"Look! He's right there!" I said.

"Oh my God!" Maj. Baldwin said, laughing.

"I don't think he's caught. Maybe he's confused," I said.

"Maybe."

"How can I kill him? Maybe I can get him with my Ka-bar," I said and grabbed the knife from its scabbard on the wall.

"No, no, I wouldn't do that," Maj. Baldwin quickly said, wincing and turning away as I moved toward the rat. "You'll get rat blood all over your knife!" He cringed and looked back at the rat in the corner of his eye and over his shoulder. "Oh man," he groaned, backing away from me but still watching.

As I stepped toward the rat, it scurried off to the edge of the wooden floor where the floor meets the tent wall and disappeared underneath.

"Son of a bitch!" I said, gazing down into the dark, wide cavity I had never noticed before. It ran the whole length of the wooden floor and led to the underworld, or, at least, the world under our tent. "Nice to know the rats, and whatever else, have direct access right by my head at night," I added. The major just laughed. I gestured to the wooden walls and bookshelves I had made, and the pictures I had stapled to the plywood. "All this, this stuff, it's all an illusion to make us feel like we live in some interior space out here," I said, half jokingly. I shook my head and closed my eyes, exhaling forcefully out my nose before I went on. "These floors are built inside the tents once the tents are up. The damn thing's built on 2x4s so this whole thing sits on a cavity over the dirt."

"There's probably a whole fuckin' ecosystem under the tent, a goddamn biosphere," Maj. Baldwin joked and laughed.

"Exactly," I replied, finding slightly less humor in it than he seemed to. "Son of a bitch!" I repeated.

"There's probably friggin' camel spiders and everything right under here. Can you imagine if we tore this floor up?" Maj. Baldwin said.

"Ugh," I sighed.

This was not the first rat I had seen in our tent. They had, in the last several days, been scurrying around in my room at night, knocking things over and keeping me awake. I would flick the light by my bed on and off and watch the rats scatter off in a panic at the sight of me sitting up. I had caught one in a mousetrap last week and it felt wrong to throw him in the dumpster alive, but held by the trap, to die a suffering death. That seemed cruel, so I opted for a method of disposal I felt should be swift, a method the chaplain's assistant described later in the day as my "going caveman on his ass." Since then, the rats seemed to have stepped up their tempo of crawling around me in my sleep, presumably for psychological effect, perhaps in retaliation.

"It's time to bring the 'Nam down on these bastards," I had joked in my best Clint Eastwood-"Heartbreak Ridge" accent as I set up the traps all around the tent.

"What the hell is that, a secondary?!" asked Capt. Wilde, laughing and pointing to a mousetrap set up right next to a rat trap in the corner of the tent under a hanging bag of trash.

"Exactly. This is war," I replied, loading up another piece of sausage on a trap.

Capt. Wilde and Maj. Baldwin just laughed.