Someone told me a while ago that the Viet Cong, during the Vietnam War, had female operatives who would sleep with American soldiers, and in doing so, infect them with some kind of incurable STD that made their dicks turn black and fall off, and which would eventually result in death. Is there any truth to this?
I think it would be the whole "dicks turning black and falling off" thing that would make me a little dubious to the validity of the assertion.
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The Internet has a large number of resources on STDs, and none of the ones I checked list any such condition. I see no particular reason why they would list information about all such diseases except this one.
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A condition with such, er, spectacular symptoms, especially if it had been observed by US military doctors, surely would feature in numerous articles and papers in the medical literature. I don’t recall ever hearing of such a thing, and I’m not going to waste my time on what would likely turn out to be a wild goose chase. You might try researching on Medline if you want to pursue this further.
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How does the person who told you this absurd story explain how the females involved became infected, and why the condition would not affect them in any way?
Given the above, I am 99.9999% sure it’s a complete crock.
Didn’t penicillin resistant strains of Syphilis first appear during the Vietnam war? I seem to recall soldiers coming home who had been insufficiently treated for it.
The story, as I heard it in 1969 while in Vietnam, was more or less as follows (no doubt there were local variations depending on where you were).
It was generally called, “The Black Syph.” Indeed your manly organ was generally assumed to turn black and fall off. There was supposed to be some island they sent you to so you couldn’t spread it. There you hung out until it killed you, there being no cure. The government reported you KIA and sent home an empty coffin with a cheery note attached saying not to open it because the body was a fucked up mess and partly rotted anyway.
It seemed far fetched and rather unlikely to me at the time and has become more so with the passing of the decades. Who could keep a secret that big that long.
We also had one about ground glass in beer. When you bought a bottle you were supposed to put your thumb over the top and turn it upside. If there was glass in it you would see it glittering as it fell through the beer. This applied only to Vietnamese beer - Ba Mouoi Ba (means ‘33’) mostly. American beer that they bought on the black market and sold to us at vastly inflated prices was almost always in cans.
Oh, forgot the one about prostitutes putting razor blades in their honeypots.
I know of two sources on legends of the Vietnam War that touch on this bit of popular folklore.
John Baky’s “White Cong and Black Clap: The Ambient Truth of Vietnam War Legendry” is available online. Baky, himself a Vietnam vet, analyzes the “Black Clap” (also known as the “Black Syph”) in some detail. (Scroll down about three-quarters down the page.)
But there’s also Thomas Barden’s and John Provo’s “Legends of the American Soldiers in the Vietnam War” (Fabula 36: 217-229, 1995), which details belief in the Black Syph and thirteen other bits of Vietnam war folklore (including the “vagina dentatae” of Viet Cong females posing as prostitutes and looking to lure US troops). SandyHook’s version resembles the overview provided by Barden and Provo,
The authors then give a specific version they collected during interview with Vietnam vets,
Barden and Provo go on to mention that officers and enlisted men were apparently given different briefings about VD, adding that,
SandyHook wrote:
Thanks for bringing this up, SandyHook! (As peculiar as this sounds, I’ve been collecting GI beliefs about beers brewed in Vietnam, Thailand, and China during the '60s and '70s.)
Could you clarify, though, why one inspected one’s beer? (I assume that the belief, at its worst, held that breweries responsible for producing and bottling 33 and its kin were intent on injuring beer-swigging GIs.)
And another question, just out of curiosity: did you ever see precipitates or contaminants in your beer that resembled ground glass?
The most common rumor, which you may have also heard, about Southeast Asian beer of the period (and GIs frequently told this about 33 beer) is that these brews contained appreciable amounts of formaldehyde, either by accident (e.g., that breweries in Southeast Asia lacked knowledge of how to brew properly and inadvertently sold to beer-consuming GIs formaldehyde-contaminated concoctions) or by design (e.g., to prolong the shelflife of bottled beer or to give the beer an extra kick).
– Tammi Terrell
Since GQ is supposed to be serious, I won’t tell the joke (the punch line is below)… but this sounds like a very old dirty joke that soldiers have been telling for decades.
I’m guessing that, over the years, rumors and dirty jokes have gotten confused with reality.
“Oh, no, no, no… it fall off by itself in a few days.”
Yea verily! It was the latest and greatest strain of the Aisian Black Crud available from any of the local Ho Chi Chi’s of the time. 
Tammi Terrell, humbly seeking enlightenment, asked:
I did it mostly because everyone else did it. It never did seem likely to me that it was more than just a story. But hey, it cost nothing, only took a second, you just never know, and once you’re dead - you’re dead a long, long time. I never saw much of anything in them and trust me here, I checked a lot of them. It’s been a while, but I think the fear wasn’t that the brewers were trying to kill off their best customers but that the VC would grab a few cases and doctor them from time to time.
Snopes on ground glass. Not a danger.
I never heard the story the OP talks about, or even about the “black syph,” however, there was an extremely resistant strain of gonnorhea (sp?) that soldiers were contracting from prostitutes in Vietnam. I guess after a few days of that pain, you’d kinda wish it would dry up, turn black and fall off. :eek:
If the soldiers were sent “away,” it was probably to a medical facility where they could get intravenous antibiotics for the infection.
Yes, I’ve also heard of this from other Vietnam Vets / Medics. “dicks turning black and falling off” it’s sorta secret because the ones that got this did not come back to the USA. They were left on ships off shore to die. I also heard that they were reported as dead / mia to save honor back home. So if you need do some more research to find more about this deadly VD go ahead and good luck.
Ah yes, the legend of Black Island, I came into the army in 1976 as a cadet, and 1980 as an officer. We had acres of Vietnam vets and they swore that soldiers infected with some dread disease or another would be sent to Black Island to die.
They swore it was true.
the zombie jokes write themselves…
Seems like a number of people in this six year old thread already chimed in with some fair evidence that it was just a rumor.
Really, is there anything about this story doesn’t sound like one made up specifically to discourage soldiers from patronizing local prostitutes? “Oh yeah, it’s a terrible disease, it’s so secret it’s not described in any medical journal anywhere, and if you get it your dick rots off and they hide you away forever (where you conveniently can’t tell anyone you know what really happened to you), and report you missing or dead to preserve your honor, (unlike all the other soldiers who caught other conventional VDs that don’t make your dick rot off), etc.”
I’ve heard the story of the bull’s head clap which antibiotics wouldn’t touch until a man in a full hazmat suit stuck a plastic rod up your dingus. The man would then push a button, causing a tiny razorblade to pop out of the inserted end, then yank the rod out. What followed was a gush of blood and infection and putrescence-under-pressure that could sometimes splatter on walls fifty feet away.
I’ve never found any reputable medical source that verified the story, but I believe that Penile Lymphangitis is the condition referred to. Antibiotics seems to have been the actual treatment, unexciting as it may sound.
I heard this story from more than one Viet Nam veteran NCO when I was a soldier in 1982-84. Most said it with a smirk and a wink to the other NCO, while some acted like it was real.
Probably the same NCO’s that sent you off for a bucket of prop wash, right?
My friend’s dad was a vet and told a toned down version of this. Basically, his version was that the cure was the plastic rod and razor from the inside out.