One day coming off of night security in a listening post, I came back to the hooch and this guy was frantic that one of his snakes got out.

“He would pick up every reptile he could put in cages or footlockers,” said Duarte. When Anthony Duarte first arrived at his base camp in Vietnam, he was assigned to a hooch with a medic who also happened to be a zoologist from San Diego State University. Didn’t see the damn snake and didn’t have constipation for a few days afterward, either.” “The ‘fighting position’ wasn’t it was a king cobra nest.

I was starting to dig through it when our scout repeatedly waved me back. “It was a few feet high and maybe five or so feet in length. “I was walking point with our Vietnamese scout when I noticed what looked to be a concealed fighting position and crept toward it,” wrote Kregg Jorgenson. One morning, a pilot found a large cobra curled up on his seat. At up to four metres long and distinguished by their massive hoods, which they spread when agitated, king cobras are the world’s longest venomous snakes. “When everything came to a stop, gunners got out, I shut down and I was trying to radio and saw this little green two stepper heading for the ship, I bailed out and got on dry ground. “Lost tail rotor in OH-23G while low and slow, crashed in wet rice paddy going backward after spinning about 270 degrees,” he wrote. Thomas Barnes of Shady Cove, Ore., was a chopper pilot and battalion commander in the U.S.

“When we loaded her someone handed me a Styrofoam coffee cup in it was the dead little green viper, the color was striking and it was so small.” “I picked up three in a year bit by the little green vipers all were alive when we dropped them off. “I was crew chief flying Dustoff (a medical evacuation chopper),” wrote Neal Caspersen of Pensacola, Fla. They’d rig them to a contraption that, once tripped, would drop the snake onto the head or back of a crawling American soldier, whose unenviable job was to kill whoever was at the other end of the underground corridor. National Archives and Records AdministrationIt may not have been the most lethal, but the two step was the most popular biological weapon wielded by North Vietnamese Army troops and Viet Cong guerillas, who would hang them in the ceilings of tunnels in Củ Chi and elsewhere. The Americans, confusingly, called them the “three step.” It is potentially lethal, but the bamboo pit viper is not even the most venomous snake in Vietnam-there are several kraits, for example, more dangerous than the two step. It was described on the FB post as a “very gnarly snake.” The story among troops in Vietnam was that if the bamboo pit viper bit you, you had two steps before you were dead. It had garnered more than 500 likes and 200 comments in three days, many of them on the “two stepper,” or “two step”-the bright-green, yellow-bellied bamboo pit viper. Pilots, crew chiefs, door gunners and medics, along with the troops they delivered to and evacuated from battle zones, are among those weighing in on many topics.īut none more than the query about snakes posed by Sean Fos. The page has 28,000 followers, many of them veterans of the 10,000-day war which, among other things, revolutionized the military’s use of helicopters. “We came across a large python-had a head the size of German shepherd.” He was OK but after that he knew not to trust anyone who said ‘we need our best guy.’” We…had to find the guy-so half the company was wandering about calling his name until we found him. “The poor guy saw this massive wriggling snake-dropped his gear and ran off. The CO, knowing we had a guy who was deathly afraid of snakes, told this person he needed his best man to check out a noise just ahead. “We came across a large python-had a head the size of German shepherd,” wrote Larry Kirby, an infantryman in Vietnam in 1968-69. A well-travelled veteran identified it as a Burmese python. The post included a picture of troops holding a fat snake at least six metres long, evidently dead. Thus began a thread on Facebook’s “Vietnam: Helicopter War” page that took readers on a raucous thrill ride through the jungles of Southeast Asia. “Any veterans out there run into snakes while serving?”

Snake escape from the north pole