Word: punji
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Dates: during 1966-1966
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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...
Tough Talk. It was a few months later, while on patrol in Viet Nam's Central Highlands, that Sadler's short combat career was ended. He fell on a Viet Cong-planted punji pole, suffered an infection that left one leg scarred and partially numb. He returned Stateside, talking both tough ("You get a sort of satisfaction out of a good shot, leading a man running across a field and bringing him down") and tenderly ("We're overgrown social workers"). Mostly, though, he preferred not to talk at all except in his songs...
...building Vinh Hoa, which they named for the Rev. Nguyen Lac Hoa, a Catholic soldier-priest who began fighting the Viet Cong in 1959. The instructors' wives wove grass rugs and made clay cooking pots, while children helped to fashion the village's huts and whittled vicious punji stakes of bamboo. For added authenticity, chickens were let loose to roam the village...
Surrounded by a high, spiked fence and a 20-ft.-wide defense perimeter bristling with punji stakes, the one-acre compound consists of five grass-and-straw huts, a camouflaged lookout tower, a well, a shaded hammock for the village chief. A dozen "Viet Cong" defenders-infantry troops who have completed their training and are awaiting assignment to Viet Nam-wear black pajamas and conical peasant hats. Underneath the village snakes a maze of tunnels that connect each hut to a passageway leading under the village wall. When the trainees attack, some villagers usually slip into the tunnels...