Contrary to popular belief (a cliche heard at "hastily called press conferences"), I do not ordinarily slip egregious errors into this column to generate paroxysms of outrage from the Gotcha! Gang. Once in awhile I do, just to see if the gimlet-eyed readership is on the ball. (Calm down; when you're using "a while" as a noun phrase preceded by prepositions like "in" or "for," write it as two words. But when you need it as an adverb to modify a verb, use the one-word "awhile." Mnemonic: Once in a while, relax awhile.)
"After uncovering the spider hole," said Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez at his news conference on Dec. 14 last year announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein, "a search was conducted ... the spider hole is about 6 to 8 feet deep and allows enough space for a person to lie down inside of it."
Hot on a Sunday deadline, I turned to the Google search engine for earlier usages and breathlessly informed readers that the phrase sure to become famous was "Army lingo from the Vietnam era."
Too quick a call. As 180 Gotcha! Gangsters gleefully pointed out to me, both my etymology (study of origins of words) and my entomology (study of bugs) were incorrect.
Though the term was used frequently in the Vietnam War, it apparently (now I'm careful) was first used in its current sense in the Pacific theater of World War II.
"The Japanese did it a lot at Okinawa and Iwo Jima," observes Colonel Charles Payne, professor of military history at Virginia Tech, adding that Special Operations forces today would call a hole dug in the ground a "hide position." The technique is hardly new -- in the battle of Crecy in 1346, French archers popped out of their holes to ambush the English cavalry -- but we are more interested in the origin of the phrase.
Let us not be misled by the blanket weaving of Navajo women described in 1930 by Dane and Mary Roberts Coolidge: "They always left the spider-hole in the middle of each blanket, like the hole in the center of a spider web." In the sense Sanchez had in mind, earliest citation so far comes in from Barry Popik of New York. A Washington Post photo caption dated Jan. 16, 1941, reads, "Soldiers at Camp Ord ... here demonstrate the Army's new `spider hole' method of hiding a soldier."
In 1984, A Dictionary of Soldier Talk defined the term as "small, concealed firing positions from which snipers emerge to shoot at patrolling troops" -- now here comes the entomology -- "probably from the ingenious lair of the Trapdoor Spider, which darts from its hold to snatch unwary prey." This is the insect-eating spider of the family Ctenizidae that builds a silk-lined burrow concealing a hinged lid. Joe Cline of Charlotte, North Carolina, adds that the hiding-place name that Sanchez used was derived from "the lair of the trap-door spider, which waits for prey in a small hole in the ground, covered with a lid (made from spider silk, I believe) to conceal the predator."
The difference between military spider holes and foxholes (in which the Army chaplain William Cummings famously said there were no atheists) is this: the lid, or cover of concealment. The foxhole is shallower, dug for temporary self-protection; the spider hole is for an offensive or suicidal mission. "One could quibble," e-mails Bentley Orrick, "that what Saddam was skulking in was more of a one-man bunker than a spider hole, since it was a hiding place and not a firing position. But it definitely had a camouflaged trap door." Not quite; a trap door is hinged, and the lid to Saddam's lair was not, but one need not quibble.
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