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Outdoors commentary: Waging war on bunker rats




Larry Woody bags a Vietnam bunker rat in 1969.Submitted

Larry Woody bags a Vietnam bunker rat in 1969.Submitted

Trapping nuisance critters in suburban neighborhoods has become a booming business, with animal-control specialists charging as much as $300 per removed raccoon.

It brings to mind how my Army buddies and I controlled our particular pests during a Southeast Asia vacation in 1969.

We called them bunker rats.

They were the size of tom cats, with long, scaley tails and fierce, yellow teeth. They infiltrated our infantry base camp, coming out at night to feast on C-ration leftovers and other GI goodies.

We could hear them squealing and scurrying in the dark as they fought over the scraps.

Occasionally one would scamper over our ponchos as we lay on the ground trying to catch a little shut-eye.

One member of our company was bitten on the hand and medevaced to a clinic for treatment against potential infection. We kidded him about getting a medal for repelling a rat attack.

But the rats were no joking matter. They were filthy and prone to carrying diseases, as did the rats that spread the bubonic plague, via the rats’ fleas, in the 12th century. An estimated 20 million people died across Europe of the rat-borne plague.

This is where the outdoors angle comes in:

Being a country boy, I knew how to trap. I could make a deadfall using three notched sticks to form a figure “4” on which a heavy rock was balanced.

The prong that extended beneath the rock was baited. When a critter poked its head underneath the rock to take the bait, it jiggled the trigger, and the weighted rock crashed down. Adios, critter.

I trapped possums and coons and an occasional skunk. The pelts of the varmints weren’t worth much, but the neighborhood chickens slept easier at night.

After graduating from college, the Army decided an English Lit major would make a great combat infantryman and shipped me off to Vietnam. There, in the boonies, I became our company’s designated rat-trapper.

I used boards weighted with sandbags and bamboo trigger sticks. I set two traps outside our bunker, baited with C-ration beanie weenies — a hungry rat will eat anything — and the first night I caught two.

I helped other squads make sets around their bunkers, and the rodent population declined. (I realize my PETA friends don’t approve, but they probably have never been gnawed by giant rats in the dark.)

Just as we were becoming rat-free, our company was moved to an even more remote base camp.

That’s where we were on patrol one steamy morning when we stumbled onto a giant boa constructor coiled and blocking the narrow jungle trail.

It was thicker than a fence post, with a head the size of a football. It studied us with cold yellow eyes, tongue flicking.

Since silence was imperative in the hostile territory, we couldn’t shoot the monster to get past. So our point man took his machete and —

But that’s another critter war story for another time.

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