The Gun by C. J. Chivers

which led to an understanding of small-armsstockpiles there; I was further assisted in Ukraine, with reports and pictures of the cache within Artemovsk salt mines, by people who asked not to be named. Hwaida Saad, in Lebanon, helped with research into Kalashnikov production in the Arab world.
    William Stolz of the University of Missouri culled and copied reams of material from the records of Representative Richard H. Ichord. Among those records were copies of letters written to Congress and newspapers by First Lieutenant Michael Chervenak, and related correspondence and clippings. James Ginther, an archivist at the Special Collections Branch at the Library of the Marine Corps, provided digital copies of the 1967 and 1968 command records from Second Battalion, Third Marines, Chervenak’s unit in Vietnam. Richard Verrone, formerly of the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University, helped with early clippings and with oral histories. The Marine Corps records, when set against the Vietnam-era military maps assembled by the university, made it possible to trace the location of the firefight in which forty American rifles jammed, prompting Chervenak to write. The current chief executive at Colt Defense, retired General William Keys, discussed in an interview the core aspects of the infantry’s complaints about early M-16 performance in Vietnam. Keys was a Marine company commander in Vietnam; his Marines suffered from the problems documented in this book. Jeffrey Gould, with whom I served in a platoon in the First Marine Regiment in the 1980s and 1990s, and who is now an engineer at Picatinny Arsenal, in New Jersey, retrieved a reliability study of infantry arms conducted by the army in 1968, and arranged its public release. Gus Funcasta, also of Picatinny, offered smart insights and suggested smart questions. The staff at the National Archives assisted by providing access to records of the early M-16 program, which included the brief mention of the comparative study, using human body parts from India, of the lethality of the M-14, the AR-15, and the Kalashnikov. Thomas Blanton, of the National Security Archive, provided advice on how to obtain a copy of the report of those tests, which had been withheld from public view for more than forty years.
    Veterans of Second Battalion, Third Marines in 1967 and 1968 spent long hours recalling their tours, and often providing records, photographs, and phone numbers or email addresses to other veterans of the same operations: Al Nickelson, Ed Elrod, Mike Chervenak, Chuck Chritton, Tom Givvin, Ray Madonna, Chuck Woodard, Dick Culver, Tom Tomakowski,Jack Beavers, Rod Radich, Dave Smith, Ord Elliott, Cornelio Ybarra Jr., Roy DeMille, David Hiley, Bill Snodgrass, Don Aaker, and Stan Maszstak. Larry Rottmann, once forbidden by the army of speaking publicly about the M-16’s failures, granted permission to reprint one of his poems.
    Dr. Martin Fackler, the former army trauma surgeon and terminal-ballistics researcher, provided copies of many of his studies of wound ballistics, and patiently answered questions. Michael Rhode, an archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., shared many referrals, opening a world of researchers and records explaining the changing ways that people have been wounded in war. Sanders Marble, senior historian at the Surgeon-General’s Office of Medical History, dug up references and introduced me to several doctors familiar with wounds and wounding. These include Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsberry, a coauthor of “War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq,” an invaluable public document for understanding the two most recent American wars, and Dr. Ron Bellamy, whose statistical studies of wounding agents in battle are a resource on this subject in which rigor rises above anecdote. Dr. Paul Doughtery provided copies of terminal-ballistic studies, old and new. Kevin McKiernan and Dr. Mike Brabeck shared email correspondence, documents, photographs, and