Carry On, My Eldest Son: From Booby-Trapped Pagers To Chicken Bloodied Boats

Recently, much of the news has been dominated by Israel’s tactical victory in exploding several devices used by the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah. As summarized by The Associated Press, two rounds of explosions killed an estimated 37 people and wounded an additional 3000. Unfortunately, some of the casualties have been civilians, but early reports suggest that a vast majority of those killed and injured were members of the terror group.

Booby-trapped devices are not a new phenomenon; Hamas is also reportedly using booby-trapped tools, like dolls and other toys, to hide recordings and trick IDF soldiers raiding through the sub-Gazan tunnels.¹

But Israel’s move (or, more accurately, alleged move) to booby-trap devices such as pagers and walkie talkies is revolutionary in the planning and scale of the operation. Though few facts have been confirmed, there are reports that Israel actually created a fake company and factory to manufacture devices; other sources claim that Israel intercepted shipments in order to plant explosives. Whatever the truth, the operation was undoubtedly a logistical feat. 

And while we wait for more information to inform us, we can look into the story of a similar operation that is one of the few in history that created booby-traps with the same level of logistical detail: the U.S.’s Operation Eldest Son, executed during the Vietnam War.

Carry On My Eldest Son

Though most Americans associate Vietnam era booby traps as tools used against the U.S., Uncle Sam got his revenge with Operation Eldest Son. Eldest Son was spearheaded by Colonel John K. Singlaub, commander of the Studies and Observations Group (SOG) from 1966 to 1968 and a veteran of World War II's Office of Strategic Services. 

As part of the SOG’s early operations, Singlaub would send small reconnaissance teams – typically made up of two or three American Green Berets and four to six local soldiers – along the Laotian highway; these teams would often find large stockpiles of ammunition in both enemy base camps and caches. However, they didn’t have enough manpower to secure the locations or transport the vast quantities of ordnance they found. Moreover, simply burning or blowing up the ammunition was not possible; using explosives would only scatter the small-arms rounds rather than effectively destroy them.

To solve this issue, Singlaub decided the best course of action was to sabotage the weapons, but with a twist: they would sabotage the ammunition, not the weapons. 

"Initially I thought of just boobytrapping it so that when they'd pick up a case it would blow up," Singlaub recalled, per American Rifleman. Then he had a better idea - boobytrap the ammunition itself.

The goal of the operation was two-fold: the first was to maim or kill as many enemy soldiers as possible. The second, and arguably more important one, was to undermine Viet Cong confidence in their weaponry as a form of psychological warfare.

And, in an inception-style sidenote, Singlaub’s inspiration came from the British – both in 1930s Waziristan, when the Brits planted booby-trapped .303 rifle ammunition, and in Zimbabwe’s Second Metabele War, when British scouts (led by the American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham) slipped explosive–packed rifle cartridges into enemy stockpiles.

Though Singlaub’s operation sounded simple enough, it was surprisingly complicated, and the CIA had to get involved. For starters, disassembling the weapons proved difficult, thanks to a tough lacquer seal used by Chinese manufacturers. 

But an even bigger issue was creating an explosive that looked like gunpowder, in case North Vietnamese forces disassembled the weapons:

“Eldest Son cartridges originally were reloaded with a powder similar to PETN high explosive, but sufficiently shock-sensitive that an ordinary rifle primer would detonate it. This white powder, however, did not even faintly resemble gunpowder. SOG's technical wizard, Ben Baker - our answer to James Bond's "Q" - decided this powder might compromise the program if ever an enemy soldier pulled apart an Eldest Son round. He obtained a substitute explosive that so closely resembled gunpowder that it would pass inspection by anyone but an ordnance expert. While the AKM and Type 56 AKs and the RPD light machine gun could accommodate a chamber pressure of 45,000 p.s.i., Baker's deadly powder generated a whopping 250,000 p.s.i.”

In addition:

“The CIA's Okinawa lab also did a very professional job of prying open ammo crates, unsealing the interior metal cans and then repacking them so there was no sign of tampering. In addition to SOG sabotaging 7.62 mm and 12.7 mm rounds, these CIA ordnance experts perfected a special fuse for the Communist 82 mm mortar round that would detonate the hand-dropped projectile while inside the mortar tube, for especially devastating effect. Exactly 1,968 of these mortar rounds were sabotaged, too.”

The final challenge was planting the booby-trapped ammunition. SOG teams infiltrated enemy supply lines and inserted the sabotaged rounds into ammo dumps, or they switched out magazines during ambushes:

“When an SOG team discovered an ammo dump, they planted Eldest Son; when a SOG team ambushed an enemy patrol, they switched magazines in a dead soldier's AK. It was critically important never to plant more than one round per magazine, belt or ammo can, so no amount of searching after a gun exploded would uncover a second round, to preclude the enemy from determining this was sabotage.”

These tactics worked for smaller ammunition used in rifles, but another method had to be developed for ammunition like the larger 82 mm mortar ammo. These were not transported loosely, but in wooden crates.

Though these crates were most often placed in the rear of camps, there was at least one example of a creative maneuver: Navy SEALs operating in the Mekong Delta loaded a captured sampan with sabotaged ammunition. They then riddled it with bullet holes and splattered it with chicken blood before sending the boat upstream from a Viet Cong village. Naturally, the Viet Cong believed the boat’s crew had been ambushed and lost overboard, and they took the tainted ammunition without question.

Soon, reports of exploded rifles and mortar tubes began surfacing, leading the enemy to suspect sabotage. Moreover, to sow more seeds of mistrust between the North Vietnamese Army and Chinese allies, the SOG circulated forged documents suggesting that the Chinese were experiencing quality control issues with their ammo. 

The mission was kept strictly under wraps within American ranks. U.S. troops were largely unaware of Project Eldest Son, and when they encountered exploded enemy weapons, they often attributed it to poor manufacturing. 

Still, details of Eldest Son leaked in mid-1969. The operation was only started in August 1967, so it was relatively short-lived. However, the psychological impact on the enemy had been deemed profound. 

Final Thoughts 

One of the benefits of writing in this day and age is that information is so readily available – but that was not the case when searching Operation Eldest Son. Moreover, when it was discussed, it was often with an air of distaste. 

For example, an article from The New York Times that included details about Eldest Son (among other booby-trap plots) declared them “dirty tricks.”²

This became a recurring theme when looking into information on booby-traps throughout history. Something about using booby-traps seemed to strike most reporters and historians as somehow more unpalatable than other methods of war, despite the fact that booby-traps are generally much more precise in targeting enemy combatants versus civilians.

This seems to be echoed in reporting on the Hezbollah exploding devices. For example, left-wing British paper The Guardian posted an asinine editorial, with the headline proclaiming “The Guardian’s view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable.”³ Note their entire argument is based on one “opinion” tweet from a reporter who works for The Intercept Brazil.

X, formerly Twitter, has also been a bastion of users who lament the booby trap, from random basement dwellers to politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who declared that the attack “unequivocally violates international humanitarian law.” Note that there is no tweet condemning Hezbollah’s (alleged) rocket attack on a civilian soccer field in the Golan Heights last July, which killed 12 children.

For whatever reason, booby-trapped devices — from guns to walkie talkies — seem to have stirred more indignation than outright bloodshed, whether it be from 50 years ago or 50 days ago.

But this perhaps echoes the heart of my father’s article last week on William Tecumseh Sherman. War is not a gentleman's game that has any sort of glory. It is dark and ugly – and as Sherman believed, the more the public saw and understood this stark truth, the sooner it ends and the less often it arises.

Those critics who are so offended by sabotaged pagers and bullets are no doubt so far removed from violence that they can live with the fantasy that war can be orchestrated as precisely as moving pieces on a Risk board, with no civilians ever harmed and a simple penalty given to those who use underhanded tactics. But that is not the truth. As Sherman famously said, the truth is that war is hell, and “dirty tricks” no doubt rank fairly low when compared to everything else in that ninth circle.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/22/hamas-booby-traps-gaza/

2. https://archive.nytimes.com/atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/dirty-tricks-of-government-forces-where-deception-and-deadliness-meet-inside-a-gun/

3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-guardian-view-on-israels-booby-trap-war-and-unacceptable