I don't know how it all started, but I got the rat traps from the supply sgt. I think we were having a contest to see who could catch the most rats. Quite a few of us had rat traps and after catching a few we realized that as big as the rat traps were, they still were not big enough to kill the rats so we needed another way of killing them.

 I remember thinking it would be really neat to take them to my arms room and drown them in the barrels of JP4  (jet fuel for cleaning guns). Then someone came up with the idea of burning them. After my experience on guard duty with the rat clinging to the guy's chest (see RatAttack story), I was afraid of the rats so I couldn't figure out how to get them to the barrel to drown them with JP4. At that point someone must have come up with the idea to use lighter fluid.

So we doused them with lighter fluid and you had to do that before you pulled the rattrap spring back. One guy would light the rat while the other would pull back the trap to release the rat.

We did this quite a few times, but you had to do it at night to get the full effect. We determined there were three types of rats. Wobbling spiral rats would go in circles and spiral into the center, the "hop and tumble" rats would take off and tumble, and there were distance rats - the ones that had been caught by the tail and weren't really wounded, would go a long, long way.

Finally, one night one of the distance rats ran into a hooch, not mine fortunately, but it ran into the hooch and set it on fire. It wasn't a big fire, I think a bunch of guys just stomped it out. I chatted with a guy on e-mail about it who said it was his hooch and he wasn't very happy about it. I think his name was Bruce Vining but I'm not sure. Somehow none of us got in any trouble over it but that was the last time we did it.

I don't remember who won our rat catching contest, we were having so much fun lighting them on fire, I think we forgot about that part.

I read George French's story about the rat races that occurred before I was there. I wish we had thought of that.

Dave Hughes
213th A.S.H.C.
1969-April 1970
dhughes505@kc.rr.com