“Loading was accomplished by inserting the pull tab on the ammunition belt from the left side of the gun – either metal links or metal tab on cloth belts – until the feeding pawl at the entrance of the feed way engaged the first round in the belt and held it in place. The cocking handle was then pulled back with the palm of the hand facing up (to protect the thumb from injury if the weapon fired unexpectedly, which could happen if the barrel was very hot), and then released. This advanced the first round of the belt in front of the bolt for the extractor/ejector on the bolt to grab the first cartridge. The cocking handle was pulled and released a second time. This caused the extractor to remove the first cartridge from the belt; the feeding pawl advanced the next round into position to be extracted. and then the first round was chambered (loaded into the barrel ready to fire) when the bolt slide forwards again.

As the bolt went into battery, the extractor engaged the next round on the advanced belt resting in the feedway, preparing to draw it from the belt n the next firing cycle. Every time the gun fired a shot, the gun performed the sequence of extracting the spent round from the chamber and extracting the following round from the belt as the bolt came rearward, the fresh round ejecting the spent one when the bolt was to the rear and the fresh round was cycled in front of the bolt, then on the forward stroke chambering the next round to be fired, advancing the belt, and engaging the next round in preparation for loading. Once the bolt closed, the firing pin dropped and the round was fired, and the sequence was repeated (at a rate of roughly ten cycles per second) until the trigger was released or the ammunition belt was exhausted.”

That’s for the M1919, the .30 caliber Browning that would have been most commonly used in Korea by US forces.

The basic difference here between this generation of MG and the ones most of us are used to in this sadly diminished age of wonders, is that the old-school guns mostly had feed systems that pulled the cartridge out of the rear of the belt. The majority of modern guns, on the other hand, push the cartridge forward, through the belt link. Plus that, there’s the difference in mechanism, with old-school guns having multi-stage feed systems to get the rounds into the chamber–On many older guns, you have the gun firing from the open bolt just like modern guns, but you have to “load” the bolt with a live round first, which is why you have to “charge” it twice. You’re really not, but that’s what a lot of people think they’re doing.

The .50 caliber M2 works like this, as well as the Mk19 Grenade Machine Gun, both of which are notorious for blowing the minds of tyro gunners with this requirement. Many of them fail to listen during the preliminary training, and do not grasp the essentials of the mechanism, even when you spend hours going over it beforehand with copious resources like animations and working models you’ve gone to great effort to resource for their benefit. What’s even more frustrating is to listen in on them, as they try to explain to others what they’ve experienced, and hear the magical thinking they use when trying to comprehend the entire series of events they’ve gone through. By the end of the day, the trainer is often thinking fondly of the idea of shock collars and operant conditioning a la Pavlov or Skinner, in order to get the fucking point across to some of these untrainable morons. The fucking mechanism is often right there in front of them to observe, and yet they’re incapable of treating it as anything other than some sort of magical black-box affair, one that you have to propitiate and do magical things with, in order to get it to work…

The average human being is a fucking idiot. And, that’s all I’ve got to say about it all.

I’m curious why this would be so. Is this something inherent to guns firing from an open bolt? Figure somebody here has a clue.

YES. Our troops destroyed the Viet Cong, fought the North Vietnamese to a standstill then backed them up. In the 73 attack, from Jerry Pournelle

“And in Viet Nam the North sent 150,000 men south with as much armor as the Wehrmacht had in many WW II engagements. That was in 1973, and of that 150,000 fewer than 50,000 men and no armor returned to the North, at a cost of under 1,000 American casualties. Most would count that an outstanding victory. (Alas, in 1975 North Viet Nam had another army of over 100,000 and sent it South; the Democratic Congress voted our South Vietnamese 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per man, but refused naval and air support; Saigon predictably became Ho Chi Minh city as we pushed helicopters off the decks of out carriers in our frantic evacuation; but that is hardly the fault of the US military)…”

The war was thrown by the Democrats. They had told everyone so often that the war was unwinnable that the first chance they got they made it so.

As is the case in most wars there was not a clear victory but by fighting the commies in Vietnam millions upon millions of other Asians were spared the fate of the Cambodians. At the time Vietnam was going on there were insurgencies all over Asia and the American troops kept them occupied so that many of the insurgencies in Asian could be defeated. The fine Men and Women of the USA fought off not only the enemy overseas but the enemy at home and saved millions.