Featured Image Credit: Reddit/@midas617
Topics: Reddit, Military, Social Media
Claire Reid
People have been left horrified after watching footage showing examples of traps used during the Vietnam War.
The decades-long conflict, which saw the US supporting its allies South Vietnam against North Vietnam, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, including almost 60,000 US soldiers.
The war was infamous for the guerilla warfare from the Viet Cong, who devised numerous booby traps - many of which the US military was simply unprepared for.
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These traps were often designed to maim rather than kill, meaning US soldiers were left having to carry their injured men, making operations more difficult.
A post shared on Reddit with the title, ‘Some examples of the horrific traps used in the Vietnam War’, included a simulation of a range of these horrific traps. The post included punji sticks, which were sharpened bamboo or metal stakes placed upright at the bottom of the hole and covered over - meaning an unsuspecting soldier would step his foot right into the hole and onto the sharpened sticks.
There were even efforts to make this trap worse, by placing the sticks at a downward facing angle, meaning the foot would go in easily enough, but couldn’t be removed without causing further injury to themselves.
According to warhistoryonline.com, the punji sticks ‘were often coated in feces or urine, with the goal of causing an infection in their victim’.
The Viet Cong would also use a trap called the ‘canned grenade’, which - as the name suggested - involved a grenade, with its pin removed, placed inside a can, meaning its striker lever was still held down.
A trip wire would be attached to the can, and when this wire was tripped, the grenade would be pulled from the can and denote.
Tripwires were also used for Viet Cong’s bow traps, too, which saw a ready-to-fire bow and arrow attached to a tripwire.
When the tripwire was triggered, the bow would be released - firing an arrow, which would sometimes be tipped with poison or feces, directly at the soldier.
If they managed to avoid all of those potential hazards, soldiers could still stumble into a ‘tiger trap’, which - once again - was triggered by a tripwire and would result in a wooden plank, studded with metal spikes, to fall on them from above.
Sometimes bricks or other heavy objects would be added to the planks to send it hurtling down faster.