This is Russia's 50-year-old squad automatic weapon

Thanks for sharing CW5 Jack Cardwell the post about the USMC M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle and the Russian RPK automatic weapon.
Background: The RPK (Ruchnoy Pulemyot Kalashnikova, Russian: Ручной пулемёт Калашникова or "Kalashnikov hand-held machine gun") is a 7.62×39mm light machine gun of Soviet design, developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in the late 1950s, parallel with the AKM assault rifle.

This answers my age old question very nicely,how come their simple ,effective ,older designed weapons worked so well in Vietnam ,while my modern,sophisticated piece of crap M16 didn’t,answer the damn thing worked,much like the M14 that I trained with.

Interesting rifle.