The Fringe's Death Benefits • 93 poral in Vietnam during 1970. He managed to get us enough parts to put together six M16 auto rifles. I was told that, earlier, a lot of guys were mailing back grenades. Tommy guns, and all that good stuff. I know we had some heavy stuff." He said that they used the existing weapons as models for the construction of other automatic weapons, produced in home shops, adding, "We had experienced, military-trained armorers and some engineering kids. They'd take one of these stolen army automatics and use it to help us turn out homemade guns in some friendly shops we ran back then." Asked what had happened to these weapons and their owners from back in the 1970s and where they ended up, he smiled, shrugged, and said, 'Beats me, that's The Man's problem." Fast-forward to 1991 and to troops coming home from Desert Storm. According to four officers whom 1 interviewed separately back in the States under their own strong securityof-identification restrictions, hundreds of weapons disappeared "God knows where." Despite almost draconian gun control measures, hundreds of M16s, FALs, and AK-47s have ended up in the United States illegally. "We're kidding ourselves if we think the majority ended up in some grunt's basement as a harmless war trophy. A lot of very bad people now have illegal automatic weapons," one field grade officer who is a Criminal Investigation Corps (CIC) investigator told me. "Every time we have a war, the lunatics get a bunch more weapons, and we've trained a bunch more lunatics to create, fix, and fire homemade machine guns as well." These deadly problems are not limited to the United States. For example, in South and Central America, radicals on the Left and Right wage continuous underground war against the government and each other, depending upon who is in power. An AP wire service story reported, 'Argentinean Federal Police uncovered a $900,000-underground-arms factory hidden on a farm near Buenos Aires in April 1991. The police claim that drug-cartel-financed guerrillas of four nations were working to perfect a cheap homemade light machine gun design."