Word: anti-personnel
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...been a frequent target of student protests because of its role in planning the Indochina war. The institute's JASON summer project did the early planning for what became the Army's "integrated battlefield control system"--the electronic battlefield of sensors, anti-personnel bombs, mines and laser-guided "smart" bombs on which American planners increasingly relied as the war went...
Saturday's Crimson story on the Honeywell demonstration quoted a Honeywell public relations executive's denial of several charges concerning his company's production of anti-personnel weapons. Specifically, Stewart G. Baird claimed: that Honeywell's Rockeye II bomb is not an anti-personnel weapon but an "anti-tank" device; that the company has not made the guava bomb for two years; that Honeywell never produced SPIW's (Special Purpose Individual Weapon--fires flechettes, steel-finned darts 2-3"long), though he admitted that it "helped" in their development...
...Anti-personnel bombs flutter to earth and land silently in darkened rice fields. There they wait sinisterly, like chunks of debris. They explode only at human contact, spewing out hundreds of tiny steel pellets which rip, shred, maim and blind. Anti-personnel bombs do not discriminate between soldiers and old women and small boys walking behind the family water buffalo...
There was a savage logic behind the use of anti-personnel weapons. The men in Washington who planned this war knew that the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had only limited medical facilities and that widespread injuries, instead of deaths, would severely tax those facilities and weaken the Vietnamese war effort. So they issued crisp orders which set in motion the farm wives and the bomber pilots. And more small boys clutched shredded bodies and blinded eyes and screamed in agony...
Vietnam, in recent years a continual example of the brutality in the world, is another shining reminder of the alternatives. None of the American onslaught--the heavy bombs and the anti-personnel bombs and the napalm and the bullets and the prisons--could break the spirit of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese liberation forces are peasants who are starving without land, and rural school-teachers who cannot teach hungry students and urban intellectuals who cannot accept oppression. My favorite high school teachers, the ones who always had extra time for students, would no doubt have been members...