All Along the Watchtower: Making Vietnam War Fortifications Pt 1

So I've made boatloads of jungle terrain for my Vietnam board, but it's almost entirely jungle scatter and rural buildings. I'm missing fortifications and military buildings, things you'd expect to find dotting the battlefield. To address this issue, I am starting this series on building Vietnam War fortifications. Things like bunkers, spider holes, fox holes, fire bases, sandbag defenses, etc. 

For this first part of the series I will be building log bunkers and spider holes for the VC using a tutorial I got from Mel Bose the Terrain Tutor on YouTube. 

To build the log bunkers I started off with some foam I found near a dumpster. (It was NEAR the dumpster, not IN the dumpster. I swear this makes it much less filthy.)

I cut them down to a size I wanted, then drew an outline of the bunkers interior, measuring it to ensure that it would fit roughly 10 figures on 25mm round bases. It's at this outline that I will end the slope of the bunker.

After cutting the foam into a rough hill shape, I cut out the interior and glued the logs into the interior and firing port. I used thick BBQ skewers for my logs but you can just go out and grab some twigs. Remember that if you're grabbing twigs from outdoors you want to boil them for maybe 10 minutes to kill off any bacteria or else mold may form. 

I cut out a square of vinyl floor tiling to use as a roof and glued a smaller rectangle sheet of foam under the roof to serve as a groove that can fit in the bunker opening and hold the roof in place.

I then used spackle to form a more natural looking hill around the foam. Once the spackle dried I sanded it down a bit and then covered it in a ~70/30 mix of Brown paint and PVA glue. I also painted the logs.

Once the paint dried I covered the bunker in a mix of static grass and turf. I then glued clump foliage, moss, lichen and tufts. I tried to place this stuff in a way that it would break up the silhouette of the hills, cover up the seams under the lid, and partially obscure the logs. The final step was to seal the terrain. I just used Rustoleum spray can matt varnish but you can also use watered down PVA.

My VC spider holes were made in much the same way. First I cut up some scraps of foam to the shape I need. Then I used toothpicks to create a bamboo lid and supports, and glued a spare rifle off a random sprue into the firing port.

I then use spackle to create the shape of the earth around the spider hole, sanded it down, painted it in paint+PVA, painted the "logs", than added the ground flocking and foliage before sealing the entire thing with matte varnish.

And there you have it. Some spider holes and log bunkers. I'm working on some homebrew deployment rules for Bolt Action Vietnam that will put these new pieces to good use. In my next entry in this series I'll be using some spare Empress Miniature's prone NVA soldiers to make some treetop sniper outposts! I will see you then.