NOTIFICACIÓN DE ACCIDENTES :

82 Catch .22

In his testimony before the Ichord subcommittee, Bobby Macdonald later related the events surrounding his introduction to the AR-15 as follows:

..In the process of getting started to sell the AR-10, [Fairchild] developed the AR-15. It seems to me that General Wyman, who was head of CONARC at that time, liked the idea of the small caliber, high velocity rifle, and. .the Arma- Lite division of Fairchild scaled down the AR-10 to fit the 5.56, or .223 as that was originally called.

Mr. Boutelle, at that time president of Fairchild, asked me to come up to Hagerstown to see the rifle. I went up there and fell in love with it. So he was about to take off to go to [Fort] Benning with Stoner for the original Army tests of the rifle when I decided that the smart thing to do would be to take both rifles, the bigger caliber and the smaller caliber, and take it around the world, and shoot it under all kinds of conditions.

I was especially interested in a rifle for the Southeast Asian people, one that was light enough for them to carry.

So [in the spring of 1959 Gene Stoner and] I went out there, and we shot [AR-15 serial no. 000004] in the Philip- pines, Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, India, at that

time, and then Italy... the more I shot it, the better I liked it. And it seems to be that is the way most everybody in those

days felt about the rifle. The fact of the matter was that having both calibers, I ended up by giving away 6,000 rounds of

7.62 in the Philippines, because nobody wanted to shoot [AR-10]. Everybody wanted to shoot the AR-15. So I didn't see any point in carrying [the 7.62mm ammunition] any further.

But to my knowledge, we fired around 8,000 rounds through that one rifle in the course of getting to India, and that means all the Malayans, everybody had a shot with it under all sorts of conditions. And as I recall, we had exactly one malfunction, and that was easily traceable to a lip on the magazine which somebody had bent.

But it was the finest, most foolproof weapon I have ever seen in my life.

. .Well, when I got back to Singapore I cabled Colt who had already spent $100,000 tooling up for the AR-10. I cabled them to stop it and go to full out on the AR-15, because it was obvious that what everybody else had always thought about this [7.62mm] NATO round - it was not as good; it just proved itself with these little people. [Colt's] followed

that advice.

Catch-22

101. Left side view of Colt's .223 caliber "ArmaLite AR-15 Model 01" (Colt internal model no. 601, the first of the multivarious "600" series), serial

no. 000112. Note the mottled brown "fibrite" furniture and the early steel "waffle" 20-round magazine (appendix). Bob Miller collection photo by Roy Arnold

Colt's completed its first-ever run of 300 "model 01" AR-15 rifles, serial nos. 000101 to 000400, in December of 1959. Already Bobby Macdonald was doing his part: in his later Ichord testimony he reported that "..the first [Colt AR-15] rifles

that were ever sold were sold to Malaya, 25 rifles, and they were shipped under State Department export license 3404 dated September 30, 1959. The second [23 rifles] went to India under export license 5893, dated December 15, 1959."

Catch .22 83

102. Front three-quarter view of an early Colt model 01 serial no. 000145, showing early prototype bayonet (appendix), bipod, and clip-on grenade launching sight.

INSET: closeup of the Colt-ArmaLite clip-on grenade launching sight, Colt part no. 62214.

Further relatively small orders, again usually just enough rifles to run a meaningful test with a squad of men, were forth- coming from Australia, Burma, and later the Singapore police. But soon a gigantic paradox became apparent. For many of the small-statured peoples in Southeast Asia the AR-15 was, as Bobby Macdonald had anticipated, particularly suited in almost every way. Indeed, at each and every demonstration the reaction was invariably and unabashedly favorable. Yet at least four would-be foreign purchasers, such as the government of the Philippines, had signed a military assistance pact with the United States government. This meant that, in order to qualify for US mutual aid funding, the arms "purchased" had to be standard US military hardware: M1s,

. .So I got back here and found that nobody had accomp- lished much, and I made a deal with both Fairchild and Colt that if they would get out of the way and turn over the whole business to me, I would make a great effort to try to get

BARs, .45s, Carbines, and so on. The AR-15 was decidedly not on the shopping list.

Back home in Hartford, the double irony of the situation was quickly absorbed. With the future quite literally at stake, Colt's elicited the aid of both Fairchild, who had a direct royalty interest in future AR-15 production, and Cooper-Macdonald, no longer limited to a specified territory as they had been with the AR-10, in a desperate attempt to somehow get the AR-15 into the US military system.

In further testimony before the Ichord subcommittee, Bobby Macdonald summed up the events which followed his return from the "world tour" with ArmaLite's AR-15 serial no. 4:

the rifle tested here and adopted by the US government, not so much to replace the M14, although it was capable of doing so, but to supply our small-statured allies with this type of rifle which has very little recoil, as you know.

85 The Early Colt AR-15

103. Skeleton drawings of the AR-15 model 01, from the original Colt manual entitled "Instructions for the Operation of the Colt ArmaLite AR-15 Automatic Rifle, Caliber . 223". Courtesy Robert E. Roy

86 The Early Colt AR-15

104. List of Parts, Accessories and Armorer's inspection and repair kit, from the first Colt manual. The Army soon found that Colt's considered all of these to be proprietary items which had to be purchased from Colt's.

87 The Early Colt AR-15