Kalashnikov and Oppenheimer

The news caught our attention on the death of Russian Mikhael Kalashnikov, AK-47 assault rifle inventor (Avtomat Kalashnikova aka Kalashnikov, AK, or in Russian slang, Kalash). He died at the ripe age of 94 but he bothered to check if he was responsible for the havoc his little “defense weapon” had caused across the planet from the episkopos of the Russian Orthodox Church.

It was in ‘79 when conducting a weeklong community consultation in one of the hill villages outside of Davao City in Mindanao that I encountered a squad of AK-armed rebels (NPA, the New People’s Army) come to the village to “salvage” two police officers who organized gambling in the barangay center 24/7 when they were off duty. The intrusion came awkwardly when a bullet zinged past my ear while squatting in a makeshift outhouse. One of our male U.S. volunteers was so unhinged that he walked down the hill straight to the Davao Peninsula where he holed up until he was convinced he was safe. He promptly flew out of the city and the country.
As an American, the volunteer thought the NPA came for him. He had good reasons to. The favored counterpart to the AK-47 in Vietnam is the U.S. military’s M-16, designed a decade after the AK to replace the bulky M1 Garand. It was called an Armalite. It was more sophisticated but had been known in rugged Indochina to lock out at the most inappropriate moments. The AK does the same, but it is simple enough for a user to disassemble and repair without much technical know-how. 

A comparison of production number, cost, and ease of use has the AK well ahead of the M16 100 to 8, making Kalashnikov’s salve to his conscience understandable. Rebel groups I’ve encountered subscribe to the AK while U.S. supported centrally managed governments (aka dictatorships) are M16 equipped.

I looked straight at the nozzle of an M16 as 13 of them were pointed at my chest when a squad of constabulary troopers came calling at our village training center in Mactan Island, Cebu, during the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship. 

The village of Sudtonggan in Barrio Basak had a big honcho who strutted around with a new Baretta M9 handgun (a Cebu town thrives with well copied colorum handguns). Once while drunk, he came over to the training center brandishing his new weapon to confront movie showing and charging entry fees to make the service viable. He thought that since am a volunteer of obvious means and education, I must be loaded enough not only to procure the projector but also to pay for the rentals, instead of getting the poor peasants part with their meager resource. An admirable sentiment but it was a tad off from our self-supporting development promo.

Anyway, a few weeks later, at the height of the village fiesta, and shortly after I drove my 250cc dirt bike from the central village dance to my dwelling at the center, a shot rang out that snuffed the village honcho’s breath. I followed the pickup that sped to the city emergency room 30 miles away. The Baretta-wielding señor was pronounced DOA. The NPA was rumored to be responsible for the not-too-widely-lamented “salvage.” Someone suggested that I harbored NPA personnel at the training school. Thus, the constabulary and their M16 one fateful afternoon in July of 1986!

I confess I almost wet my pants at the time. Instead, I gasped my standard response: “Gee, what a way to go!” The village scholar who lived in the center stood agog over the prospect of violence in the confrontation. We pacified the intruders after they viewed our rooms and empty freezer, seeing no evidence of any NPA presence at all!

Not too long after, the EDSA People’s Power ushered the Marcos dictatorship to a hurried departure for Hawaii. 

So, back to Kalashnikov. He joins J. Robert Oppenheimer in my book as folks who rued over the use of their inventions, in Oppenheimer’s case his participation in the Manhattan Project that produced the Tinian-launched bomb to snuff 60,000 breaths in a flash over Hiroshima one day in August 1945. Oppenheimer later lobbied for strict control of nuclear power proliferation, resulting in his being stripped of his top security classification during Sen. McCarthy’s anxious reign of inquisition. 

FDR intoned: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Kalashnikov’s fear that he might adversely pay for his invention should there be an afterlife (a wager since he was not a theist), is common to all of us. Schooled in deterministic philosophy of the inevitability of cause-and-effect in our time, we dread the influence of the past on the present and the future.

Freedom to me is deciding to allow the past to influence my present, and for future resolves to guide my present, neither of which falls into a determinism of causality that is to be feared after guilt of past offenses we might have committed. Conscience is a choice, not an obligation; responsibility is an internal response before it is an external act.

So, Kalashnikov, rest easy. May the rest of us who also “Just Do It” do the same.