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?”
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