The subject of this initial post is going to be much more specific than the title, but since it will probably evolve into an broader debate anyway I figured I might as well roll with it.
Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the recent Burns' documentary on the Vietnam War. In it, I noticed something I had suspected for a long time: At the height of the M16's troubles in Vietnam, VC and NVA forces were primarily equipped with (probably Chinese) derivatives of the Type 3 milled AK-49. Almost all the images in the documentary up to 1969 of North Vietnamese forces that show enou