Fire ants, that is. The difference between a little regular ant and a little fire ant is the difference between heaven and hell. At the time, Krista was an Air Force nurse stationed in Texas. After her shower she dried off and put on her panties that had been on the bathroom floor.

“All of a sudden I felt this fire sensation,” Krista said.  “Yes, as you can guess, there happened to be a bunch of those little critters all over my undergarments before I put them on. Ouch. By far the most horrible critter I have encountered so far in my life.”

Another nurse friend, Faye, spent six years in the Army nurse reserve. Despite her country girl roots, Faye does not do well with bugs indoors or outside. Finding a gigantic roach on her pillow next to her head during her college years required years of shock therapy. As bad luck would have it, the Army assigned Faye to a field unit and she usually spent her two weeks of active-duty in a tent at Fort Knox, Ky. 

One night as Faye slept in her bunk with eight other nurses, a bug (species unknown) landed on her. 

“I let out a blood-curdling scream, woke up the whole tent,” Faye said. The chief nurse, a very prim and proper person, went to investigate.  “She stumbled out of her bunk, turned on the light, and hit the bug several times with her helmet,” Faye said. “I was still screaming. She said, ‘Shut up and go back to bed, we need to be up soon.’ I went back to bed, eyes wide open, still terrified until dawn when the whistle blew.”

Think it can’t get any worse? Army wife Joelle had bats in two sets of quarters at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Her family had just signed for quarters and returned to the house at dusk (DUN DUNT DAAH...) when they heard strange sounds coming from inside the walls. A few minutes later, the bats made their way from the walls into the house fluttering about.   

Housing assigned a second house. After being bat-less for three days, four bats squeezed  through a whole in the oven. “Two we found that night. We thought we had them all, but we weren’t sure,” Joelle said. The next morning Joelle’s dog sprinted for a flower pot — with a bat in it.  The final bat, hiding behind the blinds, appeared later that day. As Joelle sat on her couch with her young son, the dog ran over to the blinds (DUN DUNT DAAH...) “I looked up and watched the bat slowly come from behind the blinds to out in the open,” Joelle said. “I’ll never forget the sight of that bat coming out of the blinds.”

And Joelle, we’ll never forget you relaying that story.
 
But the critter story that gets the “OMG!!!! No way!!!” award, comes not from a military wife or service member, but from my friend Kristen who served in Africa with the Peace Corps in the ‘90s. Kristen told me to be ready to be grossed out. She did not disappoint.

Kristen and her Peace Corps buddy, Sarah, had just traveled five hours on foot to a mountain village in Eritrea. Tired and ready for a good night sleep, they stayed with a friend of a friend in a one-room house made of tin walls and a corrugated tin roof.  
“Sarah and I had to share a bed and were tossing and turning because we kept getting bitten by what we thought were mosquitoes, but turned out to be bed bugs,” Kristen said. “So, trying to hide under the covers was, unbeknownst to us, defeating the purpose.”  About mid-way through this endless night, the two kept hearing scurrying little feet run from one side of the roof to the other. “Scurry, scurry, scurry.  Scurry, scurry, scurry. All night long,” she said. “We thought—silly us—that it was cats or maybe even squirrels. Of course not.”
Just after the women finally fell asleep, the scurrying creature fell through a hole in the tin roof and landed between their heads. 
“What was it, you ask? A giant rat! We both screamed bloody murder and proceeded to wake the entire neighborhood who started yelling, ‘Who’s there?’  ‘What’s wrong?’”  When the women explained in outrage what had happened, the villagers looked at each other in silence. They looked back at the women, then back at each other, before breaking out in laughter. After 30 years of war with Ethiopia, a rat in their world was nothing to scream about, Kristen said. She’s reached the point where she can finally laugh about it, too.

Could I trade my roaches for rats? Or bats? Or scorpions? Not likely. That reminds me, I need to give No-Nonsense Rebecca a call.