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Date Posted: Mon, June 27 2005, 16:05:03
Author: Jeff Northridge
Author Host/IP: 4.246.108.55
Subject: Booby Traps
In reply to: Lisa Elliott 's message, "silver wings" on Mon, June 27 2005, 12:32:00

Howdy Lisa;

Vietnam was and still is a tropical country. It was hot and humid year round. There is a six-month dry season which lasts from mid-December to mid-May and a six-month monsoon season which lasts from mid-May to mid-December. Anything that isn't made out of plastic or gold will rot, rust, or corrode and become a useless pile of junk within a few weeks unless it is properly maintained. Therefore, any booby trap made using natural materials such as string, rope, wood, etc. has a life expectancy of about two months at most.

Since the whole idea of a booby trap is to set up the trap and wait until the enemy just happens to stumble on to it (without spotting it first), it is not very efficient to use materials that simply won't work after a few weeks. The vast majority of booby traps that we encontered consisted of an explosive device (usually a hand grenade of some type) that had been rigged to go off by a trip wire made of nylon fishing line. All of the constituents parts of the device could be expected to last for years in the tropics.

Building a giant wooden structure with wooden spikes, bending over a tree to act as a spring, setting up a delicate trigger mechanism, and camouflaging the entire apparatus in order to try and kill one man is absurd. We did find a few punji-stake pits down in the Delta, but they were half-full of water and so old that the wooden stakes were completely rotten and even if someone had stepped into it, nothing would have happened except for maybe a twisted ankle.

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