Sticks and Stones

                                        Sticks and Stones

                              A Short Story by Frank Sperry

         My Grandfather was in the Army during the Korean War but he didn’t fight the North Koreans. He fought bugs. He never told me too much about that War except that he said those mosquitoes and other bugs sent a lot of soldiers to the Army hospital. His job was to kill the mosquitoes before they could bite a soldier and drink his blood like a tiny vampire.
         He didn’t just fight little bugs. Sometimes he had to kill rats. I had a hard time seeing a picture in my head of my Grandfather killing anyone, even a dirty, little rat. It reminded me of a movie I saw once about James Cagney where he killed a guy because he said he was a dirty, little rat. It wasn’t that rats would bite you, but they carried around tiny little fleas on their back and when the fleas got hungry they would jump off and bite someone just like a mosquito.
         I asked my Grandfather if the Army gave them the poison they used to get rid of the rats. He said they didn’t use poison. They used sticks and stones. I didn’t understand that at all so he told me the rat story.
         He said a lot of soldiers in Korea didn’t sleep in big tents, like they show in the movies. It was too cold even though they called it South Korea. They lived in these big metal houses they called huts. They were curved like the buildings at the airport where the planes stayed when the pilots were at their houses. He said they called them Quonset huts.
         The Quonset huts were built on wooden floors to keep the mud out. The rats must have been cold too, cause they lived underneath the wooden floors. You could tell the rats lived under the floor because around the edges there were rat holes they used to get in and out. It must have been like a lot of small rat tunnels like streets where they ran back and forth.
         Here’s where the tricky part came in. My Grandfather got some good Koreans who worked at the Army Camp to plug up most of the holes around the edge of the hut with stones. They left only two holes open near the front of the hut. Then my Grandfather backed his jeep up to one of the open holes. Then he hooked up one end of a hose to the pipe at the back of the jeep. Then he put the other end of the hose into one of the open holes and raced the motor of the jeep.
         He got about five Koreans to stand in front of the other open hole. Each of them had a broomstick held over their head and waited until the rats came running out of the only open hole.
         The good Koreans yelled like madmen as each of the rats came running out and they bopped each of them on the head with a broomstick, as if they were North Korean rats that had invaded their country.
         When my Grandfather told me the rat story I could tell by the look on his face that even though he knew the rats had to be killed, it was not one of the things he was happy to remember