RATS

                                                        Rats

     Rats are as much a part of war as young men and rifles and mud, black marketeers and prostitutes. The biggest rat I ever saw was one that charged in broad daylight. This was at Chu Lai, when we were stationed on the outer perimeter of the 1st Marine Division CP. Across the road from us was a unit called Force Logistics Support Unit, which we called FLUSh. We ate in their mess tent. One day at noon a couple dozen of us were headed for chow, fanned out over a large area that had been covered with heavy gravel ‑ stones an inch and a half across ‑ to help control the mud. There was a commotion up ahead. It was coming our way. Rifles came unslung, but there was no shooting. Must be guys fighting for a place in the chow line, I thought. Then enough men had jumped to the side so we could see. It was a rat, a huge gray mangy rat dragging its long dirty pink tail, running a straight line, audibly kicking up the rocks, swerving for no one, just running in full daylight. I watched at least a dozen armed Marines jump out of its way, mess gear clattering. It came straight at me. I jumped too. There were too many people around for us to shoot, though we all wanted to in the worst way. The rat ran through us and kept going. Since then it’s been my favorite example of the limits of power: one rat scatters a sizeable group of armed Marines and nobody can do a thing.

     The second biggest rat I ever saw, I had a better chance at. We were at that same perimeter position at Chu Lai. We lived in 12‑man tents with slatted shipping pallets for a floor to keep our cots up off the mud. The rats loved the pallets, of course. Rat condominiums. One night I was asleep in our tent when a rat the size of, say, a small gray squirrel landed out of the sky squarely on my chest. Then, as I yelped and jerked myself awake, it scurried off. What I remember most is the feeling of that tail, that groty piece of barely animate, hairless meat, dragging itself across my belly.

     It was getting late in my hitch. I had shuddered violently so many times at having rats crawl on or near me that I wanted revenge, I wanted it badly, and I wanted it to be as nasty and as deadly as possible for as many rats as possible. I had fantasies about killing rats, hundreds of rats ‑ no, make it thousands. I would shoot them with my rifle. Each 7.62mm bullet, big enough for hunting deer or elk or bear, would slam into a rat and dismember it and splatter pieces of it violently about. Better, a machine gun, a colony of rats, that's it, a whole swarming gray and black sea of them with pink tails writhing like mutant worms, my beloved M60 running warm and smooth, shooting long bursts into them, now and then a frag grenade, a shot of flame thrower, yeah, YEAH! white phosphorus, fricassee them fuckers, then back to the machine gun, just hosing them down, killing rats, killing, killing, killing rats.

     I had Sergeant of the Guard duty one night, which meant that I had to stay awake all night in the Conex box, the steel shipping container we used for a guard shack. We had a pyramidal tent pitched adjoining the Conex, with the usual shipping‑pallet floor. I had to check the sentries every hour or so, and call over to the Officer of the Day, but still had a lot of time on my hands. I read a lot, but late in the night that carried the danger of falling asleep.

     I would ambush the rat.

     One particular rat had made the guard shack its territory. It was about the size of a full‑grown domestic rabbit, and I had seen it up close enough to see the stringy black hair falling off its dirty gray hide in patches, like a dog with a bad case of mange. It dragged that ugly tail behind it like a pickup drags a forgotten tow chain.

     I truly hated this rat. It was so insolent. As usual, we couldn't shoot, because we might hit our own people or equipment, and because a shot, especially at night, was recognized as a sign that the perimeter had been probed. You got in deep trouble for sending a false signal. This rat seemed to know it could do pretty much what it wanted, right in the midst of all these armed men, with impunity. And it had a way of moving that was like a pickup load of teenage boys flipping you the bird. It would come in, scratch around, knock things over like a drunk, and when you charged at it, cursing and throwing things, it had this perfect timing: it would wait until the last possible instant, then, with an air of Gee-what-a-nuisance, it would amble out of reach just ahead of the descending shovel, or 2x4, or rock. Sometimes you even managed to hit it with something. Didn't seem to matter.

     I needed to drop the half‑measures. I needed to carefully plan and execute, yeah, that was it, I would execute this rat. Assassinate the fucker. Impale its filthy carcass on a stick in the sun to rot and stink and scare away the other rats. Fuck. They'd probably just eat it.

     The rat came every night, usually in the wee hours when things were quietest. Time was on my side. I had all night to set it up, to make it work. Besides, it would keep me awake. I waited till after midnight, when I got the two new sentries posted. The guys I'd relieved trooped off to their tent to sleep.

     Now. The bayonet. Now. Let's see. The rat usually comes in the far corner of the tent, and searches through that pile of stuff we've got stacked along the far tent flap, for C‑rations it can chew open and eat.

     I needed a place for me, a place for the rat, a set distance between: not too close, not too far. My place would be here, just inside the open door of the Conex. I would leave the light on in the tent, but switch off the one behind me in the Conex. The rat would be in the light; I would be in the dark.

     I picked out a target area. It had a couple of advantages. It was a place the rat usually went anyway, and its distance from my chair in the opening to the Conex was about the average distance to any point in the tent. Distance was the key. I carried in an extra pallet and leaned it against the stack of C‑ration cartons, and found a scrap of thick plywood a couple of feet square and leaned it against the pallet, and took out my pen and inked a solid black dot on the plywood.

     I went back to my chair and adjusted its position and angle so that four legs were solidly placed on the steel floor, and when I sat in it facing out into the tent I could see, and throw at, the whole area without shifting any part of my body.

     I practiced for over an hour, starting with easy throws.

     At first the bayonet would hit at odd angles and clatter off across the pallets. If it hit the plywood with the point too low and the handle then banging the plywood above the ink dot, I knew it had turned too fast. I'd make the next throw with my grip slid farther up the blade. If the point hit high, I'd slide my grip down. It came back, the endless afternoons of childhood mumblypeg, of throwing Eb Hogue's old hunting knife at the tree in our yard in Grants Pass. After more than an hour of throwing and retrieving the bayonet, I was getting good penetration of the plywood, sticking it more times than not, and hitting pretty close to the ink dot.

     Ambush time.

     I cleared away my target, opened a packet of C‑ration crackers, and put them down on the pallet in its place, being careful that the distance between a rat eating those crackers and my chair was exactly the same distance at which I had been practicing.

     I sat down to wait, with the bayonet's handle resting on my shoulder, blade cradled lightly and lovingly in my right hand. I sat like that for over an hour, with no movement but breathing and blinking. Then: there it was, the impudent clunk and scrape. A rat was coming to call, and not just any rat, but my favorite rat, my enemy, the big mangy arrogant one.

     I smiled and waited. The rat jostled around in our gear, digging and scraping and chewing. Once, within hearing but still out of sight, it climbed something and slipped and fell with a sodden thump and a pig-like grunt, then picked itself up and continued foraging. Its head came out of the pile, turned, looked at the crackers. Whiskers twitched as it sniffed. It came out of a space between C‑ration cartons, turned toward the crackers.

     Distance was good; the target was broadside to me. But it wasn't the angle at which I'd been practicing. Wait.

     The rat took its time, even raised up and looked around. Crackers in plain sight, hm, suspicious. But its myopic eyes couldn't see me, ten feet away in the dark. It started its slow, impudent waddle across the pallets, stopped at the crackers, began to chew.

     I raised my hand with the bayonet, held this past hour at just the right grip for this distance. I raised it very slowly, so the rat would see no motion. I threw, the bayonet flowing out of my body the way Eb Hogue's knife had flowed out of my boy's body ten or twelve years before. The bayonet parted the stringy hairs under the rat's belly and stuck, quivering, in a slat of the pallet the rat was standing on. The force and manner of the bayonet's arrival had lifted the whole rat into the air. It hung there, draped over the blade like a sack of rotten meat, four legs flailing. Then it managed to tip forward and grab the pallet with its front feet. It was the only time I had ever seen that rat make a quick, frightened movement. But now it moved in pure panic, its front feet trying to pull its weight over the bayonet, its rear haunches clawing the air, trying to find something to climb on.

     All this took only a couple of seconds, during which time the one flaw in my perfectly planned ambush showed itself: I didn't have a backup weapon. I looked around desperately... nothing!

     The rat finally pulled its weight far enough forward to get a rear foot up on the blade of the bayonet and heave itself over. Boots! Stomp him!... I lunged out of the Conex, crossed the pallets in two jumps just as the rat scurried out of sight.

     "Scramble, motherfucker!" I yelled. Fuck! Missed him!

     But, for once in the history of that rat's insults to our dignity and sanity, I had made it know fear, and that felt good.