A rifle bullet for use in warfare is always made up of a heavy lead-alloy core to give weight and carrying power encased in a brass-type alloy jacket to hold the bullet together inside the rifle and give better penetration of a target. This is because a lead bullet fired with the extreme power of a rifle round tends to break apart as it travels down a barrel under great pressure and flatten and spread out when it hits even a soft target.
Let me explain here that the damage done by a high velocity bullet when it hits a human body is not just the hole which it makes – though a large hole in your enemy is no bad thing. When a rifle bullet hits a target it is travelling so fast, more than twice as fast as a pistol bullet (and therefore for college educated readers the kinetic energy is squared) that it sends a shock wave out in front of it in a cone. This tears tissue and will often rip out the back of a body causing massive blood loss and certainly a rapid loss of interest in fighting you.
Pistol bullet designers aim for a bigger bullet to make a bigger hole to let the blood out quickly because, in order to be fired from a pistol, these bullets cannot travel fast enough to make much of a shock wave. As a general rule, the heavier a bullet and the faster it travels the greater the shock wave when it hits the target, the better the penetration and the better the range. But it takes a heavier rifle to fire a heavier bullet at greater velocity. What about a lighter bullet at high velocity? A lighter bullet slows down more quickly and is more likely to be deflected by wind in flight. So, as with most things in life, the choice of weight, for range, and muzzle velocity, for hitting power, against lightness of cartridge and rifle, is always a trade-off in the design of a bullet, the round which propels it and the rifle which fires it.
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Dealing with a stoppage
The first stoppage action for most rifles is cock, hook and look. In a firefight, cock the weapon turned on its side with the ejection opening pointing down. Then as the working parts come back the stuck round will almost always drop out and the rifle will reload. If the enemy is so close – touching distance – that you have no time to reload then use the muzzle of your rifle as if you had a bayonet fitted. Push your rifle forward so the muzzle hits the enemy in the face. It will rip open their face and put them off their stroke while you think of something else to pass the time.
For a light weapon you have to either go for a light bullet travelling very fast, like the 5.56mm x 45mm round favoured by NATO and fired by the M16, or a heavy bullet travelling relatively slowly, like the 7.62mm x 39mm favoured by Russia and China and fired by the AK47. I feel that the best way of looking at the idea of firing a round which is easier to carry but does less damage is that when you have ‘winged’ someone they are out of the game generally and you can always finish them off at your leisure with a head shot or bayonet. That is enough. The M16/Armalite 5.56mm bullet is travelling at an extremely high velocity when it leaves the muzzle and therefore creates a terrific shock wave when it hits a human body at relatively short range. The AK47 bullet produces a lesser shock wave but a bigger hole. But in all honesty there is little to choose between them. They both do what you need.
Ammunition in use today: Just to make things more interesting, all bullets react in a wildly different manner when they hit someone depending on the range, if they are tumbling because they hit a leaf first, the angle they strike at, if they went through heavy clothing first and if they strike a bone in the body. What I mean is, one time a bullet will go clean through an enemy with a tiny entry and exit wound, another time a similar bullet will blow a big hole out his back, a third time the bullet will somehow bounce about inside. The bouncing around has to be seen to be believed. A little story will perhaps illustrate the ‘stopping power’ debate about ammunition. We were fighting line abreast through an enemy base camp in a very pleasant East African country. The camp consisted principally of trenches and bunkers. I was carrying a Belgian FN like most of the troops on our side. An American major to my left was carrying his M16 as this was what he was used to. Many soldiers, quite reasonably, derive confidence from carrying their favourite weapon.
A friend of mine, the experienced soldier and now author Yves Debay, was carrying a semi-automatic shotgun loaded with a round which fired two lumps of lead joined by a length of wire. This didn’t give him much of a rate of fire but when he hit someone this weapon blew them apart. He said he liked them to go down when he hit them. His position might sound crazy if you have not seen much combat up close, but it is a fact that lead scouts in some theatres carried an RPG7 on their shoulder facing forwards. This had the apparent intention, and certainly the effect, of giving them one quick shot at you with a powerful weapon when they were hit but before they went down. You don’t want to know what an RPG7 round does when it hits a human body. Actually, I suppose you might. See p.62 at the end of this section.
Back to the base-camp. We were fighting through, knocking down anything that put its head up and throwing fragmentation and phosphorous grenades into bunkers, when the major shot someone in a trench with one round at a range of 8 or 10ft. The target wasn’t very happy and did not offer any further resistance, slumping down into the trench. There was an Intelligence captain close by and he asked me to take a look at the target and see if I could keep it alive. Dragged out of the trench the target was semi-conscious and bleeding a little from an entry wound high in the front of his chest and a neat exit wound in his back a little lower down.
The 5.56mm calibre bullet from the M16 had made a little hole at the front, minced one of the man’s lungs with its shock wave, and then made a neat little hole as it left through his back. He was certainly out of action for the foreseeable future at the cost of half the weight of a 7.62mm FN round. A 7.62 round would probably have gone straight through (only ‘probably’ because as stated above bullets often do funny things when they hit targets) and come out with a lump of meat at the back but the result would have been no better.
The main problem from the target’s point of view was difficulty breathing. When the chest cavity is punctured the lungs tend to collapse which prevents breathing and the casualty gurgles a lot. This is because we open our lungs through the suction created by the downward movement of our diaphragm. Air is normally sucked into the chest cavity down the throat as the lungs expand. When there is a hole in the chest the air comes in though the hole as the diaphragm moves down but instead of filling the lung it fills the air cavity around the lung and allows the lung to collapse. This is why such a wound is called a ‘Sucking Wound’.
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Dealing with a sucking wound
It is simple to treat a sucking wound and recovery figures are good – all you do is smear blood on two pieces of plastic bag and use them to seal the wounds – front and back in this case though there could only be one in some cases. We will look at this later. I did this and tied the plastic on with field dressing bandage. I then gave the man an intravenous drip against blood loss and shock then morphine against the pain and to keep him quiet. The captain tried several times to get the man out in a chopper but they were being shot to pieces by anti-aircraft machine guns. In the end someone shot the man properly to put him out of his misery.
There are just two main types of rifle ammunition in use around the world today: the 7.62mm x 39mm ‘Short’ round is fired by the AK47 and is in use from Russia and China to the Middle East. (There is an even shorter 7.62 x 25 round fired by a Russian Tokarev pistol and some SMGs.) The 39mm bullet has a relatively large diameter, or calibre, but a relatively low muzzle velocity owing to the lack of propellant. It is still far quicker than a pistol however, so it works by making a large hole in the target and by something of a shock wave to stop the enemy. The effective accurate range of an AK47 is around 300 yards and it weighs about 8lb.