Viet Nam Memories

By Wayne Wallace

 

One thing that never ceased to amaze me about American GIs in Viet Nam was the sheer number of animals that were taken in as pets.  Dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, snakes, chickens, all manner of beasts were constantly being saved from other jungle predators and brought back to our base camp.  Such, I suppose, is the nature of American boys.  Call it the "It followed me home Mom, can we keep him syndrome."  One such animal that we had in camp was a mangy, three legged dog, appropriately named Tripod.

 

Tripod had a terrible time marking his territory without clumsily falling into his puddle.  Stories of how he lost his left rear leg ranged from, being maimed by a land mine, to barely escaping a Vietnamese dinner table, after sacrificing only a drumstick. The strange thing about this mutt was that if you couldn’t find him, you had better head to the sandbagged security of a bunker, because, sure as that mangy mutt would take a leak on your boots, we were about to catch hell from a mortar attack, or rockets, in some type of hellish incoming barrage.

 

The dog was apparently able to sense these attacks, and always disappeared moments before they took place.  He always, mysteriously reappeared immediately after they were over.  It always spooked us whenever Tripod would disappear.

 

No one person really owned the mutt anymore, because whoever had been his former owner had returned to the "world", which, in the language of Vietnam stationed troops, meant rotating back to the U.S.    Whether the trip had been in the passenger compartment or with the baggage and the body bags was anybody’s guess. That was the way things were there, history existed in a series of twelve month tours.

 

Tripod ate whatever C-Rations nobody else wanted, which, more often than not was Ham & Lima Beans, not a favorite of most G.I.s.  With a diet consisting primarily of the meal most of the troops affectionately referred to as "Ham and M. F’s" because of their gaseous potential.  Tripod was almost always horribly flatulent.  It amazed most of us that a dog so small could store so much gas!

 

Tripod was notorious for joining a group of off duty, relaxing troops, playing cards, drinking beer, or perhaps just catching a much needed nap.   Guys listening to the anthems of the times, Jimmi Hendrix or the Beatles, when Tripod would silently expel a tremendous cloud of methane gas, and then, just as silently, limp away on his three paws.  These "silent but deadly" gas attacks sent G.I.’s scrambling from wherever they had congregated into a "fresh air zone".

 

We always discussed the possibility of sticking a fuse up the three legged dog’s rectal orifice, lighting it and tossing him into a VC tunnel.  The argument against this was the possibility of too much collateral damage from the resulting explosion.  There would have been nothing but "scorched earth" from Nha Trang, all the way back to Hanoi.  In retrospect, perhaps if we had actually done this, the war might have ended a good six years or so earlier.

 

Another such pet was a rhesus monkey that had supposedly been "domesticated" by some Vietnamese teens and sold to a G.I. for a few hundred piaster at the public market in Nha Trang.

The monkey, named "Ho Chi" by our group, after North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, quickly learned a dozen or so disgusting, human vices.  His current owner, a former Hells Angel from Fontana, California, took great pleasure in Ho Chi’s becoming more and more grotesque in his behavior.  It was a somewhat perverted parental pride that Ho’s owner took when he, for example, would steal someone’s Budweiser and run off with it, stopping only a safe distance away, where he would tip the can up and stick his little monkey tongue into it and spill the suds all over the place trying to guzzle it. Or when the Monkey would snatch someone’s Marlboro and take a drag from it.

 

Ho Chi ate mostly junk food, fritos, potato chips, cracker jacks, stuff like that was almost always around somewhere in our hooch, and there was virtually no way of keeping this hairy little thief out of it.  He would often overeat these junk food items and get a case of monkey diarrhea.  Since he lived in the rafters of our hooch, these frequent attacks would leave a lot of our personal belongings splattered with monkey poop. This was never a pleasant surprise on a hot, humid afternoon.

 

There were several attempts made on Ho’s life by angry GI’s but he was a survivor, and escaped every one of them completely unscathed.

 

Once, Ho Chi, tore his way into a package of brownies that his owner’s girlfriend had made for him and sent from her home in California.  While his owner was out on patrol, Ho Chi allegedly ate 15-20 of the chocolate fudge brownies.  His owner knew this because he returned to find the monkey semi conscious on his bunk with a near terminal case of the aforementioned malady. The funk and the smell was unbelievable!  Worse, the brownies had a special ingredient. The girlfriend had stirred enough high grade marijuana into the batter to stone most of Northern California, before baking them and sending them to her boyfriend.

 

After a day or two, the monkey recovered from his bout with loose bowels, but somehow, he was just never quite the same. He would just lounge around all day in the rafters of the hooch, staring off into space and listening to the rock music our group played almost constantly.

 

Unfortunately, his owner, about to be shipped back home, was unable to find anyone willing to adopt the unruly Rhesus.  One morning, he took the mellowed out monkey with our platoon deep into the jungle. The monkey was content, during a full days march into the bush, to merely lie quietly inside his owner’s ruck sack.

 

During a rest and smoke break, the former biker took Ho Chi out of his pack and put him up into a tree and then simply walked away with the rest of the patrol.  Those watching, later reported that it was a touching scene as the Biker’s eyes welled up with tears.  Ho Chi’s eyes, however, just remained dilated, glassy and bloodshot.  Witnesses reported that there did, however, seem to be a somewhat crooked little smile on the monkeys’ face.