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These land
leeches, which are about an inch long, had suckers on both ends, and could
sense us as soon as we came into the area. We could see them on the leaves standing
on their hind end and waving about. Once they had a fix on our location
they began crawling toward us like inch worms. They would drop off their
perch and land on the ground and would crawl up our boots. Once they
reached the top of the boot, where the trouser was bloused, they would work
their way under the trouser leg and attach to the skin. They were
absolutely painless when they attached. Unless you checked frequently, the
first indication that one was on you would be when they dropped off the skin,
fully engorged with blood. You would feel it land in the blouse of your
trouser leg. When you retrieved this engorged diner, he was swollen to the
size of a large marble. The leech also introduces heparin, a chemical that
prevents the blood from clotting, into its attachment site. After the leech
was gone, the bite continued to ooze for hours. Leech bites would then get
infected by other bacteria, which took weeks to heal.
By
observation, we learned that the leech would only crawl in an upward direction.
Using this information, we tucked our trouser legs into our boots and our
shirts into our trousers before entering the leech swamps. When old Mr.
Leech crawled up he would not find a way under our clothes. We would then
keep an eye on each other for when the leech neared our upper body; we
would simply pick them off the shirt and toss it back into the brush.
Regardless of how vigilant we were, a few still got a free meal. Some of
the Marines would try to use the lit end of a cigarette to burn them off
and would often burn their skin in the process. I encouraged them to simply
pull them off the skin.
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