DA NANG, Vietnam — A Marine with a full bandoleer of ammunition might think he wouldn't miss one lost round — but there's a school here that shows him how it could cost him his life.
The 3d Engineer Bn.'s Demolitions and Mine Warfare School has crude, bamboo-type bullet mines captured from the Viet Cong. It uses these and other types of mines and booby traps as training aids.
The cartridge trap shows at a glance how one bullet can be deadly when the Viet Cong use their ingenuity and crude materials to kill American servicemen.
Some 2,500 Marines have been through the school, which has four different training courses. There's an elaborate 3-day course for engineers, standard and special courses for infantrymen and an accelerated 1-day course for support units like drivers, cooks, bakers and mail clerks.
The school, also known to Da Nang Marines as the "punji palace," has a mock-up Vietnamese Village, built mostly by Vietnamese laborers, for added realism. The village is complete with thatched huts, animal stalls, hay stack, fences and gates. All are mined or booby-trapped with explosive charges, grenades and various punji stick traps.
Students quickly spot a grenade rigged on a fence gate when they approach the school's training area.
But Sgt. Henry D. Halloway, of Ypsilanti, Mich., explains that they have been victimized by the VC "double-bluff" as he points out a second trap that could have killed them. Some gates, said Halloway, have as many as four different traps.
The school emphasizes that the best defense from guerrilla traps is to outwit them. The Viet Cong set up only so many traps and he plants them where he thinks his enemy is most likely to go.
Punji spikes are whittled from bamboo, tempered like steel over fire, dipped in human or water buffalo excrement and planted to impale and infect its victims.