Hazardous Duty

[DMZ-LT]

Can you eat them raw ?

[Gimpy]

Raw, bar-b-qued, roasted, fried, steamed, boiled, baked, grilled, a-too-fayed, gumboed, stewed, scampied (no offesense Scamp), saw-teayed, Al-Fray-Doed, filleted, chunked and sliced!

We's also got a lot uv them critters called "Possum on the half-shell" (Armadillos)......but they ain't so "tasty" RAW!

Hell..........I got one gator bigger'un than the one in that picture out in one of my retention ponds! Everybody in that neighborhood calls him "T-Rex".........

Now..........about them snakes...............they shore might be "tasty"................but I'm with Andy on this one..........I don't particularly have much of a "likin" fer them suckers!

[82Rigger]

...exported these gators and snakes to Vietnam.

Ya'll could have stocked Chuck's tunnels with 'em!

Airborne! Steve / 82Rigger

[frisco-kid]

Seein' those pictures kinda' made me remenisce [sp] about E&E excercises at Ft. Gordon . Never did see any gators there, but they were rumored to be there . I DID see Jake No Shoulders a couple of times. Snakes have never bothered me. If I know/think them to be dangerous I just give 'em plenty of room, and we both move on. If I know them to be safe, I will sometimes take a closer look. Fascinating creatures, actually.

I hope they transplanted the gator somewhere else. I think it would be a shame for something that's been around as long as he has to meet an undignified end.

As far as sending them to Nam, FL has nothin' on Nam. They already have plenty of local critters just as dangerous. Would have been pretty cool to have that big mutha' as your unit tunnel rat, though . Saw several cobras and a couple of bamboo vipers [2-steps]. Would always get alittle wary if we saw any mongooses running around. Their all time favorite pastime is rasslin' and eating snakes. ESPECIALLY cobras. No gators, but you'd sometimes hear about a G.I. bein' dragged off by a tiger. Although, those boys wadin' around down there in the Delta might have had some sort of crocodilian to contend with. I just never heard of it. How 'bout it Gimp. Any crocs down in the Mekong?

[BLUEHAWK]

Steve -
Scout is concealing from you the fact that HE has to deal with prickly pears and cholla cacti (plus the occasional errant sidewinder), don't let him fool ya :-)

[82Rigger]

I was an instructor in the Rigger School at Ft. Lee, Virginia. Ft. Lee is the Army's Quartermaster school and is home to a number of Army schools including Graves Registration (now known as Mortuary Affairs).

I was having coffee with one of the instructors in the Graves Registration school one day. He was recently back from Nam where he had been assigned to the mortuary at DaNang.

He related that he had prepared several dead GIs/Marines that had been partially eaten by tigers. His impression from preparing the remains was that they were already dead, as there was very little bleeding even though large pieces if muscle and tissue had been removed by the tigers, i.e. the heart wasn't pumping when the flesh was removed. He pointed out, however, that an attacking tiger will kill quickly by breaking or biting the neck which would in effect, make them "already dead".

So, I guess whether troops were actually attacked and killed by tigers is kind of a big question mark.

Maybe our medics or medical people in here can shed some light.

Airborne! Steve / 82Rigger

[BLUEHAWK]

Doc 24/7 will know...

[frisco-kid]

Soon after I got to the 101st, I heard that the Recon Platoon for 1/327 was called Tiger Force because one of their guys had been attacked by a tiger not long after they got in-country. I did a GOOGLE search trying to find out more. Didn't find anything on that, but I did find this.

http://lairweb.org.nz/tiger/maneating13.html


I also heard of 1 or 2 other incidents.

[revwardoc]

When my old man was in truck driver school during WWII at what is now McDill AFB, there was a stretch of road with swamps on either side that they called "Alligator Alley". They were told that if the truck broke down or had a flat or something and they were alone, to just sit in the cab until someone came along. They were NOT to try to change a tire or work on the truck by themselves. One guy didn't listen. They found his truck (it had a flat) partly raised on the jack, signs of a struggle on the edge of the swamp, and bits and pieces of his uniform. Apparently he was no Steve Irwin.

[82Rigger]

Rev..

Alligator Alley is still there. It's paved now, but still one lane each direction. It is a long lonely stretch and large gators are seen regularly along there. The same "common sense" rules would still be prudent when driving along there, especially at night.

Frisco...

That website you hyperlinked pretty much confirmes a MULTIPLE EYEWITNESSES attack by a tiger on a GI in the Nam.
Didn't really doubt that it happened, since tigers regularly attack and kill animals much larger than humans. I don't know much about tigers except that they are STRONG. I would assume a tiger would have little difficulty taking down a water buffalo.

Airborne! Steve / 82Rigger