Tribute To Henry

I never thought that a pet lizard could be of so much value to soldiers in Vietnam. Here’s my story.

Tribute To Henry

When I was in Vietnam, we were living in a hootch that bunked about 20 soldiers on Artillery Hill. We had a lot of roaches and other bugs in our hootch that really irritated us by crawling on our bodies as we slept. I was walking along on the Hill one day and I saw this lizard, so I caught him and took him back to our hootch. I introduced him to the other guys and told them I’d like to keep him in the hootch to eat the roaches, They all agreed and so the lizard moved in with us. I found out he was a Mountain Horned Lizard and I named him Henry.

I had hootch guard about once per week and I would sit out on the screened in porch to the hootch with Henry and watch him catch the bugs. One of his favorite places was on the sill by the screen. Those beady little eyes of his would see any bug movement and pounce right on them.

This is is an actual picture I took of Henry the Mountain Horned Lizard hunting for roaches on the sill of our screened in porch on our hootch.

In three weeks there was a noticeable reduction in roaches and bugs around our place. After six weeks, there were no more bugs to be found around our place. Shortly after that he disappeared. We guessed he got hungry and moved to one of the other hootchs where food was plentiful. I missed old Henry after that when I had hootch guard, but I was forever thankful to him for gobbling all those roaches that dealt me misery at night.

Thats  me outside the hootch where Henry and I lived together for a while.

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Thanks for reading Tribute To Henry,
Bill