The Green Hornet

During our time at the Horseshoe we spent some days sitting on gunpicket duty on top of the hill and other days out patrolling the local countryside. It was during one of these patrols that we ran into the wasps.

The platoon had just harboured up for a lunch break when we heard shooting in the distance. It was presumed to be ARVN [South Vietnamese troops] out shooting birds, but a reccé patrol was sent out to investigate. Woody was the lead scout with Boodgie as his second scout. Trevor Elemes and Ginna made up the rest of the patrol with Cpl Green in charge. Woody spotted a large wasp nest and pointed it out to Boodgie with the message "don't touch". Boodgie passed on the message to Trevor Elemes and it was passed down the line to the rest of the patrol.

We found the source of gunfire and it was, as we presumed, ARVN shooting birds for food. We were going to put a few shots over their heads, just for fun, but were instructed to withdraw and return to camp. On the way back we passed the wasp nest. This time Cpl Green, for reasons best known to himself, poked the nest with his armalite rifle. Suddenly we were surrounded by very angry wasps. We returned to camp at a flat gallop, with the wasps in hot pursuit. As we got close to the camp we started yelling "Don't shoot. It's us." so that the pickets wouldn't mistake us for nogs and shoot us. All the yelling caused some alarm in the camp and we were challenged with "What's wrong?"

We resonded "They're after us!"

"How many?" questioned the camp

"Bloody hundreds!" we yelled back

On reflection it is easy to see how this might have been misinterpreted. The camp still didn't know what the source of gunfire was ... it could have been VC. But at the time we were running for our lives and weren't thinking about the responses as clearly as we could have.

As we reached the camp we heard safety catches clicking off as the camp prepared for the coming invasion. As we passed through the camp we could hear cursing, swearing and slapping behind us, as the wasps met the rest of the platoon. We figured that the wasps probably now had better things to do than worry about us, so we dropped back to a slow jog and continued down to the creek. We sat down at the creek having a smoko until the sound of slapping and cursing had dissipated. We slowly strolled back to camp and said casually "They were ARVN shooting birds. Oh and by the way, there were some wasps chasing us". Then we sat down and had our lunch.

One soldier had to be airlifted out for medical treatment and quite a few others looked very puffy as a result of Cpl Green's Hornets.