Ask Lance Cpl. Robert F. Dean, D Co. 3rd LAR about Extra Armor

You know, no body gets religion like a man who has cheated death out of a bite of his tuckas. From this side of the pond all the BS about the extra armor, the extra weight, the extra effort to move all become "KaKademic" when you have been in the cross hairs of a sureshot thug sniper for that brief instant when time and motion coincide and then you're are thinking to yourself: “I thought someone had thrown a rock at me,” but it wasn't a rock. It was a lead slug fired from somewhere 500 meters away. "Some things are in our control and others not." Epictetus wrote that back in 135 BC about Marines. What is in your control is wearing your "extra" armor.

"Lance Cpl. Robert F. Dean, a light armored vehicle crewman with D Company, 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, owes his life to the small arms protective insert he had strapped to the side of his body armor when he was shot by an insurgent sniper May 14 near the city of Gharmah.

“I thought someone had thrown a rock at me,” said Dean, from Spring, Texas.

Dean soon realized it was not a rock, but a bullet fired by an insurgent from roughly 500 meters away.

“We had an area cordoned off and the scouts were out searching the area,” recalled Cpl. Dustin R. Nelson, Dean’s vehicle commander. “I reached down to give him some water. As he popped out of his hatch to take it from me, I heard a crack.”

The Marines immediately responded to the insurgent attack. “The bullet would have hit his femoral bone, and possibly gone through and hit his femoral artery,” said HN Chad T. Kenyon, 20, the corpsmen who treated Dean after the incident. “If that happened, he could have bled to death within a few minutes. It would have been a sticky situation, but the plates did their job and stopped the bullet.” “The round hit the very bottom of the plate, shattering some of the ceramic, but the fiber paper [backing the plate] caught the round like a baseball mitt,” added Nelson, from Grand Junction, Colo. Story/Photo by: Cpl. Graham Paulsgrove

Marine Corps News -> Side SAPI plate saves life