Okay, the infantry and elite were wild and crazy. But each day Vietnam attacked us with rain and mud, dust and heat. With malaria, dysentery, fungus and fevers. And then came the real wildlife.

Ants, they were everywhere. Red and black, big one’s who thought everything was edible. And when the fire ants bit your ass it stung. And if you lit a match, they attacked it. More than once I saw a few thousand ants eating dead Viet Cong or NVA, and hoped I wasn’t next.

Between ops head lice waited for us in the perimeter bunkers on Blackhorse Forward Basecamp, about ten miles from Xuan Loc. The little bastards got in your hair. Lived on the blood of your scalp. Caused your neck, ears and head to itch like mad. But bunkers were safe. Inside, we could relax, smoke herb; I could play my guitar. After a time, to get away from the lice, the rats, the fucking mosquitoes, the centipedes — some were a foot long — we were glad to go back to the bush. The wildlife were always there when we got back.

In the bush the mosquitoes were so bad they would collect under the brim of my boonie hat until it made me crazy and I’d take it off. But I wore glasses, so then I couldn’t see well when it rained. To keep the skeeters away — we couldn’t use the crappy Army repellent, “bug juice” we called it. When dismounted from our tracks we’d spend hours swiping our face like Curly from The Three Stooges; sometimes all night. But the little people — those pesky Viet Cong — could smell us whether we used that shit or not.

The Tokay lizards were geckos whose mating call sounded like a child saying “fuck you.” The little bastards were everywhere and called incessantly until we settled in for an ambush or NDP. Then they’d shut up, but once we quieted, they’d start calling again, “fuck you…fuck you,” looking for a mate. The French in Indochina called them their sonnettes, doorbells, because when the lizards shut up, the Viet Minh were coming. Same same for us and Victor Charles.

There were bees. Fist-sized fucking bees, you hear me, whose hives got disturbed when smacked by the commo antennae sticking up from our tracks, our tanks, even our PRC-25s. When those fuckers got their asses stirred up they’d swarm, and you best believe we scattered like Girl Scouts, not fucking grunts. We’d rather face VC.

You may have heard GI’s had pet monkeys. Some we kept were fun. I called mine Sergeant Rock. He was a rock ape, and hard core; he didn’t like MPs. Sergeant Rock had been vaccinated but the MPs shot him anyway, because if Rock didn’t like you he’d shit in his hand and heave it at you. Fucking MPs. No sense of humor.

The snakes in Vietnam were everywhere. Kraits, cobras, and bamboo pit vipers. Little green, yellow or white bastards underfoot, they’d hide in your shoes, fall out of trees. They scared the living piss out of you when you were already scared shitless from whatever shit you were already in. “Two steps” we called them – once bit, we believed, you had two steps ’till you dropped dead.

And leeches. The fucking leeches. Walk through an inch of water and you had them up to your balls. I don’t care how much you tucked your pants into your boots — the leeches didn’t care. Whatever op we were on the leeches had their own. And if they didn’t crawl up, they fell off the rubber trees and crawled downward toward your nuts. Until they sucked your blood they were thin little bastards. Then they tripled in size.  You could burn them off with the lit end of a cigarette or spray bug juice on the fuckers. They’d curl up and fall off dead.

There were bears in Vietnam. Chubby little bastards who didn’t menace but scared our asses. What next?

Deer, that barked like dogs. One day three deer tried to stand off against us. It didn’t go well, their little antlers against our Mattie Mattel’s; that’s who made our M16s. The next time I saw a deer it walked right past our observation post, got thru the concertina wire, past our trip flares, setting them off, all the way into our NDP and out the other side! Behind him were Viet Cong, who slap-whacked two M-113 APCs and the Sheridan tank between them with B-40 rockets. When the paper wrapped Shillelagh shells inside the tank ignited, burned and cooked off, they exploded a fireworks of flame and steel. Nothing left of the driver but charred bones.

One night near Buon Me Thout, close to the highlands, I drew a listening post with a fucking new guy. I had an Army survival knife, which I still have, a grenade, and the unauthorized Colt Combat Masterpiece my old man had sent me. The newbie had a survival knife and a grenade. We had a crank field phone run out on wire by our engineers. Our orders were don’t make contact, just report by clicks on the handset: one click meant all clear when the handset clicked at us; two if we had movement; three clicks meant the little people were close by. It was dead quiet. Then footfalls, big ass footfalls, and a horrific gagging stench. We could see into a clearing lit by moonlight, and a tiger, a huge fucking tiger the size of a Buick strolled by. It was upwind so it didn’t detect us. I realized I had my hand over the new fucks mouth so he wouldn’t scream or give us away. He passed out, or maybe I choked him out, I’ll never know. I spent the rest of the night shaking.

And finally, the local homeboys and homegirls had a stake in why I was there. These kids were hell bent on killing us to stop killing them, their families. Mostly, I think they just wanted us to leave them the fuck alone. To go back from where the hell we came from. These kids, these Viet Cong, were the real wildlife. The real apex predators. I bet they weren’t scared of tigers. They certainly didn’t fear us. We were fucked in the Nam from the git-go.
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Dave Connolly served as a rifleman with the 11th Armored Cavalry in 1968-1969. See more of Dave’s work on Medic here.

Top photo: “Leaping Tiger,” excerpted from a Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows of 1928″ poster by the Stockbridge Lithographing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Internet Archive:  mating call of a male Tokay gecko

Mongabay.com  The Large-antlered muntjac – Southeast Asia’s mystery deer.