Animal’s attack
Already well-adapted to subterranean life, many insects and animals of the Vietnamese jungle found the underground tunnels to be a worthy living environment. Huge bees, gigantic rats, centipedes, spiders, snakes, bats, and fire ants (to name a few) plagued these tunnels. One tunnel rat claimed that the booby traps and Viet Cong did not frighten them as much as encountering the local ants. I quote “the half-inch ants have such a powerful bite that to pull them off means losing a bit of skin”.
The Viet Cong used this to their advantage to scare, and even kill, American soldiers. Talking of booby traps, Lt. Jack Flowers recalls how the Viet Cong used tripwires to release boxes of scorpions into the tiny confines of the tunnels. One of his men got stung and came out screaming, refusing to ever go into a tunnel again. Similarly, one soldier recalls how an encounter with the biggest rat he had ever seen led him to continually fire his gun. A colleague dragged him out before he grabbed a ‘frag’ and threw it into the hole too. After this, he refused to ever go into a tunnel again. American soldiers were often prepared for traps that may be on the ground, but they had not prepared for those coming from above.
Snakes were also commonly used traps inside these tunnels. Again, tripwires would trigger the release of snakes hidden somehow inside bamboo sticks, known to soldiers as ‘bamboo vipers’. Sometimes these snakes were even poisonous and so became known as ‘three-step snakes’ because a soldier was only granted three more steps before the venom killed him. Imagine being stuck in a tiny space, panicking, screaming, and trying to escape as a snake slowly wound itself around you.
Archives held in Texas revealed this happened to one unfortunate soldier. Reports state the soldier in question “had no time to scream or to unsheathe his knife, the snake had already knotted tighter around his neck and badly bit his face”. A colleague he worked with recovered his body by dragging his “violet-colored corpse” out of the tunnel. It was a horrendous ordeal to face and brought even the toughest of men to tears.