Word: punji
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seems either naive or dishonest now. We want to stop the war not because it is too expensive, but because it is a bloody holding action to stall a victory by the legitimate though repressive government of the people. Tell that to a woman whose son was mangled by punji sticks or a terrorist attack...
Salute to the Tube. To learn how to avoid Viet Cong booby traps and needle-pointed poisoned bamboo punji stakes, infantrymen will be shown eight hours of video tapes on Viet Nam. In a lesson on military courtesv, recruits watch a televised salute and then salute the screen while they are checked by their own sergeant. Altogether, the Army has assembled more than 2,000 TV tapes on such wide-ranging subjects as how to bandage wounds, drive correctly and repair radios. Unlike old training films, which cost three times the $500 budgeted to crank out a minute of televised...
...dirty fire fights-usually on no more than platoon or company scale-set in copses of bamboo and thorn vine so thick that men kill at a range of 10 ft. without having once seen each other. It is a war of leg-shearing booby traps and dung-smeared punji stakes, of professional skill and personal courage. It is also a war that is tailor-made for a writer like S.L.A. Marshall, who can reconstruct a small-unit action so that it takes on the intimate immediacy of a leech beneath a platoon sergeant's collar...
...Punji sticks bloomed like lethal lotus on every side, and bunkers by the dozen thrust from the sand dunes as the Marine company moved through the brush 14 miles northwest of Hué. The territory was familiar ground to the one civilian with the Marines: stout, cheerful Bernard Fall, who, by his books and visits to the country, had made himself the best-known international commentator on Viet...
Nobody Talked. Gradually the village was organized to protect itsef in a way that gave every villager a sense of participation. Old women went to work constructing punji sticks and booby traps for protective barriers around the village. Teen-age boys manned klaxon alarms. Should they sound at night, the women were taught to gather in the center of the village with flaring pitch torches, while the men held back in the shadows with their guns to ambush Viet Cong intruders. Last March a small Viet Cong propaganda team came, and nearly every villager went to his assigned post...