Pretentious little article but some points are correct - combat’s deafening, machine guns can overheat and do bad things quickly, people aren’t predictable when they’re hit, etc.
The junk about bullets “sounding like bees” is horsehockey: bullets make a loud bang when they go by or if they hit somebody. Sounds like a breaking pine board. If the incoming sounds like bees, they’re shooting at somebody else a long way off, I would guess.
The stupid part about eating MREs during a firefight is idiotic. During a real firefight you have no idea if you’re going to be alive in the next second or so. Tends to concentrate the mind.
It is true that you haven’t any idea how the guy you hit’s going to react. That’s why you always shoot a couple more times to make sure he stays down.
The authors of this piece makes fun of hand signs - as you experienced guys know, you use hand signs on patrol because making noise on patrol is incredibly stupid. We used hand signs all the time, so we stayed alive.
No mention of grenades, but grenades are used all the time and often. Work great but nobody on earth can throw them far enough to prevent getting hit by your own frags. All of us have little bits of our own steel in us from grenades. And no, we didn’t get Purple Hearts from getting hit by our own frags - we weren’t John Kerry.
I figured that if there was any BS in the article someone would detect it.
BTW, from a physics point of view, if a bullet is traveling at supersonic velocity any sound made by its passing would be heard by those the bullet passes by closely before the bang reaches them. (Whether a bullet makes a sound as it passes by I don’t know; never been on that end of a gun.)
Bullets going through leaves on trees is an interesting sound, at least if there is a lot of them.