October 21, 2010 at 4:48PM By Tim Heffernan
It is perhaps the most potent question to echo from the Cold War: Who lost Vietnam? Well, there were certainly many factors, but an important new book, The *** by C. J. Chivers (exclusively excerpted in Esquire's new November issue, and soon on this website), ****** us to consider this: For the first time in human history, a poorly trained peasant army humbled a great power with the *** its fighters carried in their hands — the AK-47. Chivers's story is about that ***, its history, and its relationship to the catastrophic failures of the M16 during the 1960s.
