Korea during its hot summer months becomes a land of insects and reptiles. In the tents at night, ...

Korea during its hot summer months becomes a land of insects and reptiles. In the tents at night, huge moths with four inch wingspans batter the lights alongside giant mosquitoes, and big rhinoceros beetles that fly in a vertical position, instead of horizontally, and look like fearsome prehistoric monsters against the lamps. Outdoors, the paddy fields are alive with noisy frogs and great horned toads live well on a diet of outsize earwigs and spiders. But the snakes are the big worry. One company of the 3rd Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), killed 74 snakes in about half an hour in its bivouac area during a recent exercise, and the Commander of 28 British Commonwealth Infantry Brigade, Brigadier I T Murdoch found that two more snakes had elected to slough their skins in his camp bath. One British officer on the Brigade, Captain Alan Thorpe, walked into his tent one morning last week and found the sandbagged wall an or two from his bed, occupied by a pair of grass snakes. Here an unidentified Australian soldier examines a large toad on the wall of a dugout.