![]() arsenal didn't have a lot that could withstand the blasts from the Communists' most powerful landmines. The crew has made some visual modifications. The Americans and their allies needed a better, faster way.Īn M48 Patton tank in Vietnam. An entire convoy, for example, could be halted by the use of landmines.Īs the troops and trucks backed up waiting for the mines to be cleared, they made a more tempting target as the wait grew longer and the size of the backup grew bigger. or South Vietnamese advances into the North or around the demilitarized zones. ![]() If not a part of an ambush, the Communists used land mines as part of an effort to slow down the U.S. Vietnam has seen the emergence of mines as a major weapons system, used on a scale, relatively speaking, never before encountered."Īnd when a mine was detected, extracting or removing it was also a slow, careful process - and that's just what the VC and NVA wanted. Even the Army's chief of research and development in Vietnam wrote that the mines "outstripped the capability of our counter systems to detect and destroy them. Some mine detection systems wouldn't even work if they couldn't detect the material from which the mines were made. ![]() Individual soldiers or Marines would have to walk down roads and other open terrain with metal detection equipment or other hand-held mine detection systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, clearing roads of mines and taking down minefields was a slow, deliberate and laborious process.
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