Going "Bats" in the Cham Temples

Along the road from Phan Rang Air Base to Phan Rang, just outside Thap Cham, a beautiful old cham temple stood atop a slight rise on the right side of the road leading to Thap Cham. There were many Cham temples built along Vietnam's roads, each a day's walk from the other.

I began and ran the serpent center at Phan Rang. We were located in the first motor pool office building (sort of a super hootch), built in late 1964 or early in 1965, and located near the base of Nui Dat. Running the serpent center as a training device meant that we spent many hours looking under and behind things for the vipers and cobras on display there. The Cham temples were often visited sites during our searches for reptiles.

A friend from the 315th ACS, Captain Joe Burch, was a botanist by degree, and a C-130 pilot by vocation. He had a friend at the University of Michigan who wanted any mammals, whole or in portion, we could ship to him from Vietnam. The temples were not used often, since the Vietnamese had already killed most of the Cham. We had discovered that the roadside shrines were not just places for pilgrims to worship, but home to hundreds of free-tailed bats as well. We used slingshots to shoot marbles up into the spires and knock down the bats which we collected for science.

The most outstanding thing I remember about the temples was the beautiful Cham writing carved into stone used as decoration on and in the structures.....Being an artist, I've often thought that the blocky cursive text would beautify any room it bordered.