SMAJ and Junior had made the trip to Nha Trang along with everyone else. They had a nice cage set up outside the operations building and became a major attraction, especially on feeding day. They ate chickens and the occasional duck, but the platoon had gone upscale and started buying their chickens downtown rather than tending a flock of them. Maybe the platoon’s homeowners’ association didn’t allow chickens, who knows? Typically, they would get three between them. SMAJ would eat two, and Junior would eat the other. One day, SMAJ got greedy and ate all three while Junior lay there politely and watched. Someone went back downtown and got three more chickens. While SMAJ was eating her fifth chicken of the day, Junior finally got interested and grabbed the last one. SMAJ decided that she wanted that one too and tried to force it back out of Junior’s jaws. Jim Graves was elected to go into the cage and keep SMAJ at bay with a mop handle while Junior finished his meal.
It is a well-known fact that snakes have no ears, and some people believe, therefore, that they cannot hear. In fact, they can detect sounds in a very limited frequency range. One day Buzz Wines was just outside the snake cage, leaning in towards the wire and trying to get their attention. He whistled at them, and he must have hit their frequency. SMAJ sprang across the cage at him and got her fangs hung on the chicken wire about eight inches from Wines’ face. Buzz probably never whistled again.
While we were in the hooches one night, we got word that the snakes were making a break for it. A few of the guys went over to see what was going on and discovered that SMAJ had found a loose spot in the wire and stuck her head out for some fresh air. A 313th MP, who had been making his rounds and suddenly found himself eye-to-eye with a 12-foot snake, was holding her by the neck with both hands for all he was worth, while his partner had him covered with a .45. Our guys moved both snakes into the Ops building and put them into a foot locker for the night, hoping that the air conditioning would settle them down. The next morning, they were released from the foot locker and were stretched out on the floor, chilling out, as it were. An NCO nobody had ever seen before opened the door, took one step in, saw these monstrous serpents, stopped, said “I’m in the wrong place,” and made a hasty exit. Nobody ever saw him again, and we never did figure out who he was.
For a brief while, we had a third snake, also a Burmese python, but only three to four feet long. One of the hooch maids, whom we called Victor, brought it to us one morning when she came to work. We called her Victor because she had a sister who we called Charlie, which made sense at the time. Victor didn’t speak enough English to tell us how she came by this snake or how she managed to slip it through the gate. This snake was too small for the existing cage to secure it, so we kept it in a foot locker in the hooch most of the time. There was a problem, though, about what to feed it.
One of the guys, whose name is being withheld at his request, was downtown in a bar one evening when a Vietnamese boy of about 8 came up to him and offered, “Hey G.I, you want buy rat?” He didn’t even have to think about it before responding, “Sure, how much?” “10 p.” Ten piasters at the time was two and 3/4 cents, and it was definitely a good deal, so he forked over the 10 p and put the young rat in his pocket. On the way back to the base later, this thoughtful animal-loving platoon member was stopped at the gate, probably for good reason, and an MP announced that he was going to frisk him. “Be careful of my shirt pocket.” “Why? What’s in your pocket?” “A rat.” “A rat!!??? What are you doing with a rat in your pocket?” “I’m going to feed it to my snake.” “Snake!!???” At this point, the MP came unglued, cuffed this criminal, took out his Billy club, which he began slapping into the palm of his hand (in a most threatening manner, I might add), poked him with it a few times, knocking him backwards over a barricade, and offered to take him out into the nearby field and beat both him and his rat. Instead, he merely took him to the MP station, where the alleged perpetrator told the man in charge about his mistreatment and the threats made against his person. He was promptly released to return to the unit with nothing further said. The little snake ate that evening, but he was soon determined to be high maintenance and was released into the wild across the street to fend for himself.
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