How to Convince Rats to Move Their AO
by Dan King
The rat killing contest was sometime in ‘69. The contest came about by accident of several circumstances coming together at the same time. There was an old bunker next to the S-1 hooch. It was a nasty old, above ground bunker, allegedly left over from 27th Marines. If it were raining mortars, you would not go in this bunker. If you were a rat, it was paradise. The S-1 hooch was a good house with a hard floor, electric lights and roof didn’t leak (walls did sometimes). At night the rats would leave their AO and come into our house. This wasn’t so terrible, just annoying to hear their little rat feet scurrying about in the darkness. Of course if you had any pogeybait stashed, you shared with the rats. Our breaking point was when the rats starting running the rafters overhead. If they had been any good at, it still wouldn’t have bugged anybody. They were not good at it. Once or twice a night, you would awaken to the sound of rat claws desperately trying to hold on to a rafter 10 feet in the air. If you slept through the scratching, you would be waken by 1) a loud thump of a cat-sized rat crashing to a plywood floor; or 2) the sound of a Marine shouting "oh F**K" as a cat-sized rat landed on some body part. Any loud noise in the dead of night was generally considered to be a bad thing.
We tried individually and as a group to penalize the rats for this intrusion of sleep. Sleep was and is one of the finest, purest entertainment forms. One night we set an ambush, walling off three sides of an area and putting a cake in the middle. We kneeled around the walled off area, armed with machetes, sticks and one had a jerry can for smashing. Soon the rats came, the shout went up, the lookout flicked on the lights and the melee began. Many blows struck, no rats killed or injured. Before this defeat, we didn’t like the rats, now we hated them.
Coincidentally with our rat situation developing, pamphlets were being distributed to the Vietnamese saying that RVN rats were clean. This was kind of a big deal, since before that rats were though to carry fleas that carried plague, so it was ok to kill them, but don’t touch them. Rats were a problem because they ate rice and other people food, but now it was ok to kill them and dispose of properly. In the pamphlet, it mentioned that live capture cages could be obtained at a military base near you. We went to the BAS, described our rat problem and asked about the cages. They said sure and gave us a couple. The next day we had two live rats in these little chicken wire cages. The rats in the cages were not treated well. There was poking and shaking and much verbal recrimination. Somewhere along the line, a contest was proposed.
The first death consisted of a rat still in his cage sitting in a puddle, with one wire attached to it, the other wire was tapped on the metal cage. The other end of the wire was plugged into a standard socket. With each tap of the wire, the rat would jump about, splashing inside the cage in the puddle. Eventually the wire was left attached and he ended up electrocuted.
Around dusk, I took my cage directly outside the door to the bunker. I shouted in the door to wake up any sleeping rats. I doused it with lighter fluid, lit him and opened the door. He started screaming his rat screams right away. He ran straight about 15 meters to the BN LZ, started across for another 10 meters, then ended up running in smaller and smaller circles until he stopped forever.
(Side note. We never saw another rat in the S-1 hooch after that. The rest apparently decided that they were better places to live).
I’m not particularly proud of what I did and wouldn’t do it again. I think another one got smashed with a jerry can and a couple of more that I don’t remember. When went to the BAS to report on the contest. They seemed unimpressed. The did mention that they had one and were killing it. They had it in a standard bucket with the bottom of the bucket having about a quarter inch of water in it. The sides of the bucket were to steep for the rat to climb out of. When we asked how they were going to kill it, but they wouldn’t say. On subsequent visits that day, they still wouldn’t talk, but there was a little more water in the bucket. By the second day, it was clear that they intended to drown it. The rat now had to stand up to stay above the water. By the end of the third day, when the rat was bouncing on one foot to get his nose above the water, he finally had to give up.
While we already had deep respect and admiration for corpsmen and the job they do. This contest drove home the point that these were people that you should not piss off. The rats weren’t even bugging them, they just took up the challenge.
