Afghantistan

I went to war yesterday and today. The enemy swarmed World War I-style; send'em over the trenches and by sheer numbers we'll make it to the other side. Even though I have 21st-century weaponry -- smart bombs, the ability to carry out precision strikes, and state-of-the-art surveillance -- I decided to fight back against this pre-emptive strike World War I-style as well. So I carpet-bombed them with chemical weapons.

Except my mustard gas was Raid.

The house was under attack by ants. Hundreds of thousands of ants. They came in through the kitchen door. And one of the kitchen windows. Platoons, companies, and divisions of them, all hell-bent on destroying my food supply. I also think there was a plan in the works to contaminate my water, but I thwarted that before the group could fully assault the sink area.

I raided the main column, starting at the head and working my way down the chain. I straifed them with blasts from the spray bottle, instantly killing probably three-fourths of the enemy. The lucky ones drowned in the sheer volume of chemical rained down on them. Meanwhile, the other unlucky quarter writhed in pain, suffocating on the toxic fumes. I must say, the bravery exhibited by the horde that still crawled in under the door made me falter momentarily. But I quickly regained my wits and unleashed a volley of sprays that turned the kitchen door into a miniature (of sorts) Dresden.

My youthful excitement and enthusiasm waned as the dead piled up (literally). I felt like Paul Baumer from "All Quiet on the Western Front." But there were more of the enemy, and I was in charge of Homeland Security. I had to fight on.

Having temporarily closed off a strategic point of entry, I turned my attention to protecting the sugar reserves. It was vital I save the sugar. It was the whole point of the war, no matter what the Queen Ant may have told her colony otherwise. I'm sure I was painted as a lunatic despot, ruling over the house with an iron fist and putting down any kind of insect insurrection with brute force ("He uses Raid! on his own house spiders!") There were a few ants who spent an hour or so abroad, and I dropped a bit of apple for them. I'm sure their pleas for peace were ignored as the bloodlust rose in the hick ants who spent all their days in the depths of the colony raising aphids for milk to feed the Queen and soldier ants. No, I wasn't going to be fooled. I knew the ants were here for one reason and one reason only: the sugar.

I set up heave defenses around the sugar reserves and spread out from there. I decimated the three lines of enemy combatants headed for the "white gold" using the same technique I closed the borders with.

But in my quest to protect the Homeland, other important duties were being neglected. This is where my allies came in and saved the day. The Coalition of the Willing consisted of my roommate and some spiders. When I left for work, the ants staged another assault on the Homeland. Either the chemical fumes died down or the ants tied little bits of grass around their mouths to breathe through, because when my roommate came home the attack was on. He fought back, picking up the fight where I left off.

Detractors of my War on Terror-ants will point to my alliance with the house spiders as proof of my insincerity. I understand the spiders will turn around and bite me in my sleep faster than I can say "Black Widow," but by building an inter-species coalition I was setting myself up for future successes. The spiders caught a minimal number of enemy combatants, and the glee with which they spun their sticky web around the trapped Terror-ants caused me some alarm, but I looked the other way during these moments of torture (for some reason it made me think of Paul Wolfowitz, though). These are Terror-ants -- THEY attacked US because they hate the way we live in houses and with food in the pantry. They don't deserve our sympathy. The spiders are on the forefront of the War on Terror-ants. They fight and eat them every day. I need them on my side.

Some of you may blame me for this problem, saying it was my own policy that got me here in the first place. Let me first say that these are bad ants we're dealing with. They don't like us. Secondly, sure, I used to like ants better than spiders. I used to let some ice cream drop to the sidewalk in summer so they could eat. I was vehemantly against the sunlight-through-magnifying-glass-to-burn-ants (a.k.a. the scorched ant policy) that many of my friends funded and supported. But times change. Situations and contexts change. Those ants I helped were part of some East Coast colony (cell?). These are the more evil West Coast colonies (cells?). The house is a safer place with the ants pushed back. We have spiders all over the backyard rooting them out. Roommates with Raid bottles ready to hunt them down before they attack us again. How many other house insects are safer now that the threat of thousands of ants swarming them and ripping them apart is gone?

Also, I know that seventeen of the twenty creatures that attacked people in the house in the past year are spiders, but these were renegade spiders. Probably trained by ants. There is no official spider jihad against me; unlike there is an ant jihad as exhibited by the Queen Ant instructing her colony to attack with the promise of tons of syrup and 66 not-fully-grown queen ants as a reward in the afterlife.

AND, I know that I had a no-bug zone around the whole house and a policy of killing any and all bugs that tried to move around, no matter if they were ants or not; and I allowed a bunch of spiders (i.e. picked them up in Kleenex and set them in the garden) to get out of the house. This isn't contradictory at all. See, spiders aren't insects. They're arachnids. Completely different. Nothing to do with each other. So stop your whining about me not questioning them because maybe they knew something. They are our allies. Besides, they don't want the sugar and help guard it.

Oh, wait, I shouldn't have admitted that last part. Never mind.

If I had unilaterily fought the ants, I would have been caught in a quagmire. Every time I went to work, the ants would attack. I would come home and repel them, and it would start all over the next day. I would be stuck fighting them for possibly the next fifteen years. But with my Coalition of the Willing, we won the War on Terror-ants.

The house is secure. I hope to live here for another 4 years or so.