Being a medic at 1st Cav HQ in Phouc Vihn Vietnam gave us time between routine morning sick call. To pretty much goof off and find creative ways to entertain ourselves. Unless we had casualties from the field, then we had to work.
A chest tube is a device that you use to take air or fluid from a lung that has been collapsed or damaged. It’s not the chest tube that this is about. It’s the packaging that it came in. The tubing that the chest tube was packaged in had one end just a bit smaller than the outside tubing.
It fit just perfectly inside the tubing. So we cut it off turned it upside down made a small hole in it that fit a wooden Q-tip. On the end of the Q-tip we fitted a not so small needle, 16gauge to be exact.
It made a perfect blowgun. I mean perfect.
There was a particular species of lizard there. Named during the Vietnam War, as the lizard's cry could be heard as fuck you. The fuck sound is quite clear and short in duration, followed by a pause of about half a second and the elongated you. The same sound could also be heard as tokay (as in tokay gecko), as tokeh (as in tokeh-tokeh), or as tuctoo, all of which are other English names of the lizard. I'm sorry for sounding like animal abuse here, but we seldom hit the target anyway.
Since we had nothing else to do we use the blowguns to shoot the lizards. Its okay we didn’t eat them or anything that were just an annoyance.
There was one other thing we used. We took the bullet out of an M-16 casing, and replaced it with a dart from an artillery shell called a flechette round. That actually was a little too much firepower for a lizard so we didn’t use that very often. Blowguns were much more fun.
At least you had something interesting to do during your downtime. And I'm sure the lizards practiced their evasion skills with you so they could quickly jump out of the way of a real threat like a bird diving to get them or a snake striking. You are doing them a service.
I didn't see any lizards like the one in the picture when I was in Thailand in 1978, but my host told me to shy away from them because some were poisonous. When we got car trouble one evening outside Bangkok with a martial law curfew looming, his girlfriend, a college professor, took me on a wild ride through the streets on bus, pickup truck, and cab to her extended family's home, half on the water and half off. I was escorted to a mat in a large wooden room for the night. Before I drifted off, I noticed about 20 geckos positioned all around the room. Probably there to take advantage of the mosquitoes that were in plentiful supply.
Being a medic at 1st Cav HQ in Phouc Vihn Vietnam gave us time between routine morning sick call. To pretty much goof off and find creative ways to entertain ourselves. Unless we had casualties from the field, then we had to work.
