07-13-2011, 06:43 AM
RangerRick Wrote:I can tell you from personal experience that clothing slows shrapnel down. It's not a bullet but the shrapnel I got hit with was the filler of an anti personnel mine. It consists of a steel rod cut into short pieces at an angle to create sharp points on both ends. It's about the size and weight of a bullet.
Even though it isn spinning, air resistance causes it to orient one or the other pointy end first over short distances. I had very few oblong holes in me.
When the docs gave me a jar of souvenirs from the surgery, I was surprised to see so much cloth in the jar with it.
They took strips of my outer uniform and my tee shirt into the wound with them. That's got to use up a lot of energy
Any of you guys who have been shot found this to be true too?
I took a 9mm through-and-through. It was an FMJ, and was very clean. The wounds bled like drinking fountain faucets, but you can bleed like that for a long time and still be ok for the time it takes to win a gunfight. Fortunately for me, it was an accidental shooting, so I didn't have to beat anyone's face in at the time. I also have the projectile, and it has a flattened dent running diagonally off to the side of the bullet tip, from where it hit the lateral epicondyle of my right femur.
The grenade fragments I've been hit with burned right through my BDU's both times, and kept burning in my skin. I never sought medical care for them as the first was easily picked out with my hand (burned the tips of my fingers slightly), and the second probably worked itself out of my back (did something stupid on a grenade range and didn't want to face possible UCMJ).
Most FMJ wounds are pretty clean, except for 5.56 in my experience. If a round skips through ground debris into a person, there are sometimes rocks in the injured area as well. I've seen that.
If you do get any fabric and foreign debris into a wound, the debris needs to be removed ASAP. This is where debridement comes into play. Basically, you need to expose the wound, irrigate with saline solution, probably open/remove damaged fascia at the entrance/exit, and run gauze through it until the wound path is cleaned. They did that on my legs with the GSW. If you don't debride, the dead tissue and foreign debris will induce infection really quick, and then the muscle tissue will turn black, while skin turns dark and mushy, with no more nerve function, and will need to be removed. This is why mine injures are so effective when a soldier is wounded because he needs to be rushed through the echelons of care from the front to the rear ASAP.
With mine and explosively-launched fragments, you're looking at brissance velocities that start out at up to 34,000 fps if C4 is used, and well over 20,000 fps if TNT is uses. COMP B is closer to C4 IIRC, so explosively-launched projectiles will be going as fast as the atmospheric threshold will tolerate, and they are extremely hot from the initial explosion and air resistance. Bad ju-ju
LRRPF52