Rats

Rats become the unwilling subjects of a series of violent films made by Corporal Lockhart and Private First Class Jeffries in their cramped quarters across the base. The episode follows the narrator’s first-person witness of one recording and the soldiers’ accounts of others, turning animals that are abundant around the building into a ready supply for repeated cruelty.

Captured and Made into Subjects

Lockhart and Jeffries are assigned as the company arms-room orderlies. Both are described as particularly slight, and they spend much of their time listening to My Chemical Romance and complaining about Lockhart’s wife. They also devise a way to catch Rats and make what the narrator calls snuff movies. The rodents’ presence in the building ensures that the pair do not run out of subjects; the violence is not a single outburst but an activity they can return to.

The Recorded Killing

The narrator has seen one of the films. A Rat is placed inside an empty ammunition box. A small white hand, which the narrator supposes belongs to Lockhart, enters the frame holding a container of Zippo lighter fluid and soaks the animal. The hand withdraws, then returns with a lighter and sets the Rat on fire. It runs in panic as a small ball of flame, stops abruptly, dies, and falls over. The camera’s restricted view makes the sequence brutally plain: a box, a hand, fuel, flame, and the animal’s sudden death.

Repetition and Human Context

The pair describe further films in which Rats are drowned, dismembered, decapitated with a cigar cutter, or crucified on a Popsicle stick and disembowelled. They treat these acts as evidence of their own cleverness, even discussing the separate methods as if cataloguing a collection. That repeated, matter-of-fact relish sharpens the contrast between the animals’ terror and the makers’ self-satisfaction.

The episode also connects Lockhart’s treatment of Rats to the account of his marriage. While he is away in Iraq, his wife grows emotionally distant, parties, works as a dancer, sleeps with a man named Dale, and spends Lockhart’s money; she gives him more detail than he might be expected to want. The narrator sees a vindictive edge in her disclosures, but also relates her conduct to Lockhart’s own cruelty, describing him as the sort of man who spends his time crucifying mice. The comparison does not make the human and animal experiences equivalent; it places Lockhart’s private grievance beside the violence he chooses to inflict on creatures with no power to answer him.