Murderer of Murder Hornets

With all of the talk about so-called “murder hornets” on Facebook this past week it didn’t take long for me to recollect that I had a history with these fascinating insects.

I had to rewind to the summer of 1991 to find this pertinent scrap of memory.  I was new to the Army as a young infantryman fresh out of Basic Training and assigned to “Delta Death,” a company  on the north end of Camp Casey, 2^nd Infantry Division, Republic of Korea.  When I arrived to the company area it was eerily quiet as the entire battalion was on its 3 month rotation to live and patrol inside the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea.  I was issued my weapon and necessary equipment before being sent north on a bus.

On the DMZ I was assigned a cot in my squad’s tent and then taken to be introduced to the First Sergeant, 1SGT Glasgow.  I was in a tight parade-rest position which seemed to amuse him.  He told me I could take it easy and have a seat.  Things were a bit more relaxed “in the field” as they say in the military, but I had no experience of the Army apart from the insular and high stress world of Basic Training where trainees cowered before the NCO’s, especially around one as high ranking as a First Sergeant.

He asked me some questions about myself and learned I had finished three years of college before dropping out to join the Army at the start of the Gulf War.  He then asked what I knew of the political situation in this part of the world.  I was a History and Political Science major so I gave some history of the region and dropped a few names so that he raised his eyebrows and looked at my escort and guffawed, “That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard since we’ve been up here!”   

So what about those murder hornets, you ask.  I’m getting to that part.

While living isolated on the DMZ life was pretty much consumed with training exercises that could run around the clock, depending on which phase you were in.  Much like the quarantine situation now, there was not much to do with your “free time” after work because you were living in a small town of tents surrounded by a high fence crowned with concertina wire in the absolute middle of nowhere known as “Warrior Base.”  It was during one of our field training excursions that I ran into this notorious insect that has so captured our imaginations this past week and spawned a veritable swarm of memes.

I remember being out in the woods somewhere miles from Warrior Base around midday and I had to go #2.  I broke off from the others in my squad and went deeper into the trees to have some privacy.  I pulled out my entrenching tool (a small folding shovel) and started digging a “cat hole” at the base of a tree to do my business.  That’s when I heard what sounded like a stealth helicopter skimming the treetops.  I stopped digging and looked around.  The sound came again, but this time closer.  It buzzed by me so loudly that it produced the doppler effect!  

At first I thought it might be a small bird because it was too big and loud to be an insect.  When it finally landed on a tree and I could see it more clearly I knew there was no way I was dropping my pants anywhere near that thing!  It was either me or him, but one of us had to go (I had to go! stupid murder hornet).  I pulled my knife and circled around the tree where I knew it had landed.  It was remarkably tolerant of me as I ever-so-slowly peered around the tree and lifted my knife.  In a kind of spasm I flicked the blade with my wrist and severed the hornet in two pieces.  That’s how big it was!

I see myself now in a 30 year retrospective: PFC Haney, Murderer of Murder Hornets.

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