Cartridge trap

A cartridge trap is a type of booby trap devised by the Viet Cong and subsequently used against American and other anti-Communist forces supporting South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It derives its name from the fact that the wounding component of the trap is a small arms cartridge.

Design

It is a very simple trap, made from four main components: a bamboo pipe, a piece of wood, a nail and a small arms cartridge. The device required a cartridge to be stood upright and when a person (usually a soldier) stepped on the trap, the pressure placed on the bullet would force it down onto a nail, igniting the primer and subsequently causing the round to fire.[1]

Purpose

The intent of the trap was to cause the round to travel through an enemy soldier's foot, causing him and probably his entire section to cease their actions in order to treat him. This would often create an opportunity for a Vietcong (or other North Vietnamese force) to engage the stationary section in an ambush.

gollark: Anyway, I think it's because you can consider the problem of designing an error correction code similarly to packing spheres, because each sphere of radius n represents all the possible values n bit errors away from a value being transmitted and you want them to not overlap.
gollark: Like cows.
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gollark: I'm sure I read about the sphere packing thingy being investigated in higher dimensions, if not packing in general.
gollark: Can you do better if you can use multiple shapes together?

See also

References
  1. "Anti personnel mines & booby traps used by the Viet Cong & NVA". Digger History. Archived from the original on May 4, 2009. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
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