Yusef Komunyakaa's collection Dien Cai Dau (1988), which takes its title from a Vietnamese phrase meaning 'crazy,' drew on his experience as a soldier in Vietnam to produce a series of poems that engage with the tropical natural world — including its insects and parasites — as an integral part of the experience of war. Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular (1994), brought an African American perspective to the tradition of war poetry and the soldier's confrontation with a tropical environment full of hostile insect life.

Komunyakaa's Vietnam poems extended the tradition of war insect poetry from the louse-ridden Western Front into the mosquito-ridden Southeast Asian jungle, updating the bodily degradation of warfare for the mid-century American experience. His African American identity added a further dimension to the confrontation between the American soldier and the tropical environment, connecting the history of racial biology — the supposed immunity of African Americans to certain tropical diseases, which had been used to justify their deployment as labourers in the Caribbean and South — to the specific insect world of Vietnam.