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At least one dog has achieved some notoriety in a specialty. Taddy, a 65-pound German shepherd bitch, has become expert at giving departing U.S. troopers—either home-or R & R-bound —a thorough sniff-over for hidden marijuana. She is so sharp that she recently nosed out two joints carefully tucked away in a man's camera that was inside his suitcase.
The Communists also use dogs and, for that matter, a whole zoo of combat animals. They occasionally drop cats into tunnels and spider holes to divert allied scout dogs. They have been known to stampede water buffalo into American defensive wire and mines. They like to leave snakes and spiders in bunkers and underground complexes in order to keep U.S. troopers from investigating them. Not long ago, a Special Forces patrol came upon an ingenious booby trap that consisted of a basket filled with poisonous snakes. Its writhing contents would have cascaded on a man tripping the wire.
Kamikaze Foxes. Communists sometimes gather fireflies in glasses for illumination. Occasionally, they carry owls to the perimeters of Vietnamese outposts: to superstitious Vietnamese, the hoot of an owl is a dire sign of impending disaster. Back in the days of guerrilla war, some Viet Cong outfits even trained kamikaze foxes to make a beeline for light at night, then sent them off into well-lit U.S. and Vietnamese installations, carrying explosives and a timer on their backs.
Even now, when the Ho Chi Minh trail often resembles a network of busy truck roads, the Communists still use elephants to haul their supplies. Not long ago, an American pilot sighted an elephant carrying rockets. His strafing run killed the animal and set off a series of secondary explosions. There was a slight dilemma on his return to base: should he put the event down as an enemy killed in action or as an enemy vehicle destroyed?