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bdickens wrote:Every - and I mean EVERY - malfunction Of an M-16 I ever saw in 7 1/2 years of active duty was caused by a dirty weapon. I can't believe that the old saw about the M-16/ AR-15 being prone to jam is still going around after more than 40 years. If you keep it clean, that platform is absolutely reliable.

This might be true today, but the original ones without the assist were called Mattel Jamomatics for a reason, jungle fighting is tough conditions to keep clean for man or gun. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong didn't seem to have the same problems with their rifles.

While I wasn't around M16s much, but I saw them Jam up real tight so that they couldn't be cleared at thew range, All the guns in my units were cleaned and inspected before they were allowed to be put away. the A1s were supposed to better, but a lot of soldiers got killed before they did.., Most Vietnam vets hated the 16 but had a lot of respect for the enemy's rifles.

Silverhawk wrote:Could be they pick an AK to have a weapon that will fire everytime you pull the trigger. Everything since the M16 has had a tendency to jam, misfire and lock up. Got a lot of good people killed or captured. Treat a AK bad and it just keeps working. Combat weapons should be designed to work in the worst of conditions. Another lesson we DIDN'T learn from our Southeast Asian wargames. Of course, this is just my opinion.

Our government didn't want to win in Viet Nam, Johnson and Nixon didn't like many of the young men at the time. The M16/AR 15 was the solution.

Thats my conspiracy theory and I'm sticking to it. Might sound silly but we sure were drafting and getting a lot of young men killed for a war nobody wanted to win, and no one seemed interested in getting out for many years