Some history on the lethality of the .223/5.56 round. If you are squimish, stop reading now. As a round to increase the amount of ammo that can be carried for a given weight, I tend to favor the 7.62x39 round, but the grunt on the ground doesn't have that choice, and in the beginning, when the M16 first was issued in Vietnam, the fact that the combat soldiers couldn't use hollowpoints didn't matter. The first years of the M16 saw a 55gr .223 FMJ round with a rifle barrel with a slow twist, one barely adequate, but sufficient, to stabilize the projectile in flight - might have been a twist rate of 1 in 14, but I can't remember for sure. Anyway, bullet flight was satisfactory for acceptable accuracy and it punched nice little round holes in vehicle doors, wood barriers, etc. HOWEVER, when it hit something soft and squishy, like a human body, it would tumble after penetration and you had this approximately 3/4" long object going through an enemy body sideways, doing more damage than you can believe, much more than an HP round. My service was waterborne, so I never saw it up close, but a grunt friend showed me photos of a row of more than a dozen bodies lined up at an after battle body count; each had been shot in one side or the other and the projectile had traversed the abdomen toward the other side. The hydraulic force generated caused the abdomen to split open and each body was lieing there with what remained of its insides spilling out over their lap. My friend assured me that this type of damage was the rule for shots entering between the waste and armpits. So what did the DoD do? They speeded up the twist rate so that the FMJ projectile that was marginly stable in flight but delivered acceptable accuracy no longer tumbled when traversing a human body, ending the one redeeming feature that gave the GI something tangible to make up for not having a .308 or a 30-06 any more.
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