[ WP ] You 've single-handedly taken out an enemy platoon , dueled with an elite sniper , survived months behind enemy lines , and killed a grizzly with your bare hands . Now you face your toughest opponent yet : the crazy cat lady that lives next door .

The following is a true story from my days as a grad student at Texas A & M University in the 1970s. I lived just off campus, two blocks straight out the back door of the Dixie Chicken bar. Yeah, the one at North Gate with the rattlesnakes back by the pool tables. 
 
 Our old rental duplexes, 7 of them along both sides of 2nd Street, were built around the time of the Korean War, and were built to the standards acceptable to vets returning from Frozen Chosin for graduate studies - cinderblock walls, window AC units, linoleum floors. By the 1970s they were still as decrepit as shortly after opening, but instead of Korean War vets they were rented by guys coming back from Southeast Asia, Vietnam, land of rice paddies and infinite ammo for an AR-15. 
 
 One such veteran who lived there was a youth of 22 named Ted, studying for his PhD in Biology. 
 
 He was concerned that the crazy cat lady down the street, who fed the feral cats in the neighborhood in her front lawn, was causing real health risks to the community. He asked her to cease feeding the feral cats. She said no. He asked the city to stop her. They shrugged. He asked his neighbors to sign a petition. They went to class and suggested if he was so bothered by the cats he do something about it himself. 
 
 So at 9am on a quiet Sunday morning, while the crazy cat lady was at Church and everyone else on the block was asleep, Ted climbed up on the roof of his cinderblock duplex apartment, toting his AR-15, the one that had gotten him out of trouble so many times in Vietnam, the one that he claimed was lost on his last patrol, the one that came back home disassembled in several boxes shipped from the Da Nang PX. 
 
 And he shot cats for about twenty minutes. Then he collected all the cat corpses, bagged them up in plastic, and put them out for collection with the rest of the trash on Monday. 
 
 The city police eventually arrived, called by the crazy cat lady after she got home and noticed most of her cats were gone, and the officers asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. He told them he was legally shooting vermin - feral cats - in Bryan County, and told the police, quite correctly, that the city limits were one block away. 
 
 The police did n't know what to do, so they canvassed the neighborhood and asked residents if they felt threatened by Ted's actions. Nobody did. 
 
 One darling old Texas woman, who had lived on our block since the 1930s, whose sons had fought in WWII, whose grandsons fought in Vietnam and were Ted's age, was asked about the shooting by the police. She offered to buy Ted as much ammo as he needed to kill the rest of the crazy cat lady's cats. 
 
 True story.
