[Music] wherever a soldier happens to be deployed aside from the dangers of combat they'll come to find that the new and unfamiliar environment itself plays a pivotal role in defining the experience while there are plenty of tempered corners of the globe whose natural elements make for comfortable Outdoor Living military personnel are more often expected to live and fight in some of the most hostile environments on Earth ask any Soldier who's deployed to Iraq and they'll tell you about the blistering dry heat and massive blinding sandstorms or the soldiers in Vietnam who have nothing nice to
say about its climate likewise the sailors and Marines who have found themselves station throughout Asia and the Pacific like myself can attest to the many frustrations presented by operating in the jungle the humidity the torrential downpours the dense undergrowth and we cannot forget the bugs having never traveled to Asia prior to enlisting I honestly never knew mosquitoes and centipedes could get so big and then there were the spiders there was nothing like walking through the jungle in the pitch dark at night and putting your face through a cobweb that actually pushes you back like walking
into a literal net and then you feel something with long spindly legs crawling across the back of your neck but after some research it seems that my Collective experiences with giant venomous banana spiders orb weavers Huntsman and the like are nothing compared to some of the arachnids other men have encountered eight-legged creatures that eat not only cats and other small animals but purportedly humans from the equatorial jungles of Africa and Asia to the deserts of the Middle East these are true stories of military encounters with unbelievably massive spiders the Mist which hangs before you offers
you a choice to pass through or to escape Beyond it are stories which defy explanation and fly in the face of what we know to be real it is a void of both reality and impossibility of both fact and Superstition you alone are left to discern what to believe as you pass through what we call the fog of war I've spent quite a bit of time patrolling in jungles and really one of the worst things about it is the giant spiders and their cobwebs there's nothing like walking through the pitch dark at night and putting
your face through one but despite being out of the jungles for the most part for several years now there is one nasty little web that I still have to worry about the dark web fortunately today's video is sponsored by Aura and it's a really important time to be talking about them my own social security number was stolen recently during an AT&T data breach thankfully Ora was quick to notify me when it was found on the dark web because it didn't take long for someone to try and open a bank account in my name but now
I just found out that over 2.9 billion records were stolen from national public data which offers personal information to employers private investigators staffing agencies and others doing background checks considering our country is home to less than 350 million people I'd say this recent hack of nearly 3 billion records is concerning not just for me but for all Americans but as with the atat hack I'm not worried RS still has my back not to mention all the other benefits it offers including $5 million in identity theft Insurance it's always on alerting me when my data has
been compromised I'm not leaving myself and my family vulnerable to data breaches and if you don't want to either you can go to or.com wartime stories and try your first two weeks for free in all seriousness you've really got nothing to lose just by trying it out thanks AA now back to the episode [Music] towards the end of the 19th century the African nation of the Congo found itself in the clutches of the Belgian government ironically dubbed the Congo free state the country was in reality under the private ownership of King Leopold II under the
guise of bringing humanitarian Aid and economic opportunities to the developing Nation Leopold instead sought to exploit the congales people and their land laying claim to most of the Congo Basin in 1885 within its seemingly endless expanse of lush jungles lay vast amounts of valuable natural resources such as Ivory palm oil and rubber all of which the Belgian Monarch was eager to cash in on as the Congo free state was not yet a formal Belgian Colony its people were not subject to the protective laws and labor regulations of the European State and so under the private
jurisdiction of Leopold II and his appointed European overseers the congales people were forced to work often at gunpoint on the numerous plantations sprouting up all over the country enforcing Leopold's will was the force publique a paramilitary faction whose ranks consisted of mercenaries from all over Africa led by European officers through sheer brutality these soldiers kept the population in line the force was also chiefly responsible for defending Leopold's congales assets from any territorial Rivals seeking to muscle their way into the Monarch's business Enterprise with Arab slave Traders establishing themselves in the region during the early 1890s
the force publique was mustered to push them out during the conflict which spanned from 1892 to 1894 many armed patrols would be dispatched into the jungles their objective being to eliminate Arab encampments and shut down their human trafficking operations so The Story Goes perhaps during one such mission one of these many Belgian patrols would fail to return they had mysteriously vanished for many days after their departure nothing was seen or heard from the well-armed company of men likely sparking much concern amongst the force biblique senior officers but eventually and much to the surprise of their
leaders two of the company's men would finally emerge from the jungle badly dehydrated and clearly driven to the brink of Insanity by Fear The Two Soldiers consisted of a young African mercenary and a Belgian officer by the name of Remy Jansen when questioned by their superiors they are reported to have relayed a horrifying and unbelievable story it would have been easier for their commanding officers to Simply presume they had fled from battle in an act of cowardice or even murdered the rest of their company to cover their crime of desertion but considering this story still
circulates today if it is derived from an actual military report perhaps it was so incredible that the Belgian officers could not possibly believe these two men cowards or not would have fabricated such a ridiculously far-fetched story if it wasn't true according to these two crazed men there was something far more terrifying than enemy soldiers lurking in the jungle depths something that had attacked their patrol and had eaten their companions we have been walking in circles since yesterday you are supposed to know these jungles doas I want to get the hell out of here sir what
is it the Birds sir they stop [Music] according to the lone Belgian officer who had survived the force public troops while in route to confront the Arab slave Traders were ambushed by hostile mercenaries sustaining heavy casualties in the Ambush the commanding officer ordered his men to pull back into the jungle interior hoping to lose the pursuing mercenaries in the dense undergrowth while they succeeded in Breaking contact with the Enemy the force publique troops now found themselves hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar forest for days they aimlessly wandered the jungle depths many wounded men soon succumbing to
infections and heat exhaustion brought on by the unrelenting humidity the rest marched on hoping to find a river a road or anything that would lead them back out of this godforsaken jungle and back to their camp but one afternoon as they stopped to rest the jungle around them suddenly fell eerily silent and their situation suddenly got much worse emerging from the jungle underbrush came spiders spiders with bodies the size of large dogs their legs spands reaching up to 5 ft across the creatures now swarmed the Petrified soldiers knocking men to the ground sinking venomous fangs
into them and then dragging them Kicking and Screaming back into the underbrush or even up nearby tree trunks disappearing High into the branches panicked gunfire filled the Jungle the Swift spider outpacing even the men who tried to run often being tripped by Vines and brush watching as the men around him were carried away or mauled on the spot by what seemed like hundreds of these massive spiders in understandable Terror the officer who later recounted the story likewise broke Rank and fled into the jungle managing to escape the screams of his fellow soldiers carried on but
eventually became muffled as Lieutenant Jansen stumbled deeper into the jungle Jansen and the one other surviving Soldier would be the only man in the company to make it out alive to their European superiors the account of the giant spiders certainly must have appeared to be the ramblings of two crazed men driven mad by both combat and the Hostile jungle terrain perhaps the result of heat broke and hallucinations however when the story was imparted to the native congales people they were unsurprised the men's seemingly fantastic story carried with it an unnerving degree of Truth they said
the Belgian troops must have trespassed on sacred grounds those belonging to one of the Congo's most Elusive and terrifying Predators the jaboi also referred to as the giant congales spider jaboi similar in appearance to a tarantula would far exceed the size and human Terror of any known spider species with a leg span reported to be anywhere from 3 to 6 ft in length these spiders armed with speed strength and potent Venom are said to dwell in concealed Huts consisting of webbing and leaves as for diet the jaboi are said to hunt small mammals birds and
according to Legend even humans who are unfortunate enough to cross their path the spider said to be now rarely seen due to a habitat loss and a decline in available prey is still rumored to stalk the deepest unexplored depths of the Congo's vast jungles regrettably or perhaps more fortunately for the rest of us it is only these rumors and bits of local folklore that stand Testament to the jai's existence even documented military records detailing the force Public's troop movements and operations conducted during the Freestate era are hard to come by making Lieutenant Remy jansen's account
of the doomed Patrol nearly impossible to verify as it stands like all fantastic tales of the strange and unexplained wherever the story was originally derived from it has clearly Fallen prey to alterations and mellings if one were to research remans and's story they would more often find an account of a Belgian officer fighting not in the Congo in the 1890s but in Vietnam 80 years later this version of the story does otherwise say that while in Vietnam during the 1970s the Belgian officer witnessed his men being swarmed and killed by hundreds of large spiders as
they attempted to evade slave trading gangs in the remote jungle this however would make no sense historically Belgian troops have never been deployed to Vietnam in any capacity in known history nor are there any reports from American Vietnamese or other forces during the Vietnam war about encounter in Belgian troops or slave trading gangs so saying given that the Belgian forces did war against Arab slave traders in the Congo during the early 1890s it is then perhaps safe to assume that if this story truly came from a Belgian officer it more than likely surfaced in the
Congo free state during the years of King Leopold II's occupation now more than 120 years later it would be no surprise then that the story has become convoluted through various ret tellings and perhaps we might assume that even the spiders got bigger with every retelling however that may be the one part of the story that remain consistent because even today the congales people namely the Baka communities maintain their belief in and fear of the jopi and unlike us these people are not living far flung from the jungles where these spiders are said to dwell these
are people who presently continuing to survive as hunter gatherers explore these jungles every [Music] day though stories of these massive arach nments have long existed in congales oral history and Legend the creature was first brought into the Global Spotlight in 2001 by Scottish Explorer and cryptozoologist Bill Gibbons while exploring the Congo Basin in his quest to shed light on the jopi Legend he would encounter many locals who were eager to share their knowledge of the creature both in historical accounts and their own personal anecdotes one story of note set in neighboring Uganda during the early
1890s Rings eerily close in both time and proximity to Remy jansen's tale but instead concerns the ill-fated Journey not of a Belgian Patrol but of an English missionary named Arthur Sims while in route to a village on the coast of Lake nasala Arthur along with two Porters aiding him on his track found themselves carving a trail through a section of dense jungle suddenly the trio became ins snared in a tangled mess of what could only be described as webbing strung out amongst the trees and jungle floor struggling to cut themselves loose the tree over then
attacked by what Arthur Sims described as two spiders of great size their legs spanning at least 4T in width the creatures pounced on his two Porters sinking their fangs into the helpless men still trapped in the unnaturally strong spiderwebs as they thrashed and screamed in panic managing to reach for his pistol Arthur said he fired wildly at the spiders forcing the two creatures to abandon their prey and hastily Retreat however the damage was already done the two Porters ravaged by the spider's venomous fangs quickly succumbed to swelling and fever leaving a terrified Arthur SS all
alone many days later the now deranged missionary would arrive at his village Village destination telling the villagers of the terror he witnessed in the depths of the jungle for Outsiders his story would have seemed the ramblings of a Madman for the villagers however his tale was entirely believable if not something more like an everyday occurrence I first became aware of a giant grelling spider through Miss Margaret Lloyd formerly a rhan and now living in England her parents Reginald and Margaret Lloyd were exploring the interior of the old Belgian Congo in 1938 when they spotted something
cross in the jungle track ahead of them at first they took the object to be a large cat or a monkey on all Forest when they stopped their vehicle an old forward truck to allow the animal to pass they were thunder struck to see that it was a very large Brain spider similar in its appearance to a tarantula the legs span at least 4 to 5 ft Mr Lloyd trembled so much with excitement that he was unable to retrieve his camera in time to take a snap and Mrs Lloyd was so distraught that she wanted
to return home to redia immediately a creature is known as the Jaa fofi Jabba meaning great or giant a fi meaning spider spiders of all kinds are called fuy as Bill Gibbons continued to search for the infamous spiders he reflected on the story which had first prompted his trip to the Congo one which he had heard through another res president of the UK a woman who had immigrated from Africa considering that stories of giant man-eating spiders are understandably the kind of creature fod we'd expect to see only in mythical films it would no doubt seem
bizarre to us that encounters with arachnids similar to the ones described in the tales of Arthur Sims the Lloyds and Remy yansen are by no means rare and for whatever reason many of these stories seem to pop up during times of War barely a year after regginald and margarite Lloyd's horrifying encounter in 1938 World War II would see tens of thousands of civilized men sent to the front lines many of which were in remote and largely unexplored regions of the world finding themselves trudging across the jungle islands of the Pacific Allied soldiers would apparently face
not only Japanese Fighters but eight-legged creatures that caused them to question whether they had already died and had woken up in Hell the following story came to light in 2005 during an episode of the Coast to Coast AM radio show featuring cryptozoologist rob morphe during the show a caller by the name of Craig shared a war story told to him by his grandfather an army veteran who served in papaa New Guinea during the second World War doubtlessly for many young American soldiers who grew up in North American climates the islands of the Pacific Theater their
jungles overflowing with Exotic Life might as well have been alien worlds Papo Nini was no exception and as Craig pointed out during his call it's an island nation with no shortage of strange animal sightings though one of the world's largest Islands the Lush jungles covering most of the nation were as they remain today largely unexplored it stands for reason that the American soldiers defending the nation's capital of Port Moresby during World War II besieged by Japanese Air Raids throughout 1942 were among the first men to ever set foot in the jungle interior on their many
patrols and Craig's grandfather was one of them slicing through the dense undergrowth with a machete the American Soldier found himself paralyzed with fear having nearly walked into the web of a giant emerald green spider with his machete already in hand as any red-blooded American Soldier would do his immediate impulse was to chop it to Pieces it was just it was a spider and it scared him so much he hacked it up his with his machete and apparently it was about 3T long from tip to tip and I said no that's impossible it had it was
furry like a bird spider right he said no it was shiny emerald green even his grandson Craig said he had a hard time believing the story but otherwise said that he had never known his grandfather to lie about anything and at the time he shared the story on Coast to Coast AM his grandfather was still alive and had answered all of his questions and provided him with more than enough details to be convincing again as baffling as such a large arachnid is to accept as fact Papo guini was a land seemingly lost to time its
untouched jungles and many yet undiscovered species going undisturbed until the war brought humans into its inner depths sharing its largest island with the country of Indonesia it also wouldn't be the first time the world laughed at the seemingly ridiculous idea of strange oversized creatures being found in the Island region 100 years ago scientists openly laughed at the idea that giant man-eating lizards lived in the Island region of Papu New Guinea and Indonesia most lizards documented in Europe and America at the time were harmless and only a few inches long but in 1910 with Indonesia being
a European Colony a Dutch military officer Lieutenant stain van Hans Brook having heard Tales of 20ft land crocodiles went exploring and came back with a dead 6-ft lizard saying there were others as long as 10 ft 16 years later Explorer W Douglas Burton traveled to the island to research search the creatures and returned to New York City with two of them alive he named them kodo dragons displaying the two animals in the Bronx Zoo this single Discovery prompted The Next Century of Western fantasizing about gigantic undiscovered animals including dinosaurs living on remote Islands when Army
Air Service veteran and film producer Marian C Cooper visited the zoo seeing the giant lizards is what inspired him to write the 1933 classic King Kong perhaps as was the case with the kodo first being said to be 20 ft and only being half that size stories of giant spiders might be similarly embellished and as with the kodo dragon the proof of any new creature lies in the evidence we have to go on so while we wait for some Brave Explorer to go out and wrestle one of these monsters into a box and bring it
to our local zoo we might ask was an American Soldier the only man to report seeing giant spider in Papo New Guinea fortunately for the giant spider enthusiasts but unfortunately for the soldiers who fought there he was not like their American counterparts around Port morby Australian troops tasked with flushing Japanese forces out of new guiney's remote Owen mountain range throughout 1942 and 1943 would likewise come out of those jungles with horrifying stories all right leaf leaf there's a good Leaf to what what the hell is this stuff cobwebs buggers have been busy around here oh
all right you've got my attention going to back up slowly mate I'm giving you room he's an now according to Australian cryptozoologists Debbie and Peter Hines the father of one of their friends himself a veteran of the second world war shared a story in which he lamented on his encounter with a terrifyingly large spider since no name was provided for this unknown Australian veteran we'll refer to him as Jackson during one of the many armed patrols along the Cota Trail a near 60-m footpath running through the inhospitable mountain range Jack taking advantage of a momentary
pause in their Advance broke off into the jungle for a long overdue latrine break squatting in the dense Thicket pants down around his ankles the Australian took notice of what appeared to be large cobwebs clinging to the surrounding trees and shrubs this in and of itself wasn't enough to phase Jackson whose Homeland was practically overrun with large sometimes hostile spiders whose presence he'd long been accustomed to however the unnatural creature he then noticed mere feet away from his face watching him in perfect Stillness from the undergrowth was something else the spider's jet black body excluding
his legs he said was the size of a small dog its legs while short were thick and hairy like those of a tarantula not unlike the description offered for giant spiders living in the same latitude in the African Congo locking eyes with the spider Jackson now squatted in his compromising position acted with slow deliberate movements never once taking his eyes off the creature step by step he put distance between himself and the spider finally arriving back on the relative safety of the Kota Trail while it is said that such verbal accounts of massive insects were
frequent among the ranks of Allied soldiers in the Pacific if it ever was something to report it would seem very few if any made their way into official records still as the saying goes there is no smoke without fire or perhaps no cobwebs without spiders and the Papa New Guinea encounters certainly wouldn't be the only time Australian or American soldiers came face to face with a breed of terrifyingly large Iraq nits with the end of World War II the power vacuum left behind in the country of Vietnam devolved into another violent conflict as Communist forces
sought to overtake the southern region of the country in the 1960s a new generation of American men soon found themselves trekking through even more jungles largely Untouched by humans and like their World War II Brethren they too came home with wild stories though armed with a wealth of military experience from World War II and the more recent Korean conflict the nature of fighting in the Vietnam War was unlike anything the Americans had previously encountered while North Vietnam had a formal standing army consisting of uniformed soldiers armored divisions and aircraft it was the spreading web of
communist aligned gorillas crawling into the South known as the Viet Kong that presented the greatest challenge to US forces hidden in both plain sight amongst the local populace and deep within the country's remote jungles fighting the Viet Kong or VC was a tedious Affair for American troops in order to effectively root out the insurgents from the rural South the US military turned to its newly developed special forces units to execute the task operating in small highly mobile groups these elite soldiers would be dispatched into the most remote unreachable corners of the country from there they
would gather information on local Guerilla bases Supply networks and Troop formations all to be later targeted by air strikes or other large-scale ground offensives by all accounts the soldiers Within These elite units were well-versed in all aspects of jungle warfare and felt reasonably well at home in the hostile environment much like their enemies however the Viet Kong their booby traps Tigers Rock Apes venomous snakes and giant centipedes weren't the only danger creeping around deep within the country's malevolent jungles oh hold up what's up something moving over there by the river all right weapon's up let's
check it out oh what the hell is that good God is that a spider shh keep it down whoa everybody back I did not sign up for this [ __ ] someone shoot the damn thing Sergeant only if it starts running at us the man who shared this story online operating under the handle Mr Maxima did so on behalf of his father-in-law who was a Vietnam veteran with his father-in-law and his fiveman team spending months scouting in the jungle at a time he said they encountered the creatures on several occasions I have known him for
many years and have never known him to lie or make up stories he rarely talks of the war he thinks it was a waste of too many American lives while in the jungle he swears he saw spiders with the body the size of a common dinner plate says with the legs the overall span ranged 20 to 30 in across he says he saw more than one always near creeks or water sources he also said they scared the hell out of the entire unit they shot a few with their M16s and unloaded full magazines and they
were still moving around just thought I'd add this I feel where there is a will life will always find a way there are living things in every environment known and unknown to man we as mankind have only found an estimated 25% of the total species on this planet so how do we know some of the spiders didn't evolve in a different way I will take my father-in-law's word as truth while this story similar to those shared by Allied soldiers during World War II are of course difficult to verify the idea of undiscovered species of large
spiders lurking in the jungles of Asia and the Pacific seems to be less far-fetched the more they seem to pop up around the world although there are no wartime encounters known there are similar reports of large spiders even living in the jungles of Central and South America likewise near the equator where the climate is warmest and most tropical and like with the Koto Dragon new discoveries are always being made it was only in 2001 that what we now know as the giant huntsman spider was first seen by human eyes found lurking in a remote cave
system within the jungles of La Vietnam's Western neighbor with a lifespan of 12 in it's certainly not the 20 to 30in monsters supposedly seen by American soldiers so again perhaps the stories did get embellished by the time the rest of us have now heard them although not as large as the giant huntsman one documented spider known to inhabit the jungles of South America is the Goliath bird eater its name speaks for itself but far from Jungle climates being the only ones to lay claim to massive spiders what would we think if we were a soldier
deployed to Iraq already well outside our normal environment and we saw what he did a spider big enough to eat a house cat words of the wise never pound two riets after eating a vomelet so that's what that SM was damn dude I thought something died uh that was my stomach war fighter tested is right that's what they meant they're testing them on us right Warrior approved my ass I mean who even thought you could put it oh [ __ ] spider spider in the early years of the 21st century the United States would again
find itself embroiled in another controversial overseas conflict this time however the lush tropical backdrop of Asia would be replaced by the blistering Heat of Iraq however whether squared off against grizzled Republican guard veterans or young religious Fanatics there was one Enemy At Home in the Iraqi desert that left a lasting impression amongst the soldiers and other service members who served there camel spiders measuring about 6 in in length armed with a menacing set of fangs and an attitude to match these arach nets resembling an unnerving cross between a crab a spider and a scorpion were
capable of sending even the most battle hardened men into hysterics such was their aggression that the spiders were said to chase down fleeing soldiers however the camel spider's horrifying reputation is possibly unwarranted their bites while painful are non-venomous and though the camel spider is known for its aggressive posturing it only resorts to such measures when it feels cornered or threatened to the soldiers who saw the horrifying sight of one of these horrible little monsters sprinting towards them the spider likely had no ill intent in their efforts to stay out of the intense Desert Sun camel
spiders will seek shelter in whatever shade they can find including the shadows of human beings chances are that what you thought was a murderous spider chasing you halfway across the fob was simply an ugly little friend trying to cool down in your Shadow however this next story isn't about a camel spider it comes from an army veteran who was deployed to Iraq in 2009 he personally reached out to me over email a couple years ago to tell me about a massive spider he saw there one whose size and aggression would likely make the camel spider
appear cute and cuddly by comparison I was in Iraq in 2009 Bill writes in his email we were at a forward operating Base called Brassfield MOA it was a very small fob about the size of four football fields at this time the Army was closing at smaller fobs moving every one to larger ones so I only spent 2 or 3 months there one night walking back from cow there were four of us we just walked into the area where our chws platoon area is the area looked like an aircraft hanger with no roof and brick
walls about 7 or8 ft tall the chws short for containerized housing units looked like small office trailers they were running down the right and left side of the walls maybe 10 or 15 of them then down the middle there were these wooden sheds that were offices but only like four if I remember right now on this fob we only used red lights at night we also had a few cats that roam the area normally on this night we were walking down the right side between the chews and the woodsheds and we see this cat just
in fear with its hair standing up cat was hissing and going crazy so then we looked to see what the cat was looking at now the chws were elevated 2 or 3 ft off the ground sitting on top of bricks all we saw at first were these 2T long about 1 to 1 and 1/2 in wide about 2 to 3T long poles they were sticking up at about a 45 degre angle just under the edge of the chew then we all saw what it really was they weren't poles they were legs it looked just like
a wolf spider the body not including legs was about the size of a 2 L bottle of soda I swear on my life I am not exaggerating it size now it was not a camel spider camel spiders don't really get that big only about the size of a tarantula it didn't look anything like a camel spider camel spiders look more like scorpions mixed with a spider this looked like an all black wolf spider we were about 6 feet from it then it ran out extremely fast grabbed this cat was fighting and killing this cat and
then almost in a blink of an eye it ran off with the cat back under the chew this whole thing took 20 seconds if that on the other side of the chew was this brick wall now we could not see the other side without walking down to the end of the chws to go behind them but it had to have gone over this wall because after we regained our composure we looked around to see if it was still in the area a few days later near the trash pit we found what was left of the
cat was crazy bones and skin and fur nothing else it was all ripped up but no meat or anything we never saw this spider again but to this day I am so glad that we saw the cat first and did not walk past this thing when we finally rotated out we were all glad to leave that fob to this day I still have nightmares about giant spiders I never in a million years would have thought when I deployed to Iraq I would have run into something like that if anything I was just lucky I had
people with me we all saw it so at least we didn't get looked at like we were [Music] crazy from a scientific standpoint it's argued that it would be incredibly difficult for any spider species on Earth to grow to the Epic Proportions cited in these stories primarily this presumption is based on what is known about the way spiders breathe maybe eons ago massive spiders would have been as common as dirt but the present day oxygen levels combined with the forces of gravity seemed to imply that arachnids would be limited in their scale as indicated though
how many other undiscovered species of animals have flipped science on its head when they were found doubtlessly new species will continue to be found for the foreseeable future personally I'm not really hoping for the spiders to be one of them I have my own stories with average size spiders in the jungles of Southeast Asia that are less than fond memories what about you what's your best or should I say worst spider story [Music] hey guys welcome to the credits and the little after action that I like to do here so I did mention at the
end that I have my own spider stories and while there are too many to share the worst spider experience I had was in Guam 31st Mew our Recon teams were going off the boat we were going to do a port call for like a couple of days but we had a training mission that we were going to do before that happened and so they took a helicopter they took us off the boat flew us a couple of miles over the ocean we landed in Guam sometime at night there was another unit that was doing an
operation that we were kind of tagging along with so we hopped into these Humvees which was fairly unusual usually they would just drop us off in the middle of the Jungle but we get out of the Humvees we had several teams with us first we stopped we did our Sills our our stop look listen smell and then when we took off it was funny because it was very dark this night there was no probably no Moonlight plus the canopy cover um and everything but it was very dark in this jungle and the evidence of that
was when we stepped off my team my radio Recon team was going in One Direction one of the amphib Recon teams was going in another direction we lost two guys because they saw the other team leaving and they just fell in line behind that Patrol I guess we stepped off a couple of minutes after they did well we did a head count and we're like we're missing two guys where is our our tail Guy where is our artto well these Knuckleheads they had got the wrong team so we had to do a radio check and
like guys like can you do a head count on your team and see if you've got two extra guys our two idiots that that stepped off with you finally we we had to regroup found each other again we get our two idiots back and then we step off so it's dark our our our Night Vision Optics are basically useless for us because everything is too close the depth perception is terrible and there's really no Alum anyway so there's really not a lot of uh ambient light to use the Optics but we were the nature of
the patrol was just Meandering around this series of very closely situated trees all the trees are very close together the brush and everything was very flat so we didn't have to go up and down Hills but we ended up just stacking up only a couple of feet away from each other like kind of in a in a centipede sort of like just snaking our way through and and it was so dark that our arto again this knuckle he was the guy on the team that nobody really liked but he was always like dude where did
everybody go guys where are you and we're like dude just shut up we're like 10 ft away from you we're right here so we were very close together the whole time I was in the front of the patrol basically winding my way through the easiest route right you know trying not to cut through too much brush or trying to avoid any dangers and stuff like that and they were just following behind me in a snake but being in the front and cutting the the path for everybody else I was the guy who won I kept
walking into all the plant life and everything was sharp I mean if you've been in in like a desert environment where they have like those Agave plants with the very sharp tips on the leaves or just all of the leaves in this jungle were sharp I didn't I didn't know what kind of godforsaken but everything was pointy and sharp and I was terrified about my eyes getting poked out it was but the other thing was the spiderwebs I found out very quickly as I walked every 2 or 3 feet and I'm putting my face through
another spiderweb and spiders are crawling up my sleeves and I'm smashing them trying to shake them out of my out of my you know had my sleeves down on my uniform and they're crawling across the back of my neck and I they're crawling across my ears it's just just awful I was like how many spider webs are there in this jungle it's pitch black so I can't really see to avoid them and it seems like all of these spiders put their webs at face level not to mention probably all of the webbing that I'm walking
through with my chest and my my my legs and every right it's just my face is the only skin that's exposed and I'm constantly running into webs and I felt like I was taking the brunt of this Patrol because all the guys behind me were just I'm I'm knocking down all the webs and stuff for them and I'm just like the spider magnet for this Patrol So eventually I got so sick of it that I just dropped my rifle it was hanging for my sling so I'm like I'm not being tactical anymore forget my rifle
I grabbed like a twoot stick and I just start twirling it walking through the jungle Meandering through trees trying not to get my eyes gouged out checking my GPS and twirling the stick in front of my face I I mean I imagined I look like you know like a wizard and Harry Potter like casting spells just trying to wrap all of the cobwebs onto the stick so by the end of the patrol the sun is starting to come up and I look at this this ugly stick that I'm now holding it I mean it was
think of like white cotton candy on a stick spiders trapped inside their own webbing just this maob looking Cotton Candy Stick I mean it was just probably maybe only about an inch thick but an inch thick of webbing just so much webbing so I threw that away and then we started to look around around the rest of the jungle as we continue to move spiders at it was probably a good thing that it was Pitch Black because we would not have wanted to continue patrolling if we saw what the jungle actually looked like I'll find
I'll try and find a picture of the Guam jungle I took some pictures with my camera that I had with me too spiders everywhere and not just like the big orbweavers and their kind of spread out webs and you know one spider here one SP they had these massive webbing complexes I I I got the impression this was like the New York City of spiders just apartment complexes of spiders small spiders mediumsized spiders giant spiders all living together in this hellacious jungle and now that I'm researching and I find out that Guam actually has a
spider infestation problem and apparently they been bringing spiders over people coming to the island and and other species that aren't supposed to be there but my goodness it was just absolute hell I mean I can't imagine some of these guys in the story running into massive spiders like that and what I would think these things were bad enough I just I did not feel comfortable from that point forward moving um around in that jungle at right yeah wonderful place Guam um if you live there I'm not dogging it I'm sure it's a wonderful place to
live um but yeah I didn't like walking through your jungles back at Okinawa at one point I had this fever dream that I was in a large tree of some kind and these giant spiders started coming out of the holes in the tree and stuff like that and one of them uh bit my foot and it actually really hurt because in reality as I was thrashing around in my barracks bed I had kicked the concrete wall smashed all five of my toes against this wall and I just woke up holding my foot in pain so
it let these spiders left like a lasting impact uh on my memory so I can understand running into a giant spider in real life would be traumatic but Guam was about the worst that it got for me but anyway thanks for listening thanks for watching and as always a sincere thank you to both my patrons my YouTube channel members and everyone out there who has supported the channel in some way whether through purchasing merchandise the donations you guys have made I sincerely appreciate it thank you so much for helping me keep the channel going may
God be with you no matter what you are dealing with and I will see you in the next episode
