|
|
These stories are true, but the names may be Pleiku is located in what used to be the royal hunting preserve...for tigers. The tigers located in this area are HUGE beasts and not afraid of humans at all. While they have been hunted, in most cases, they are the ones doing the hunting. One night we got a call that a GI had been mauled by a tiger and was on his way in on Medevac. Having never seen a tiger bite before, I went out to the ER to help with the wounds. We unloaded a young GI and got him into the ER, where we cut off his clothes (standard procedure) to better see and treat the wounds. He had been bitten in several places, including his thigh, abdomen and chest. The wounds were quite unremarkable, just bloody puncture wounds, maybe 2-3" deep. There was no tearing of the flesh, just these puncture wounds, like the tiger had bitten down over and over, without really ripping. Unfortunately, the abdominal bites had broken through the peritoneum, so we had to take him to surgery and perform an exploratory laparotomy (we did hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS) of those) to see if there'd been any organ damage. Finding none, we just closed him up and sent him to post-op. He was evac'ed to Japan and recovered. After the case, we spoke to his buddies who came in with him about what had happened. It turns out that they were on an LP (Listening Post), staying very quiet in the bush, when they heard a noise coming toward them. They could tell it wasn't VC, but didn't know what it was. The sound stopped and they relaxed. Then the tiger jumped on one of them, closed its' mouth OVER THE GUYS' HELMET (do you know how big of a mouth that would take??) and began dragging him away into the brush. He dropped the guy, then just bit him a few times, picked him up by the helmet again and was heading off when the guys' partner finally unfroze and hosed the tiger down with his M-60, killing it. Of course, this blew their LP and immediately exposed them to potential VC attack. They called in Dustoff and got out of there. The next day, a team in the same area found the dead tiger. It measured fifteen feet nose to tail. That's a whole lot of cat! That same night, we got another tiger bite in, though not as severe as the first. This guy was grabbed out of a foxhole by the tiger, which was in the process of dragging him off into the jungle when the GI's buddy blasted it with his M-16. He hit it at least once and it dropped the poor guy and ran off. He was scared absolutely to death and in shock when he was brought in. Bill Herndon ('67-'68) relates a story of a guy whose foot was grabbed by a tiger and he was being dragged off, kicking and screaming, into the bush. He kept kicking the tiger on the nose with his free leg and the tiger finally dropped him, running away into the jungle. They were the only tiger bites I saw in a year of action. Strange night! Not long after the tiger incident, we heard a lot of shooting from the chopper unit that was just below the 71st, on the road to the AFB. The next day we got the story. A guy on guard duty saw a trip flare go off and could see SOMETHING long crawling through the wire. He opened up on it with his M-16 until it stopped moving. Of course this brought everybody out, weapons at the ready to repel an attack. When they investigated, they found a huge, chopped up Cobra tangled up in the wire. It was almost fifteen feet long. Being "snakeophobic" myself, it still gives me the creeps to think about it. There were many, many dangerous critters in Vietnam. It was a hostile environment in all senses of the word. When we'd got out to our incinerator to burn the debris of surgery (arms, legs, etc.), it always made me nervous because someone had told me that there were "two-step" vipers in the grass there. The "two-step" was a notorious snake in 'Nam..reputedly so poisonous that you could only go two steps and you were dead after a bite. For all the nasty stuff that was over there, I really don't remember many snake bites. Comments: E-mail me Thanks for visiting ...SP5 Steven Streeper
|
