> The article below brought to mind Dwayne's point about the inevitable
> outcome of competing technologies -- which, as it turns out, doesn't
> always favor the most "advanced."
>
> Joanna
> ____________________________________________
>
> A Vietnam veteran offers an interesting and telling incident summing
> up his personal feelings about the war
> "I remember the moment when I knew we were going to lose the war in
> Vietnam. Frustrated by our inability to find the elusive Viet Cong,
> the United States had developed a top-secret program to locate enemy
> troop concentrations.
>
> It was a "people sniffer," a device sensitive to the presence of
> ammonia in urine that could be hung from a helicopter flying low over
> the jungle. When a high reading was identified, artillery was
> directed at the area.
>
> One evening in 1968 I was attending an end-of-the-day regimental
> briefing and an infantry captain was describing a sweep through the
> jungle.
>
> He and his men had encountered something they could not explain:
> buckets of urine hanging from the trees. The regimental commander and
> his intelligence officer exchanged looks as they silently
> acknowledged that we were firing artillery (at $250 a round) at
> buckets of urine all over Vietnam."
> [snip] for the rest, see
> http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3379C496-BA09-4CDE-A93E-2B36DCF7F36E.htm
>
> Joanna
The device was a vial full of bedbugs or fleas with a mini mike/xmitter attached. I don't believe it was ammonia the bugs reacted to, I'm pretty sure it was butyric acid < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid >. When the bedbugs smelled human they started jumping around and the special forces op over the ridge with a pair of headphones on would call in... artillery?
They were calling in million dollar F-111 strafing/Napalm raids & B-52 bombing runs on buckets of piss, dirty clothes, and an occasional unlucky water buffalo.
On a similar note, I believe the reason we were calling in airstrikes on bunkers around Iraq early in the war, claiming that Saddam was surely there, is because the cellphone pin codes assigned to the Iraqi leadership were known and being monitored. All one of Saddams people would have had to do is turn on their cellphone and toss it into a bunker. Purchased for $9.95 at the local Verizon wireless store on the add-a-phone plan.
Pooft. 15 minutes later the f-16s show up to bomb a cellphone.
They will break the US economy ya' know... it'll take slightly longer than it took AQ & the US to break the Russian economy but they will break it.
Technology, our supposed advantage, will be our undoing.
Never forget that the Vietnamese spent years beating us back with punji sticks, tiger traps, WWII vintage weapons(The AA gun that Jane Fonda was pictured on), and sandals made from the tires of stolen US jeeps.
Leigh www.leighm.net