Could You Survive Three M16 Bullets to the Chest?

NARRATOR: Paul Dalby is a weapons expert with more than 30 years experience testing firearms and explosives. What I'm holding here is the iconic M16 assault rifle. This particular example being a Vietnam veteran. It's a 5.56 caliber weapon fed from a 20-round box magazine. It's accurate to 500 meters and fires at a rate of 700 rounds per minute. NARRATOR: To show the damage caused by a single M16 bullet to the human body, Paul will fire into a block of ballistic gel that has the same density as human tissue. A high speed camera shows the extent of the damage caused by the bullet. Adam Brooks is a trauma surgeon and expert in ballistic injuries. He's treated similar wounds on the battlefield and will be examining the extent of the bullets' impact. This ballistic challenge is very much like incising tissues of the body. I'm going to try and cut along the track of this round so we can get an idea of the damage it's done. So here's the entry of the bullet. For the first 5 or 6 centimeters, very little in the way of destruction or damage to tissues. But then as the round turns on its side and slows down in the tissue, we get this cavitation effect. All of the energy is dumped into the body. We get tearing in huge amounts of trauma to the tissues. And then finally, you can see how the round is twisted, turned on its axis to the point where it's pointing backwards here and come to rest still within the body. NARRATOR: If just a single shot from an M16 rifle causes such devastation to a human body, what will be the effect of three direct hits to the chest? To recreate the scene from "Platoon," this ballistic gel mannequin will represent Sergeant Elias. Inside are representations of the vital organs. The heart and lungs, liver, and kidneys. Paul will be firing in semi-automatic mode from a distance of 30 feet, the same shooting distance as in the movie. [GUN FIRE] Weapon clear. NARRATOR: Every one of Paul's bullets hit their mark. But have they missed all the vital organs as they did in "Platoon?" He's been hit low down just taking the edge of the kidney out. And that's going to bleed and you see the blood around the model. He's got two other injuries here and here, both of which have caught the edge of the right lung. Although the lungs have been deflated a little bit, it's not an immediately life-threatening injury. NARRATOR: So Elias could have survived Barnes' assault to later reappear from the jungle only to meet his maker at the hands of enemy fire. But after surviving three bullets to the chest, would Elias really have been able to run into the clearing? Elias could have got up and run for a period of time. NARRATOR: So Elias' dramatic death wasn't just Hollywood fiction.

Channel: Smithsonian Channel

Views: 10,888,540

Rating: 4.7716451 out of 5

Keywords: Vietnam war, Film, asia, culture, pop culture, movies, Oliver Stone, politics, War

Id: Dr7dpEDNNC4

Length: 3min 43sec (223 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2013