the gun that helped sink country after country into fresh cycles of blood.
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- Highlight on Page 440 | Loc. 6742-45  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 02:38 AM

The Lord’s Resistance Army, sinister and bizarre, descended from a mystical guerrilla movement founded by Alice Auma, a childless Acholi woman who by various accounts was either Kony’s aunt or his cousin. In 1985, Auma returned from a period of isolation on the banks of the Nile claiming to have been possessed by the spirit of an Italian army officer, whom she called Lakwena. Lakwena, she said, spoke dozens of languages. His name meant Word of God.
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- Highlight on Page 440 | Loc. 6747-50  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 02:38 AM

Late in 1986 Alice announced that Lakwena had ordered her to organize a movement to overthrow the Ugandan government, which was led by Yoweri Museveni, a former guerrilla commander who had displaced a post-Amin Acholi president. At that, Alice Lakwena, a composite of personalities in the form of a young woman with no military experience, became as strange and underqualified a guerrilla leader as the world had known. Yet she found a following. Uganda was suffering, and the Acholi felt abused by Museveni. Her message of rejuvenation appealed.
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- Highlight on Page 441 | Loc. 6760-65  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 02:40 AM

Rituals arose around Alice’s invocations. Before battle, the soldiers attended purification ceremonies and were rubbed with shea butter oil, which Alice said would render their skin bulletproof. Many Holy Spirit fighters did not carry rifles. Those who did, at least in the beginning, were ordered not to aim at their enemies, but to fire in the general direction and allow spirits to guide bullets toward flesh. Others believed that if they chose the right rocks, those rocks, when thrown, would explode like grenades. The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces were not a rational military organization. But their cultishness gave them an early power against their foes, some of whom believed Auma’s magic was real.
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- Highlight on Page 442 | Loc. 6777-80  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 02:42 AM

occasional interviews with journalists, who documented her end as an exiled lush, hooked on gin, spiritless, vowing a return. Her homecoming was unnecessary. Joseph Kony replaced her as the possessed guerrilla leader of Acholiland. The new commander had learned what Auma had not. Kony did not ask his child soldiers to rest their faith on shea butter and stone grenades alone. He made sure to give them guns.
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- Highlight on Page 443 | Loc. 6780-81  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 02:42 AM

Joseph Kony raised Alice Auma’s millennial weirdness several notches, blending her mystical persona with more practical ways to kill. He claimed to inherit her otherworldly contacts in 1987, when spirits took possession of him.
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- Highlight on Page 444 | Loc. 6803-6  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:10 AM

In almost any other setting or any other time, Kony would have been marked down as a barking madman, a person to be walked wide around when encountered on the street. But Acholiland was rife with cross-border intrigues, and across Uganda’s northern line, in Sudan, Kony found support. Sudan was willing to arm him and the abducted children with whom he crossed out of Uganda, and to use the LRA to undermine a neighboring state.
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- Highlight on Page 445 | Loc. 6811-13  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:12 AM

Assault rifles did more than amplify the war. They gave it stamina, a duration it otherwise could not have had. The children sensed this. “The Arabs gave Kony many weapons, and up to now that is how he has been able to resist,” said one former soldier. “Without the guns it would have just been sticks.”
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- Highlight on Page 446 | Loc. 6836-39  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:15 AM

The population suffered from both sides. The Ugandan government forced rural Acholi residents into displaced-person camps, both to protect and to control them. The Acholi economy withered. Eventually, the government invested in heavy weapons to chase the child soldiers down. The use of Mi-24 helicopter gunships was decisive in pushing the brigades across Uganda’s borders.
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- Highlight on Page 448 | Loc. 6862-67  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:18 AM

loudness and repetition are not truth, and these statements, echoed by journalists and arms-control advocates over the years, are best viewed with skepticism. The more realistic retail price range for a single automatic Kalashnikov in much of the developing world, depending on many factors (the rifle’s exact type, nation of manufacture, and condition, the local laws and security conditions at the time and point of sale, the experience of the purchaser) is on the order of several hundred dollars. In some conflicts, a thousand dollars is not rare. Prices climb when and where Kalashnikovs are difficult to obtain. In nations capable of enforcing the laws they pass, strict gun control can send prices soaring.
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- Highlight on Page 450 | Loc. 6885-94  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:22 AM

Not just cash and barter have been used to acquire rifles; extortion has proven an effective means. In Chechnya, insurgents often gain rifles and ammunition through novel agreements. A local fighting cell will use middlemen to negotiate with Russian or pro-Russian Chechen units for truces. In exchange for not attacking a certain Russian position for a prescribed length of time, the insurgents exact a tax paid in armament—a rifle, a can of ammunition, perhaps a sack of grenades. Sometimes to close deals, they sweeten agreements by delivering vodka regularly to a government checkpoint or position. In this way, Russian units have arranged quiet tours.55 Such arrangements are mercurial, and similar pressures can be applied in the other direction and serve as a mechanism for disarmament. Russian units, when seeking to capture weapons, have set up roadblocks and impounded Chechen civilians’ cars and trucks. For each vehicle to be released, the soldiers tell the evicted drivers, the price is one Kalashnikov rifle, to be obtained as the vehicle’s owners see fit.56 In such situations, a rifle becomes very expensive—worth as much as a family’s automobile.
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- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 6907-11  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:24 AM

Relatively new, the AKSU-74 had been carried in the Soviet-Afghan War by specialized soldiers, including helicopter and armor crews, for whom a smaller weapon was useful in the tight confines of their transit. For an Afghan fighter, possession of one of these rifles signified bravery and action. It implied that the holder had participated in destroying an armored vehicle or aircraft; the rifle was akin to a scalp. By choosing it, bin Laden silently signaled to his followers: I am authentic, even if his actual combat experience was not what his prop suggested.
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- Highlight on Page 456 | Loc. 6982-84  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:34 AM

the United Nations had attempted a rough tally of the human costs to those in places where the rifles are used most. It found that small arms had been the principal weapons in forty-six of the forty-nine major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died, roughly 90 percent of them civilians.
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- Highlight on Page 461 | Loc. 7069-71  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:43 AM

Not youth, not will, not fitness, neither training nor hard-won knowledge could bring a man broken in this way back to what he had been, seconds before. Slogans and money meant nothing here and now. Even ideas were few. Karzan Mahmoud was not a cadaver. Not yet. He was a man who wanted to stand and feel the handle of a pistol wrapped within his shooting hand. He could not. Instead, he was fighting sleep.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 468 | Loc. 7175-80  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:54 AM

“My God helped me,” he said one night in Ottawa. “I like my God.” He had been helped, but not healed. He knew he never would be. And he found, when considering the rifle that had altered his body and diminished his life, that he wondered about Mikhail Kalashnikov, who lent his name to the weapon. He had a question for the man who proudly insisted he was the inventor of this device. “Why did you make this machine?” Mahmoud asked. “You don’t like living people? You are smart. Why not make something to help people, not make them dead?” Mahmoud was sipping tea, pinching the small warm glass with a mangled hand, furrowing his bullet-scarred brow. “Are you not afraid to see the judge?”
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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Post-Soviet Russia developed around him into an extraction state, an exporter of hydrocarbons, lumber, minerals, and people. It manufactured few commercial products widely recognized or sought beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. In its lists of companies and exports, Russia had no Sony, Panasonic, or Samsung; no Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, or Nissan; no Vanguard, Lloyd’s of London, or Sotheby’s; no Gucci, Tag Heuer, or Cartier; no Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nestlé, or Kraft; no Nokia, Black-Berry, Apple, or Microsoft. Russian fashions were not coveted, Russian popular music was scarcely listened to outside the former Soviet Union. But Russia had invented one commercial product that had overtaken much of the world: the AK-47 line. The
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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Others detected his discomfort, his fatigue, and a sense that he was performing services scripted by others. He goes, frankly, as a bauble, a banquet boy in the rolling Russian hospitality suite, to lend the peddling of planes and tanks some historical gravitas. He helps get the checks written… it is a special torture custom-made for him in a special capitalist hell.86
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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Americans like to think that everything that is best is “Made in USA” and they would like very much that the period after World War Two would pass under the sign of their achievements and that “according to the law of the markets their American products would fly like a swarm.” Unfortunately, everything was the opposite. The second half of the twentieth century is marked by the fact that the Americans could not feel themselves absolutely unpunished either in Cuba or in Korea or in Vietnam or in tens of other places, which they believed were their zone of vital interests. And everywhere it was the AK that had a sobering effect on them.94
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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His zigzagging statements were unsurprising. He had lived a complicated life. With a complicated life came a complicated file—that of a survivor in a dystopia that first tormented his family, then championed him as a national hero. He presented a mass of ideas that cannot be squared.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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The references to Galileo and the outbursts were significant. They underscored the most consistent qualities of Kalashnikov’s innumerable comments after the Communist Party’s fall: his pride of association with the AK-47 and his sense of extraordinary accomplishment. This was his real position.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 479 | Loc. 7338-48  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 10:40 PM

These positions made him much different from another renowned figure in Soviet arms design: Andrei D. Sakharov. Sakharov, one of the physicists who led the Soviet nuclear-arms program, had contributed to the successful detonation of RDS-1 outside Semipalatinsk in 1949 while Kalashnikov was involved in outfitting the gun works in Izhevsk. His later work was a cornerstone of the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was a giant in Soviet weapons programs, a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor—one of the rare Soviet men more decorated than Kalashnikov. By the mid-1960s, burdened by the moral responsibilities of his work, he urged an end to the arms race that had been the center of his professional and intellectual life. Sakharov dared to question the entire socialist world. In doing so he rejected its rewards and brought upon himself its wrath. He called for rapprochement with the West and the development of a pluralistic society rooted in human rights and free expression. The Soviet Union ordered him into internal exile and restricted his travels and his writing. In 1973, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the crackdowns in 1956, labeled him “a person involved in anti-social activity.”100 The world saw Sakharov differently. In 1975, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Mikhail Kalashnikov was no Sakharov.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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His memoirs touched difficult themes. “Arms makers have strange destinies!” he wrote. “They are saluted with shots they never expected, and it is not orations or music that remind one of jubilees but moans and screams.”101 These were hints at private pain. But almost always, after allowing such a tantalizing glimpse, he turned back to his fuller answers, the jumbled medley of a man whose name was attached to the world’s most common rifle, and a killing machine.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
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they spread the weapon not because I wanted them to. Not at my choice. I made it to protect the Motherland. Then it was like a genie out of the bottle and began to walk on its own in directions that I did not want.
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The Gun (C. J. Chivers)
- Highlight on Page 486 | Loc. 7445-49  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2016, 10:51 PM

museum, which struggled for years to raise money for its construction, provides a series of stories within a story. Kalashnikov derided the men who dismantled the Soviet Union and profited from the looting of state assets afterward. The museum in Izhevsk that is dedicated to him was built with donations from Anatoly B. Chubais, one of the main architects of the privatization of state assets, who profited handsomely in the process. The ironies only get richer. Chubais was nearly assassinated in 2005 by at least two men who ambushed his armored BMW on a road outside Moscow, spraying it with Kalashnikov fire.
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