Last Updated on May 23, 2026 by admin
Tan Son Nhut Air Base, January of 1968.
The Marine corporal who found him was twenty years old, from a small town in central Pennsylvania, and had been in-country for four months. The cat — black with a single white sock on his right hind paw — walked out from under the chapel building during a mortar attack and sat on the corporal’s boots until the boots stopped moving.
The corporal named him Bandit, for reasons nobody can now remember, and Bandit lived with the unit in a converted supply shed for the rest of the corporal’s tour.
There was no formal way to bring a cat home from Vietnam in 1968.
There were ways.
Bandit traveled the last leg in an olive-drab ammunition box with a hole punched in the side, packed with C-ration cans. He flew Tan Son Nhut → Yokota → Travis → Philadelphia in roughly four days. He weighed three pounds and was, at no point, officially declared.
The corporal’s mother, when the corporal walked into the kitchen of the small Pennsylvania house in March of 1968, opened the box and said the only thing she said about Bandit for years.
“Oh,” she said. “There you are.”
Bandit lived in that kitchen for eleven years. He died in 1979 of normal old-cat reasons. He is buried under the lilac bush in the side yard.
The corporal is seventy-eight now. He still talks about Bandit on Memorial Day.
He says the cat was the one who came home in one piece.
There is a photograph in the family album of the corporal in his dress blues, on the day he came back from his second tour two years later. He has one hand on his wife’s shoulder. He has the other hand on a small black cat with a white sock, who is sitting on the arm of the kitchen chair, watching the camera. The cat looks like he has always been there.
Most of the photograph is the cat.