bullet sponge
n.— «Fighting in there “is going to be chaotic,” he said. There’ll be lots of ricochets, concussions, shrapnel, and nowhere to crawl in retreat. “The first guy is going to go down.…He’s going to be a bullet sponge,” Rinehart said.» —“Soldiers train to a fighting edge” by Michael Gilbert News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington) Mar. 14, 2002. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Katie in Everett, Washington, is curious about the expression If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. What is a tinker? She heard this phrase on the television series The Gilded Age, in response to a character who...