The Tunnels of Cu Chi (16 page)

Why did Thornton think tunnel specialists were needed? “At first we tried to put tunnel teams all over the division, and we had people getting zapped because they didn't have enough knowledge to go into a tunnel right.” None of his chemical platoon, he claimed, was “zapped” in the one year he spent in Vietnam on that assignment. But other infantrymen, volunteers or under orders, from ordinary line companies did die in tunnels, sometimes in horrible and bizarre ways; one Viet Cong technique was to slit a man's throat or garrotte him, as he came up through a connecting trapdoor. Thornton took only volunteers into his squad. If you had to order a man into a tunnel, he said, he would come straight out and say it was only ten or twelve feet long even if it was much longer. But even experienced volunteers could lose their self-possession underground, start panicking and screaming, and scramble back to the entrance, to be absolved of tunnel duties from then on.

“I didn't like my people to be down there too long,” recalled Colonel Al Hylton, who succeeded Herb Thornton as the Big Red One's chemical officer. “If they ever started panicking, as some of them did, I just said, ‘You get the hell out of there!' You could tell when they were panicking because they would
call up and say, ‘I can't go any farther; I got to get out of here.' I'd call up on the field telephone line. I had a sergeant on top at all times, and if communication ever broke we went down to see what had happened. They would come out; some of them had obviously been crying, and even though they were volunteers, I would not let them go back until they had some rest and came to me and said, ‘Colonel, I want to have a go again.' It's a job you can't force people to do. They volunteered because it was exciting, I suppose. They saw me, the old man, do it and figured if that old, gray man can do it, so can I! I never anticipated when I went to Vietnam as a chemical officer that I would be crawling around on my hands and knees underground.”

Dead or wounded tunnel rats were dragged out with communication wires or ropes, or by the fireman's crawl, in which the wounded man's tied hands were hooked around the neck of the crawling rescuer. No dead tunnel rat was left in a tunnel, but extricating bodies exposed other men to the same danger. Many, but not all, tunnel rats were small men, suited to the narrow entrances and constricting space; many were Hispanic—Puerto Rican or Mexican.

The efficient Viet Cong intelligence-gathering inside Di An base soon let them know of Captain Thornton's special tunnel duties; despite his junior rank, he was a marked man. Reward notices were posted by the Communists, calling for Thornton's death; there was a price on the tunnel specialist's head. He survived, however, to become the tunnel guru. In March 1966 he was assigned to instruct soldiers of the newly arrived Tropic Lightning Division at the tunnel school in their base at Cu Chi. In 1967, after Operation Cedar Falls, tunnel-rat duties in the Big Red One were transferred to the 1st Engineer Battalion. The chemical detachment by then had defoliation commitments, and the engineers had demolition expertise. In the years that followed, esprit among tunnel rats increased to the point that they had a special cloth badge made and an (unofficial) sleeve insignia. The badge showed a gray rodent holding a pistol and a flashlight, and had a motto in dog Latin:
Non Gratum Anus Rodentum
(Not worth a rat's ass).

The 1st Engineer rats worked in teams of about a dozen men under a lieutenant or NCO. One of them was a “Kit Carson scout,” a former Viet Cong who had defected to the South
Vietnamese government side, and who knew tunnels from first-hand experience. Junior officers of the Big Red One achieved distinction and decorations as tunnel rats. In the 25th (Tropic Lightning) Division, based just across the Saigon River in Cu Chi, the policy was not to allow officers to explore tunnels. In that division, each company had a volunteer tunnel rat, usually a private. He enjoyed some prestige among his peers, but no special status.

Tunnel rats volunteered for a variety of reasons—sometimes to make up for problematic lives back home, or to prove their manhood in truly testing conditions. Once their fear was conquered, and assuming they survived, some even came to like their work. They accepted the silent enclosure of a tunnel, where the Vietnam War was unavoidably reduced to the ultimate confrontation, single combat, one on one; for the rats, the light at the end of the tunnel was usually a VC with a candle. Colonel Thomas Ware of the 25th recalled one of his men: “There was one little pale-faced, pimply-skinned guy that'd go anyplace. I remember one time he was down there we heard a shot; we got him out and he was wounded. I'd go and visit him in hospital and he couldn't wait to get back. Next time I'd see him he'd be back in the tunnel again.” Major William Pelfrey, also of the 25th Infantry, commanded a West Virginian tunnel rat called Private Short.

“He was north of Cu Chi,” Pelfrey recalled, “and we'd run across a bunker complex. We blew it and opened up a hole and Short went down to check it out. He went in about thirty or forty feet and there's a trapdoor that led down to another level. He raised it and a booby trap went off and the tunnel caved in on him. He was buried, face down. We crawled down and tied ropes to his feet; we tried to drag him out, but couldn't. So we had to dig down from the top. He was about twelve feet down. It took us thirty minutes and was kinda frantic. When we could see his feet, they were wiggling. He was getting air because his hands were below his face. He was semiconscious when we got him out. He went to the hospital, but discharged himself. The hospital thought he'd gone AWOL, they sent military police looking for him; in fact he came straight back to his unit. His idea of R & R was to join me on patrol. You just couldn't keep that man out of the tunnels.”

They were a special breed with a special and awesome task
that set them apart from the rest of the grunts. Among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, only helicopter pilots and LRRPs (long-range reconnaissance teams) brushed with mortal danger so consistently or enjoyed such a reputation. The rats were professionals who did not hesitate to kill, loners who gained satisfaction from accepting a mission no other soldier would contemplate. Some were deeply aggressive men with dark and perplexing motives who found their true selves in the tunnels; others were well-balanced men who took on the job but were so scarred by the experience as to want to suppress it from their memories.

Harold Roper was a tunnel rat with the 25th Infantry in the early Vietnam days of 1966. “I felt more fear than I've ever come close to before or since,” he recalled. “The Viet Cong would take their dead after a battle and put them down in the tunnels; they didn't want us to count their dead because they knew we were big on body count. Finding them wasn't pleasant, but we'd killed them so it didn't matter. It was worse if they'd been down there for a week—it stunk! Everything rotted very quickly because of the humidity. I came across rotting bodies several times. It didn't revolt me. I was just an animal—we were all animals, we were dogs, we were snakes, we were dirt. We weren't human beings—human beings don't do the things we did. I was a killer rat with poisoned teeth. I was trained to kill and I killed. Looking back, it's unreal. Unnatural. It's almost like someone else did it. It wasn't really me, because I wouldn't even think of doing anything close to that again.”

Roper was seriously wounded by a mine, hospitalized, and repatriated. He was to suffer years of nightmares. Like many of the tunnel rats, he could not bring himself to talk about his experiences for nearly ten years. The collective experience of tunnel warfare was nearly lost. Only now have some of the rats been willing to recall, often painfully, what they had to do.

   Not Worth a Rat's Ass

The tunnel rat was to stand proud and isolated within the ranks of the best-equipped army in the world. Not for him the standard infantryman's equipment of steel helmet, full combat dress, flak jacket, lightweight jungle boots, full webbing, water bottle, M-1 or M-16 automatic rifle and spare ammunition bandolier. To the contrary, the tunnel rat soon discovered that the less he took into the sweaty darkness, the better his chances of survival. The more they tried to arm him, the more he was to realize that neither firepower, personal armor, or newfangled high technology would ever give him an advantage over his invisible enemy.

After Operation Crimp, as tunnel rat volunteers began to step forward, experience soon showed that the knife, the pistol, and the flashlight were to be the basic tools for combat and survival inside the tunnels of Cu Chi. Indeed, the very reverse of high-tech weapons development took place within the tiny ranks of the tunnel rats. They had to relearn the whole business of carefully planned face-to-face combat, one on one, as they called it, without fire support, and without weapons superiority. The rats were to become obsessive about the most minute details of their equipment, lauding one pistol over another, one knife
edge over another. They rediscovered the satisfaction of old-fashioned unarmed combat, where individual strength, guts, and cunning counted for much more than massive air and artillery support.

Every rat carried a flashlight, and carried it in a special way to avoid being a nicely lit target. If the flashlight was dropped and the bulb smashed, then panic could easily follow, so they learned how to change a bulb in pitch darkness by touch alone, and they learned how to do it quickly, and how to do it squatting, kneeling, or lying prone.

The only weapon the tunnel rats ever agreed about was the army's standard-issue Colt .45. No one wanted it, and very few used it. It was too big, too cumbersome, and too loud. Choosing your own pistol was a tunnel rat privilege and each sought the weapon he felt comfortable with. They disagreed about silencers. Some would not fire a pistol without one because of the deafening roar of the shot; others wouldn't use a silencer because the added barrel length made a quick draw awkward and hindered maneuverability within the tunnel confines—and indeed, there were times when they deliberately wished to advertise their presence in order that the VC be frightened out of the tunnel. Not many tunnel rats actively sought and welcomed tunnel combat, surely one of the most terrifying encounters imaginable.

PFC Harold Roper simply bought a Smith & Wesson .38 from a helicopter pilot for twenty-five dollars and used that, together with a shotgun, where appropriate. The larger pellet scatter of the shotgun made it potentially a more accurate tunnel weapon, although not necessarily as lethal as a pistol. Master Sergeant Flo Rivera appropriated his own German Luger and managed to arrange official issue of a four-gauge riot shotgun—“real handy that four-gauge, the noise blew your eardrums out but if there was anything at all in front of you, you hit it.” Staff Sergeant Gilbert Lindsay, a Japanese-American, carried his own .38 but once in the tunnel he always carried it in the left hand. “I had this thing if the guy was going to cut my hand off—if I had this struggle with Charlie and if he had a knife and he cut my hand off—I'd still have my good hand to write with, wipe my ass, you know, do something. The idea of losing my right arm was like losing my friend, I was petrified.” Major Randy Ellis, who led one of the tunnel rat squads in the Big
Red One, also favored an unsilenced Smith & Wesson .38 but was worried about its lack of firepower in the face of the VCs' AK-47. So he acquired an M-2 carbine with a “paratrooper” stock, which folded up to about twenty-two inches in length. This weapon was nicknamed the cannon, and if Ellis led a tunnel rat squad down a hole, the number-three rat always carried it. If the point man (lead man) suspected there was a VC ahead, he would call for the cannon. Sergeant Bernard Justen rejected a specially silenced .38 with a unique light-source sniper-scope, in favor of his own simple .25 Beretta. If the rats ever took a rifle below ground, it was a captured AK-47; the intention was to confuse the VC with its distinctive sound.

Despite the rats' satisfaction with the old-fashioned martial skills newly learned, their unit commanders constantly yearned for new technological solutions to problems that needed the application of common sense rather than silicon chips. In the event, home-based scientists were only too happy to produce new weapons systems, many of which turned out to be useless.

In 1962, the Limited Warfare Laboratory (known as LWL) was established in Maryland to develop counter insurgency hardware in a crash program to meet the army's operational requirements in a limited war. By 1967, nine out of ten of its projects were oriented toward the Vietnam battlefield. Some of its inventions proved useful: an effective leech repellent; foliage-penetrating radars; a 1,100-calorie meal in a ten-ounce packet. But many of its efforts directed toward tunnel fighting, while well-intentioned, were risible flops.

On 7 August 1966, after considerable research into the perceived demands of a new kind of war inside tunnels, LWL created and shipped to both the 1st and 25th division a Tunnel Exploration Kit for practical testing. It comprised three items: first, in place of the ubiquitous old-fashioned flashlight, or torch, there was now a revolutionary headlamp, specially mounted on a new kind of fatigue cap. In order to leave the hands free, a mouth-operated switch was supplied. You bit the light on and off. Second, the kit held a communications system with a sensitive “bone conductor microphone,” worn on the bone at the
back
of the head, or strapped round the throat. Reception would be through an earpiece; necessary trailing wires would be secured through the pistol belt to a wire reel.
Third, there was a .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel complete with silencer and a tiny high-intensity aiming light. The kit came complete with ear plugs to be inserted when the weapon was fired.