I remember when I started MOUT training, I heard the phrase “bullets follow walls, so stay away from walls.” I heard it and did it, but I had to eventually ask what it meant. Why do bullets follow walls? At 18, I had no idea what bullets did. I was told to shut up and clear the street again. At that point, you aren’t asking questions. You’re yelling ‘Aye, Sergeant’ and doing what you’re told.
I’m the type of person who likes to know what and why. I like explanations. I eventually looked into it and figured it out. Years later, it dawned on me that others may have never learned why bullets follow walls, so let’s dig into it.
How Bullets Follow Walls
The way bullets follow walls is pretty simple to understand. The first part of understanding the how is understanding what doesn’t happen. When most of us think of something bouncing off a wall, we think of a rubber ball. If you throw a rubber ball against a wall, it typically departs at the same angle it struck the wall.
Bullets don’t do that. They hit a solid surface and leave at a shallow angle since they aren’t soft like a rubber ball. A bullet strikes the surface, and it loses its momentum perpendicular to the wall. The bullet then seemingly skims along the wall.
The angle does make a big difference in this effect. A direct hit to the wall isn’t likely to skim a bullet. If you tried to skim bullets along walls purposefully, you could do it fairly easily. However, in a gunfight, you won’t know the angle at which your enemy is firing. This is why we just try and stay off walls and resist hugging them.
Can and Will Follow Walls
We always stay away from walls; it’s just part of urban fighting. In this discussion, walls can take all sorts of shapes and sizes. We wouldn’t call a car a wall, but bullets can skim off a car. Is it as likely to skim off a car as a steel ship wall? No, but it can happen.
Material matters. Regarding stuff like sheetrock and wood, the likelihood is pretty low that a bullet will skim off the wall. We still tend to stay away from walls because it becomes a habit. We get to this interesting middle zone when we switch to stone, concrete, and rock.
It can skim off a wall and is likely to, but it also might not. It’s all dependent on how hard the material is and the angle the projectile strikes the wall. If we move into steel, like a ship hull, then the likelihood increases drastically.
I’ve never had to take a ship outside of training, and even in training, it’s terrifying. It’s all tight corridors and walls; if I had to defend a ship, I might just blind fire in corridors!
Bullets follow walls so often that the army used to instruct and teach troops how to use them to their advantage. Manuals from the 1980s and 90s discuss using ricochets off walls to shoot behind and around cover to inflict causalities.
Stay Away From Walls
I feel like this was a painfully in-depth explanation of a simple concept. I’m the type who wants to know the why, and this was typically irritating to my higher-ups. As someone who wants to know the why, I like explaining the why, and hopefully, I’ve done that with the old saying of “bullets follow walls.”
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