When they weren't saving the good-guys, they went truck hunting on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That was the main infiltration route for troops and supplies from North Vietnam through "neutral" Laos to South Vietnam. We had Korean War vintage (1950) AC-119K gunships and similar aged A-1E & A-1H fighter/bombers that were serious anti-truck machines.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Vietnam had an "electronic fence" dreamed up by LBJ's strange Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara (the same guy who developed the Edsel when he worked for Ford Motor Co). The fence consisted of acoustic and seismic sensors dropped along and beside the trail and transmitting sound and vibration to monitoring aircraft which then relayed the data to a super secret facility at my base, which sent someone to bomb the source of the sound or vibration, if all worked well. Read about Igloo White.

Well, in addition to the trucks, there were a lot of gomers coming down the trail on foot. They carried heavy loads on their backs or on poles between a pair of people or really heavy loads on a bicycle that they walked beside and pushed the length of the trail. These buggers were really motivated and devoted to their cause.

To impede the pedestrians, we didn't use gunships or fighter/bombers, -- not really cost effective. Somebody was finally thinking? So they developed an ingenious landmine called Gravel. This looks sort of like a drab beanbag that somebody dropped on the ground, and if you step on it, it blows your foot off. That'll knock the freaking motivation out of you and make you wish you had stayed home.

So, while I was reminiscing this morning about the good old days, I had a great idea. (Yeah, there goes that EPA-approved, dim, curly, toxic-mercury filled, piece-of-shit light bulb above my head again.) -- We have this problem with all these illegal "pedestrians" crossing our Southern border. The government can't and won't do shit about it. We've got to find a way to make up a huge batch of gravel mines. As far as I can determine, they were last produced in 1970. They could be made from recycled glass, that would really please the leftist greenies, maybe we could get buy-in from them.

Next, we need a way to seed them thickly along the border line and maybe a mile or two either side of it. Well, congress every year makes the Air Force buy C-17s that the Air Force doesn't want and doesn't need, so they have plenty of the damn things. We borrow one, load it up with our beanbags and start seeding the border. Shouldn't take more than a few weeks to complete the whole thing from Baja to Brownsville.

Then you just station a cop at every hospital emergency room. Somebody comes in with one (or zero) feet, arrest and deport them.