by C. Roberts
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Of all the hazards of being in Vietnam, it was the rats that posed the greatest threat. They were huge, and they were everywhere. We left them plenty of scraps, but apparently not enough to feed the population, because they started coming after us, at night, in base camp. Doc’s special concern was the diseases they carried, but we just didn’t like the feel of them running over our bodies at night.
So Doc organized the Great Rat Hunt, a contest to see who could kill the most rats (carcuses required for proof). For prizes, he wangled 3-day passes for in-country R & R. Being naturally competetive, enjoying the thrill of the hunt, hating rats, and knowing that rats were much easier to find than the VC, we all joined the contest with great enthusiasm. Except Johnson, who had taken the rat bite personally and was out to get revenge, not R & R.
Firken, our basic entry level grunt, would sit on a barrel against one wall of the bunker, M-16 across his knees, gazing intently into corners. After three days, he had a body count of 6 (shell casings of 12 dozen). His buddy Garcia placed C-4 explosive in strategic paths but the damn rats wouldn’t detonate it.
Stanley, a huge hulk of a man from Oregon, began sleeping during the day and staying up all night, squatting in perfect silence, grabbing rats as they scurried past him and breaking their little necks. He was awfully good at it; never got bitten and had 12 carcuses after three nights, the appointed time for the hunt.
I am a coward, I confess; I set little box traps like Elmer Fudd does for Bugs Bunny, boxes propped open with sticks, with a tasty bit of cheese inside. The ugly fat bastards would knock down the stick getting into the box, the box would fall on top of them, and they would flex their bodies and shake the box right off. I had a zero body count.
Johnson didn’t try to be clever. He had a baseball bat and went out to the garbage dump and just clubbed away, about as vicious a display as I ever want to see. He didn’t collect the carcuses, thought they might be a deterent if he left them where the other rats could see.
Martin, an engineering major/college dropout, was the winner. He spent a couple of hours scheming and drawing elaborate plans, collecting materials including a barrel, some planks of bamboo, string, grease and a couple of C-rations. Then, under our curious eyes, he set his trap. First he greased the sides of the barrel from about halfway down from the top. Then he filled the barrel about 3/4 full of water. Carefully, he laid planks from the ground to the top of the barrel. At the end of the plank over the top of the barrel he attached a string that hung down towards the water, but ended a good foot above the water. He then covered the top of the barrel with part of a poncho liner, stretching it taut but leaving about a third of the top uncovered. In rapt attention we watched as he ran his fingers up the plank, over the water, down the string, and into the barrel. Satisfied, he took a C-ration (peaches, I believe, meaning he made a tremendous sacrifice in the interest of killing rats) and rubbed some of the contents on the upper ends of the board, along the string, and then dumped the rest of the C-rat into the water. He then sat casually on an tree stump about 10 meters away, tipped his boonie hat down over his eyes, and watched. We watched too, from our various perches nearby.
At least an hour of stillness passed before any action was noted; one particularly nasty looking rat approached the plank, nose twitching furiously. Pausing, looking around, listening, he finally proceeded up the plank, down the string, and into the water. After a mouthful of peaches, he tried to leave. The sides of the barrel were greased; he couldn’t get up them. He tried the string but it was too high, and he couldn’t jump. Sputtering rat obscenities, he swam furiously about until he was exhausted; then he drowned. Meanwhile, another greedy rat had climbed the plank; he experienced the same fate. And then another, and another. After a few hours we helped Martin refresh the bait. Later still we fished out bodies so more could die. At the end of the three days, Martin’s total was 65 rats--the undisputed winner and scoring so far beyond the rest of us, he got ALL the R & Rs, but we didn’t begrudge him a bit. He really had earned them. And we kept his trap going for as long as we were in base camp.
After that, the nights got back to normal, with periodic mortar attacks not particularly targeted at us, with various squads of us going out on night patrol, and with our far less successful efforts to hunt the enemy. Doc later got a commendation for his good work in signficantly lowering the rat population at the camp, and was invited to share his Contest concept with other medics throughout Vietnam. Firken, the basic grunt, stepped on a buried Claymore one night; I guess the jungle rats found the pieces we didn’t. Martin survived his tour, and I hope he went back to college; he was too smart to quit. Johnson, who was indirectly responsible for the contest in the first place, was targeted by a sniper late one afternoon. Sniper won. We lost.
Later, when Johnson’s body was bagged, Doc considered tagging it with “Remains Unviewable” so the family wouldn’t be upset by the partly eaten ear, but then he decided that the family would probably be focused on the hole in his head than the missing piece of ear. And that was Johnson’s contribution to the War in Vietnam.
The True Story of the .45
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