I was in Vietnam and lived in Japan for a while. I visited a number of places when I had the chance. Travelling around Japan by myself was a culinary adventure. Away from Tokyo and the American military bases, not many Japanese wanted to or could speak English, so, although I could speak a bit of Japanese I couldn't read more than a few street signs and such, so I never knew for sure what I was eating, especially in ryokans (Japanese inns).
Bless your heart and thank you for your service. My favorite vets are from that war and this last one my son was in Iraq. Only because I knew so many of course.
Can't say I've ever eaten any insects, but I've enjoyed the most marvelous turtle soup. There was a restaurant in New Orleans called Kolb's, now out of business, that served turtle soup.
I find Asian cuisine to be fascinating. I probably mentioned that I worked for NEC for a while, but I never visited Japan, and then those folks hit our shores, they wanted everything American. They were good people I'll always be fond of.
I watched a YouTube video on good old boys who made turtle soup. It started with the hunt. The process was quite interesting. That being said, I've never had turtle soup.
I had an uncle who would make turtle soup from snapping turtles. He'd buy them from us for $10, $15 for a really big one. We could usually find snapping turtles along the banks of the Little River. I've never eaten turtle soup, though. The idea of it sounded gross to me at the time, and I guess it still does. It probably tastes just like chicken soup.
I get the impression that only snappers are used for soup. Perhaps they are the only turtles on our continent that are large enough to get a meal out of. The show I watched used a "turtle fishing" technique that was nothing more than a big baited hook and an empty plastic milk used as a bobber. They guys would toss these in the pond then come back the next day and pull them out. The cleaning process was interesting (and somewhat barbaric...moreso than dressing a deer) because the sympathetic nervous system continued on for at least 1/2 hour after death (by decapitation.)
Terrapin soup used to be popular and it was made from smaller turtles. They were so hunted that they nearly became extinct, so the commercial hunting/trapping is now illegal (I thinK) but there are some good ol' boys down south who were still catching them for personal use when I lived down there using a simple bucket trap.
You don't get a lot of meat off a turtle. I had turtle in Nassau once and there was precious little meat on the bones. It wasn't delicious enough to do it again, especially for the price of the meal.
From NPR: Terrapin soup used to be the "I'm so hungry I'll even eat this" food, being fed to slaves (as lobster was) and Confederate Soldiers. For reasons yet to be understood, in the mid 1800s, terrapin soup became a gourmet "thing," even being served in Jackson's White House. Terrapin Soup appeared in the household cookbooks of the day. They were hunted to near extinction, and then they were saved by Prohibition. Apparently all the high-end foods & soups of the day incorporated sherry or Madeira, the sale & consumption of which became illegal...so for 13 years those foods became unavailable. The combination of terrapin scarcity, the availabity/cost of illegal booze and the Great Depression drove the cost of the soup up to $100/serving (at today's prices) and off the menu. This gave our little shelled friends some breathing room until state-level protections could be put in place. Just to give a nod to NPR, their comeback continues to be hampered by man-made climate change and rising sea levels. (Now I gotta go wash my mouth out and research what happened to trilobites.) Attempts at raising them in farms have proven to be unsuccessful, and modern-day substitutes include alligator and farm-raised snapping turtle. As an aside, the article mentioned Chincoteague Island (Maryland) as being a source that used to ship 3,000-4,000 turtles to the rest of the nation per annum. It also mentioned Crisfield, MD (was The Crab Capital of the World) as a source. I spent many summers vacationing in that region from the early 60s to the 80s, and have been to Crisfield's annual Crab Festival (Miss Crustacean was hot.) In my many hundreds of hours at the campground's edge (and on Chincoteague and Assateague islands) fishing, playing, chasing horses, clamming and crabbing, I never once saw a terrapin.
Lobster were once thought to be "trash" as well and were fed principally to slaves, indentured, and convicts.