nprfreshair:

Jake Tapper tells Terry Gross about the kinds of animals found in the Afghan valley where Combat Outpost Keating was located: 

I wanted to get across how otherworldly it was for the men to live there. This part of Afghanistan is gorgeous. It’s mountains with cedar and walnut and fir trees and beautiful rivers, but … for a lot of these troops it’s like walking into another dimension where the creatures are just, you haven’t ever seen anything like that. The lizards, the horned vipers — snakes that look like they have horns — there are monkeys in trees, there are leopards. The lizards would get as a long as six feet, and then there’s all these weird insects. Centipedes that were longer than a man’s foot, different kinds of ants. … But then the worst and the strangest creature was this thing called a camel spider, which is not technically actually. … It’s about the size of a man’s hand, and they’re not poisonous but they are terrifying and they would have a habit of being in your sleeping bag or in your shoe. These are spiders that would eat birds and lizards. It’s something out of Stephen King. I mean, the men would have fun with it. They would put two in a box and watch them kill each other or they would throw them at each other, but it certainly illustrated to the men that they’re not in Kansas anymore.

Image of a horned viper native to that region by cerekwan via Flickr

Yikes