PURPLE GEESE & OTHER FIGHTING FAUNA

EVERY day, First Lieut. Steven Schreiner, an earnest young infantry officer whose unit guards the strategic Y Bridge in Saigon, dutifully fills in MACV Form 10. He no longer cringes when his buddies rib him about the re port and his peculiar command--a laudable sign of self-control. For MACV Form 10 is the Geese Reaction Report, and Schreiner's platoon includes 40-odd riflemen and a gaggle of six belligerent geese.

Cantankerous Birds. Like the ancient Romans who staked out Rome's Capitoline Hill with geese that would signal the approach of the invading Gauls, the Americans have recruited geese for early-warning duty on Saigon's bridges, which are choice targets for Communist demolition teams. The idea is that the cantankerous birds will start to honk madly as soon as someone approaches within 25 feet of their cages. To distinguish them from civilian geese--and to keep them from winding up in Vietnamese cooking pots--the birds have had their feathers dyed purple. Originally, the birds were issued dog tags, but they refused to tolerate them.

The goose guard is still an experiment. If it works, honkers will be assigned to other allied installations; if it does not, the troopers can look forward to some tasty pate. During the two months the geese have been on duty, not a Communist has made a try for the bridge. But they may soon be obsolete. The U.S. command is thinking of replacing them with guinea fowls, considered to be even more cantankerous and noisy about their territorial imperatives.

There have been failures in animal warfare, of course. The Great Bedbug

Experiment was a bust. Bedbugs carried in a special capsule were supposed to smell out North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, and let out tiny "yowls" of excitement that could be amplified for human ears. But while field tests showed that the buggy road show would actually work, it proved too troublesome to keep the bugs both healthy and hungry in Viet Nam.

Scout Dogs. In the immensely difficult environment of Viet Nam, such far-out attempts are taken entirely seriously. Animals play a major role on both sides of the conflict. More than 1,000 dogs are in action on the allied side alone, and nearly 100 veterinarians serving in the U.S. Army in Viet Nam help care for them. German shepherd scout dogs lead jungle patrols sniffing out ambushes. Often they are more alert than their masters: last week, a U.S. Marine company commander took heavy casualties in an ambush after ignoring a dog's warning. The shepherds have an uncanny knack for avoiding booby traps (apparently, their ears can pick up the tiny sound made by the breeze on a taut trip wire). One handler, Marine Sergeant Roy Jergins, says: "I walk where my dog walks, and I walk right through the booby traps." Mean sentry dogs who attack anyone but their handlers guard key U.S. installations. Tracker dogs, Labrador retrievers trained in Malaysia, are used to sniff out enemy withdrawal routes. After one recent ambush in III Corps, a tracker led a U.S. unit on a 51-hr. chase that ended at an abandoned rub ber plantation. Sure enough, the Communists were hiding there, and the Americans killed 70 of them.

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?

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