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38 DOI: 10.7330/9780874219043.c02 2 Know Thy Enemy Camel Spider Stories among US Troops in the Middle East Justin M. Oswald I would think that a camel spider seems always to be on attack mode. —Matt, a US Air Force veteran who served in the Middle East Rumors express and gratify the emotional needs of the community in much the same way as day dreams and fantasy fulfill the needs of the individual. —Robert Knapp In a classic study of social psychology written toward the end of World War II, Robert Knapp stated that rumors thrive in conditions of “social duress” and that war, which “focuses and intensifies the emotional life of the public ,” is an especially fertile ground for their circulation (1944, 22). More recent studies of this folklore genre have confirmed this observation; thus, it is hardly an exaggeration when a prominent Israeli folklorist claims that “wars have always been great hotbeds of rumors” (Hasan-Rokem 2005, 45). Since rumors are in general responses to social anxiety, the hotbeds can exist both on the battlefield and in civilian populations; but they are perhaps a little hotter in the former, where soldiers are faced every day with life-threatening situations. Knapp identified three common types of wartime rumors: pipe dreams, wedge rumors, and bogie rumors. The first, he claimed, satisfied the emotional need for wish fulfillment, the second that of aggression, and the third that of fear. Not surprisingly, combat zones are especially rife with “bogie” Know Thy Enemy 39 rumors, including fearful, sometimes fanciful, tales about the enemy and its terrain. Such fear fantasies, which emerge naturally during wartime, may range from mere pessimistic tales to all-out panic rumors about espionage, atrocities, or an impending attack (1944, 23–24). We can see the same process that Knapp described operating today, in the appearance of bogie rumors about the war on terror. The online “urban legend” site Snopes. com, for example, has recently reported rumors about al-Qaeda poisoning cans of Coca-Cola with anthrax or arsenic, and about terrorists stealing rental trucks that they are planning to use in the ongoing attack on America (Mikkelson and Mikkelson n.d.). Such bogie rumors, which used to spread by word of mouth, now circulate much more quickly over the Internet. The popularity of rumors—and of frightening stories in general—in war zones may be intensified by the fact that soldiers there are not only in harm’s way but physically and psychologically removed from familiar surroundings . As human beings, we depend on routine and mundane practices to bring order, consciously or subconsciously, into our daily lives. The inability to maintain our daily habits may engender feelings of alienation and cause us to act outside our usual spectrum of behavior (Fine and Ellis 2010, 2). When we find ourselves in a new physical environment, we may experience “the phenomenon of displacement” (Casey 1993, xiv), and this displacement can alter our perception of self and surroundings, thus allowing new forms of thinking, including rumors, to emerge. In this essay I examine various personal narratives—from simple memorates to more elaborate anecdotes to full-fledged rumors—that are current among US military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, and that concern the fearful characteristics of a local creature whose common name, among soldiers, is “camel spider.” Camel spiders are described as seeking out soldiers at night and inflicting painful damage through their use of aggression, speed, and stealth. New arrivals to these countries are warned about the spiders’ lethal nature, and the stories grow in transmission until the creatures take on an aura of mythical evil. The narratives function , therefore, partly to initiate newcomers and partly to control them, but also—as I’ll demonstrate—as a kind of bonding ritual and coping mechanism . Before they are in the Middle East for very long, soldiers incorporate camel spider stories into their belief systems, making them part of a common military worldview. In Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis calls legends “part of a ‘belief-language’ that helps individuals make sense of disorienting and stressful experiences” 40 Justin M. Oswald (2000, 4). As I will show in this chapter, anecdotes and rumors about camel spiders perform a similar function among deployed US soldiers. I’ll also show how soldiers’ staging of “death matches” between camel spiders (or between them and scorpions) gives them control over an imaginary battlefield and therefore allows them to be more effective in a hostile environment...

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