Dirty Tricks

[dragoon500ly]

Thought I'd toss this one in and see what comes up!

My demo instructor encouraged his classes to develop as many different ways to use "that stuff that goes boom"...

Here is one for an ambush that he taught us.

The patrol sets up in a standard "L" formation, at the far end of the killing ground, a marker (c-ration can, lighter etc) is left on a branch. Instead of emplacing Claymores along the line, they are emplaced in the overhead cover, tied to branches and so on. They are aimed so as to fire straight down and of course camouflaged.

Takes advantage of the human nature of not looking up when walking, something to distract the eye for a moment...

Another trick was to lay out a triple row of concertina wire...to include empty cans with a couple of pebbles in them...the trick was that the wire was rigged at either end pull/release detonators hooked to fougas barrels. Hold the wire to cut it, and when the tension was taken off the wire....

One last trick...anyone every take the time to look at photos of M-48 tanks in Vietnam? If you look closely you will see two brackets welded in front of the sprockets and another two welded near the tow pintles on the bow of the tank. The tankers would mount Claymores on these brackets and then run the wires into the driver's hatch. The NVA/VC would almost always attempt to board a tank because of the habit of the TCs riding with their hatch open...as the enemy approaches the tank, the driver would use the clacker...

[Panther Al]

Was doing some training back in the day, and I took the time to pester a demo guy on the nature of some of the ways you can set things off. Never actually got the chance to set this up and have it go off, though not for the lack of effort finding an excuse. Set up along a trail: String a line of claymore's along the side, and totally conceal them from sight, and daisy chain them up: don't string a trip or anything else to them towards the trail itself. At the bend of the trail, about the distance from closest claymore should be about as far as you'd expect a patrol to hole up while someone fiddles with a trap at the bend (And the reason why you picked that section) set up another, this one getting a trip set up. Conceal it, but don't get anal. You want it found.. well, better to say you wouldn't mind. Go ahead, and if you have one, set a toe popper under it. Looks like a booby trap, andit is, but it is there to focus attention on this end of the trip. On the other end, attach a a push pull igniter, and attach the daisy chain to that. If they don't see the trip, all of the claymore's get set off. If they spie the trap, and disarm it baddly, the toepopper goes off, and sets off the claymores. If they cut the wire, or otherwise remove it, the claymores go off... either way, odds are, the claymores go off.

Of course, you can always set them off in other ways if you have some metal mesh, a few sheets of paper, and a good shot with a good rifle.

[dragoon500ly]

This one came out of Vietnam. Not really a dirty trick as, creative use of locally acquired material.

Hollywood would have you believe that all a demo expert has to do is slap a couple of sticks of C4 onto the massive highway bridge and you get this massive explosion and the bridge comes tumbling down...

IRL, dropping a bridge usually involves a few hundred pounds of explosive, carefully placed and tamped for maximum effect.

A Special Forces team had the mission of crossing the border into Laos and dropping a road bridge on the Ho CHi Minh Trail. The team wnet in with enough explosives to do the job, as well as a few hundred plastic bags that were to be filled with water and used as tamping. During the HALO jump, the bundle with the plastic bags went missing.

The SF went on and secured the bridge, wiping out the platoon of NVA that were guarding the bridge as well as a small convoy that was crossing the bridge.

The SF demo people then placed the charges and then used the bodies of the garrison and the convoy to tamp the charges.

One has to give credit to the demo people...along with a check mark for the yuck factor!

[Legbreaker]

I LIKE it!
A body would be almost perfect for tamping, and you don't have to worry about digging a grave later! :P

[Targan]

This exect scenario has been used in my campaign, bodies being used to tamp explosives.

[Panther Al]

Not to mention fresh bodies make excellent field expedient cover against small arms fire - as has been found out overseas by many a trooper. Just make sure to strip them of anything that might go boom first.

[Legbreaker]

Bullets got through bodies way to easily for me to want to try that.
Of course if the enemy are armed with .22 rifles... But in that case I might as well just walk up and punch them.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Read this one in Ralph Zumbro's Tank Seargeant:

His M48 platoon was on patrol and setting up a laager for the night and they noted that the perfect spot for the command tank to be in was a little too perfect - nice and clear fields of fire, etc.

So tankers, being a superstitious lot, started carefully checking out the site and sure enough, a couple hundred pounds of TNT with detonator wires leading back to a nearby spiderhole complete with knifeblade switch detonator.

The TNT was removed after careful checking for booby traps and went into the platoon's stocks. A light bulb was affixed to the now bare end of the circuit, every tank in the platoon zeroed their guns in on the spiderhole, and they waited for nightfall.

A little after dark the light went on and the whole platoon fired nearly simultaneously. The next morning they trooped down to the spiderhole, and found it a smoking crater with a foot inside a shoe remaining, nothing else.

Another fun tale from the book: whenever they'd see someone giving them the stink-eye in a town, they'd perform a quick "loyalty test" by running the hydraulic fluid down in the turret motor just enough so that the thing would shriek and complain when the turret rotated, like it would after poor maintenance. Sure enough, most of the young males giving them dirty looks dove for cover the second that shriek started up: they'd heard it before...

He spoke of getting a shave in Hue (prior to the Tet Offensive) and doing so with a grenade in one hand with the pin out. Sure fire way of avoiding any "accidents"!

Less of a dirty trick and more of a "holy cow" was a guy wounded during the Tet Offensive in Hue City who immediately received covering fire from the M42 moving in concert with the unit. Grunt went down, duster rolled up and opened up - the barrels being 6ft directly over the soldier's head: THROM-THROM-THROM-THROM. Guy said it bounced him up and down and left him partially deaf for a day, iirc. Still, better than dead! (This last one being from the must-read Fire in the Streets by Eric Hammel.

[Abbott Shaull]

Not to mention fresh bodies make excellent field expedient cover against small arms fire - as has been found out overseas by many a trooper. Just make sure to strip them of anything that might go boom first.

When in desperate situation this has been done many times. I would have to agree with Leg with the ballistics of many guns, you would need to have cover several bodies deep to be effective.

Always made me laugh that the body armor that we were suppose to have we never trained with unless you were overseas. Even then it seemed to be always in short supply, much like desert chocolate chip cammy uniform or the later desert cammy uniform after they drop chocolate chips. Nothing like seeing formation of troops in desert uniforms with olive drab web gear, woodland bullet proof vests, and woodland kevlar helmet covers. Or the vehicle that were still painted in Woodland color because they didn't have enough paint to repaint them.

Then again it is amusing to see unit that have returned from in the Middle East and were lucky enough to bring back their equipment that still painted in the tan/browns for desert warfare. I still remember some Armories down are Lansing and Jackson for National Guard units still had vehicles that hadn't been repainted since 1st PG War. *shrug*

[TiggerCCW UK]

I recently saw a photo of the old Snatch landrovers that have been brought back from Iraq, with their green paint and the confidential phone line number for Northern Ireland showing through the tan paint - I reckon that'll have confused the Iraqis a bit :)

[dragoon500ly]

A co-worker of mine told this story following his 2nd tour in Iraq.

His patrol was checking a local village, known to be a "pitstop" for insurgents traveling into the interior of Iraq. This particular day, a party of travelers decide that they couldn't wait to kill a few Crusaders.

The lead Hummer started the ambush too early when its gunner spotted movement and unloaded a belt of M240 before being wounded. As the patrol left the vehicles and went for cover, the insurgents started to push forward. One sergeant killed an insurgent with a close-range pistol shot and then got a SAW gunner ready. He picked up the body, waited until a few insurgents were shooting at the position and then popped the body out, waving a hand and ducked back down again. He repeated this again and the party of insurgents, thinking that one of theirs had just killed a couple of Americans, left cover and started forward, as soon as they were out of cover and right in the open, the body was dropped and the SAW gunner dumped a full belt at almost point blank range, killing five of the insurgents.

[Abbott Shaull]

A co-worker of mine told this story following his 2nd tour in Iraq.

His patrol was checking a local village, known to be a "pitstop" for insurgents traveling into the interior of Iraq. This particular day, a party of travelers decide that they couldn't wait to kill a few Crusaders.

The lead Hummer started the ambush too early when its gunner spotted movement and unloaded a belt of M240 before being wounded. As the patrol left the vehicles and went for cover, the insurgents started to push forward. One sergeant killed an insurgent with a close-range pistol shot and then got a SAW gunner ready. He picked up the body, waited until a few insurgents were shooting at the position and then popped the body out, waving a hand and ducked back down again. He repeated this again and the party of insurgents, thinking that one of theirs had just killed a couple of Americans, left cover and started forward, as soon as they were out of cover and right in the open, the body was dropped and the SAW gunner dumped a full belt at almost point blank range, killing five of the insurgents.

What a dirty trick. I am sure it happen lot more often than this one time during the last 8 years.

[dragoon500ly]

Another DT from Vietnam...

A Special Forces camp located in the highlands was rather better dug in then normal; they had a nice thick shoulder-high wall, with a waist-deep ditch about 5 meters or so in front of the wall. The A-team was expecting a NVA attack and was busy reinforcing the wire/mines/booby traps when a new demo sergeant took a look at the ditch and came up with a ballsy trick. It seems that the outer wall of the ditch was about a half meter higher than the inner wall; carefully looking at the ange of the camp wall, the demo sergeant placed several Claymores into the wall, facing into the camp.

When the area between the ditch and the camp wall was filled with NVA, a ripple charge of Claymores right into their backsides!

[Abbott Shaull]

Another DT from Vietnam...

A Special Forces camp located in the highlands was rather better dug in then normal; they had a nice thick shoulder-high wall, with a waist-deep ditch about 5 meters or so in front of the wall. The A-team was expecting a NVA attack and was busy reinforcing the wire/mines/booby traps when a new demo sergeant took a look at the ditch and came up with a ballsy trick. It seems that the outer wall of the ditch was about a half meter higher than the inner wall; carefully looking at the ange of the camp wall, the demo sergeant placed several Claymores into the wall, facing into the camp.

When the area between the ditch and the camp wall was filled with NVA, a ripple charge of Claymores right into their backsides!

Charlie was definitely have a bad night...

[Bullet Magnet]

Another DT from Vietnam...

A Special Forces camp located in the highlands was rather better dug in then normal; they had a nice thick shoulder-high wall, with a waist-deep ditch about 5 meters or so in front of the wall. The A-team was expecting a NVA attack and was busy reinforcing the wire/mines/booby traps when a new demo sergeant took a look at the ditch and came up with a ballsy trick. It seems that the outer wall of the ditch was about a half meter higher than the inner wall; carefully looking at the angle of the camp wall, the demo sergeant placed several Claymores into the wall, facing into the camp.

When the area between the ditch and the camp wall was filled with NVA, a ripple charge of Claymores right into their backsides!

This made me think of several sayings about things jumping up to bite you in the ass.

[dragoon500ly]

More dirty tricks....this one is a NVA trap.

Dig the standard hole for pungi stakes, place 2-3 toe popper mines in the bottom of the hole, and then fix the pungi stakes so that they point downwards from all sides. Then camouflage the trap and wait for the helpless GIs to walk down the jungle trail.

This was often laid out in checkerboard patterns, mixed with standard pungi traps.

[Abbott Shaull]

More dirty tricks....this one is a NVA trap.

Dig the standard hole for pungi stakes, place 2-3 toe popper mines in the bottom of the hole, and then fix the pungi stakes so that they point downwards from all sides. Then camouflage the trap and wait for the helpless GIs to walk down the jungle trail.

This was often laid out in checkerboard patterns, mixed with standard pungi traps.

One game of chess I wouldn't want to play.

[dragoon500ly]

NVA also pulled this trick...not so much demo as damned fine camouflage!

An infantry battalion was landed in the middle of a headquarters area, while the troops were searching for the enemy, they started to take heavy small arms fire; except the troops could not id the direction the fire was coming from. One GI dropped into a dry drainage ditch for cover and was promptly shot, a medic, hearing the cries of the injured trooper, jumped into the ditch and was killed by a gunshot. Two more troopers jumped into the ditch, one was killed and the other wounded.

By this time, the entire platoon had gone to ground trying to figure out where the fire was coming from. A squad leader was hunkered down behind an ant mound, looking the situation over. The drainage ditch was one leg of an upside down Y. The dead and injured GIs were on the vertical leg of the Y, smelling a rat the sergeant started looking over the area around the angle and soon spotted a narrow firing slit that overlooked the GIs. He signaled a trooper who was carrying a satchel charge and the two soon had the charge hanging right above the slit. After the charge blew, the platoon discovered that the NVA had dug a tunnel next to the ditch, and drilled a firing position every few meters. It later turned out that the area was covered with these tunnels.

So the GIs pulled back and Arclighted the site....after the B-52s had finished, they went back in swept the remainments of the garrison up.