Five Stories – More Amusing Now Than They Were Then-A Rat
submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson
It was a cloudy, cool, and wet day with a ceiling offering very comfortable clearance below the clouds and above the ground. The Red Hats were operating east and south of Bong Son, a fairly large town in the II Corps Tactical Zone, some miles north of Qui Nhon. It was a beautiful area, heavily wooded, with karst-strewn mountains to the west. Large rivers flowed through it and emptied just a few miles away to the east at the bright coastal beaches of the South China Sea.
The start, taxi, takeoff, and climb out had gone smoothly. Then I saw, with speechless astonishment, a rat climbing across the top of my cockpit from one side to the other. After recovering from the unusual attitude I’d gotten myself into, I notified my TACP at Phu Cat of the situation. I asked them to call Red Marker Control back in Saigon and notify them, and ask them if they had any suggestions. If I had taken more time to think, I would have kept my mouth shut, but at the time, I just had to tell someone. You can guess what some of the suggestions were and then make up some of your own. Here are just a few:
• climb to altitude where the rat will die from lack of oxygen and then continue the mission!
• if I had any snacks on board, bait the rat and when the rat was near enough, grab it and sail it home out the window!
• do some zero G maneuvers, catch the rat when it floated by, and then chuck it out the window!
• do not, under any circumstance, try to shoot the rat!
I told the TACP to discontinue calling me with suggestions and I continued the mission. The rat didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother the rat.
After landing the always-capable crew chief had already procured a rat trap, baited it and set it up for operation. I never saw my friend the rat again. I loved those crew chiefs!