Spiders Were Our Friends

Vietnam

FLYING INSECTS WERE especial nuisances in Vietnam, especially those that could raise lumps in the event your head inadvertently crossed one of their flight paths. I believe that several species of beetles registered on our radar systems. One Goliath variety, the Rhinoceros beetle, outweighed any possible insectile airframe inasmuch as they grew to eleven inches in length. One of those in flight could easily knocked a man off his feet in the event of collision. The most dangerous, though, of all flying insects were the mosquitoes. Armed with eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium, they spread malaria indiscriminately. I was one of their victims. 

Spider eyes (click to enlarge)

Although I was armed with mosquito netting and various forms of repellent and anti-malarial drugs, I think that I would have been better served encircled by an army of spiders. We welcomed spiders to our domiciles and took great care to avoid disturbing theirs; unless, of course, they proved inefficient. Each day we examined the accumulated insects in each spider's web and destroyed those that were barren, giving the occupant an opportunity to rebuild using a better design. Two consecutive failures resulted in instant eviction making their space available to a more suitable tenant. Those spiders were our friends.

One night as I sat trying unsuccessfully to stay awake in the division headquarters (I was the duty officer that night), I heard a bug walking in the hallway outside my office door. It's footstep was not familiar; indeed, I was not certain it was an insect at first, thinking that it was rather a cat in serious need of having its claws trimmed. On investigation, I found an enormous example of the earwig family with long pincers at each end. It was a wonder. It was a trophy. I had to have it for the next night's bug fights. Scrounging through the drawers of my temporary desk I found a match box and, after emptying its contents into an envelope, attempted to imprison this specimen. After a few moments scratching around inside, it unceremoniously hacked away the end of the wooden box and exited.  I don't think he was happy. 

I remember watching a trail of black worker ants scurrying to and fro outside my hooch in Vietnam one afternoon soon after arriving in-country, eviscerating some dead thing to stock their colony's larder. They were large ants, the largest I had ever seen. Just as I was about to lose interest, the flank of their column was assaulted by a platoon of red soldier ants with heads of such Godzilla-like proportions that I wondered how they stood and walked without tipping forward and resting on their mandibles like insane tripods. My attention riveted on one in particular that grasped a blank ant by the head and seemingly froze. I was not able to understand that it was simply applying pressure until the head of the black ant collapsed with an audible snap. Thus, I was introduced to the insects of Vietnam.

Termites, the arch-enemies of ants, demonstrated voracious appetites by devouring any wooden structure they could find. Viet Cong mortars blushed in comparison. Apparently, our bunkers appeared especially appetizing to them. Inasmuch as any shelter we attempted to dig soon filled with water, we had to build our bomb shelters on the surface. We began with 4x4 frames covered in 2x10 planking, and then entombed all in layers of sandbags. Within three or four months, the sandbags fell into a pile after the termites had totally consumed the underlying wooden structures. Thank God our M-16 rifles had composite plastic stocks rather than a wooden ones.

Rhinoceros Beetle (click to enlarge)

Our hooches were elevated above the ground in a futile effort to avoid crawling insects. Plywood floors were placed on half buried canisters that our friends in the artillery batteries had disposed after after removing the shells for delivery to the enemy. Insect screening was stretched over flimsy wooden frames and layered with widely-spaced clapboards to allow airflow. Heavy duty canvas tents were stretched overall, and we sat back to see which would occur first; would the termites destroy our abodes from below before or after the jungle rot destroyed them from above. It little mattered to the insects who traversed our hooches looking for a tasty ankle to bite. Interestingly, just as we learned to distinguish the type of helicopter approaching by the sounds of its rotors, we learned to distinguish species of insects by the sound of their footsteps on our plywood floors.