When we say "booby trap," chances are you either A) imagine Indiana Jones running, jumping, and dodging through a hail of poisoned arrows, or B) snicker like a schoolboy because we just said "booby." But you don't get to run away from booby traps in reality, because the kind of person who builds them is, generally speaking, trying to kill you, not supply a narratively compelling escape scene. And then there are these folks, who stepped way over the line from "homicidal maniacs" to "huge dickheads."

5 The Viet Cong Rigged All Sorts of Traps Involving Insanely Venomous Snakes

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There's rigging a trap for your enemy, and then there's rigging a venomous snake to bite your enemy right in the face. IN THE FACE.

This trap falls into that second category.

Steve Kharmawphlang

IN. THE. FACE.

The bamboo pit viper of Vietnam is chock full of hemotoxic venom, which works by disrupting the blood's clotting process, destroying red blood cells, and wreaking havoc on your organ tissues. They were known as three-step snakes, because that's as far as you'd make it after getting bit by one. Now, it's bad enough to be burdened with the knowledge of such a creature, much less to have even the remotest possibility of stepping on something like that in the dense underbrush. But during the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong made everything worse when they started using them as natural biological weapons.

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They hid pit vipers in their packs so that anyone searching through them would get an agonizingly fatal surprise. In the tunnel complexes, they stuffed them into pieces of hollow bamboo and propped them in places where U.S. "tunnel rats" were likely to stick their unwary hands. Worst of all, they tied them into the branches of trees by their tails, right at face height. After a couple days spent hanging in a tree without food, the snake would be (admittedly, justifiably) pissed. And at that point, it would lash out at anything that came within range, even your goddamn eyeball. Especially your goddamn eyeball.