-If I may, as Molon finishes his next installment, this may be of interest:

Something I wrote about in Guns & Ammo a few years ago. Could it be true, the old Viet Nam war bromide of," I stitched him square across the chest and he kept coming!" Patrick Sweeney and I tested this many years ago in a class but I took it further for the article. Patrick's point was that then and now, enemy combatants are likely to be wearing AK chest rigs and indeed, those sturdy AK mags filled with steel-case, steel-jacketed, steel-core ammo pose a viable barrier to the old M193 ammo. Even .45 hardball did not get through in some test shots. The good news is that the new M855A1. Mk 318, and Brown Tips all pretty much say, "Magazines? Were there magazines in the way? I didn't notice."

The fun part was that pretty much every rifle round shot into the chest rig also caused a flare-up of powder from the disrupted ammo.