The Tunnels of Cu Chi (17 page)

Touched by such thoughtful concern for their welfare, the tunnel rats gingerly and suspiciously began to test the kit in combat conditions. Things went wrong from the outset. The headlamp bite switch didn't work properly; the lamp itself, which was firmly fixed to the fatigue cap, soon slid down over the rat's eyes because it constantly rubbed against the tunnel roof. Slipping was worse when the unfortunate rat began to sweat—which was inevitable the moment he entered the tunnel. The earpiece in the communications system was soon found to have the disadvantage of not staying snugly inside the ear but falling out, while the trailing wires snagged along the tunnel floor or round curves.

The specially adapted .38 was a total disaster. With silencer and aiming light mounted, it was far too large and awkward; the aiming light was either ineffective or useless because it was diffused and overpowered by the larger and stronger miner's lamp (unless it had tipped forward). The .38 silencer turned out to be ineffective, and even the gun's holster was too large and bulky for tunnel use. The Tunnel Exploration Kit was gratefully returned to the LWL, never to be seen again. One part of it, however—the communications kit—did make a brief and equally ill-fated reappearance three years later. A radiotelephone especially made for use in the tunnels was invented. Its rather grand name was TELACS (Tunnel Explorer, Locator & Communications System). A 1st Division tunnel rat squad was ordered to test and evaluate the complex system, which was intended not only to allow speech between those in the tunnels and those waiting outside, but also to facilitate electronic tracking of the rats as they crawled through.

Very quickly the rats discovered that the transmission system distorted the voice too much for anyone to comprehend it and the tracking mode system was too time-consuming for safety; then they discovered something the manufacturers might have thought of before they even embarked on the project—the kit was too bulky to take through the tunnel trapdoors.

Lieutenant Colonel James Bushong, who as a captain was chemical officer of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Division in March
1966, was scathing about the kit. “The communications set was unsatisfactory; you had all that wire dragging along behind you. Besides, one of the things the bad guys liked to use a whole lot to make their booby traps with was our commo wire, and if you're in the dark, one piece of commo wire felt like another. We found using a human chain for communications far more efficient, and psychologically a little bit brighter.

“Then they came up with the miner's lamp. Wonderful as long as you were down there by yourself. If you were down there with someone else who was intent upon doing you harm, then keeping a spotlight for him to aim at on your skull may not exactly give you an advantage.”

A full two years later, in July 1969, the Limited War Laboratory invented a new piece of equipment for the tunnel rat (or Tunnel Exploration Personnel, as it called them): a silent handgun, capable of “engaging fleeting targets without aimed fire.” They came up with a “balanced, compact, six-shot, cylinder-loaded exposed hammer, selective double-action, modified Smith & Wesson .44 magnum revolver, weighing 38 ounces.” It fired a special 15-pellet bullet with a shot pattern similar to that of a shotgun, but with smoke and flash virtually eliminated. Called the Tunnel Weapon, it deserved a better fate than it received, but by 1969, tunnel rat combat had become so refined that even the introduction of a potentially helpful new pistol did not interest the ultraconservative rats.

From the very beginning, the two demonstrators flown to Vietnam by LWL to sell the weapon knew they would have a hard time convincing the rats that the weapon was truly lethal. They were right. Rats who used it in combat liked its size enormously. It allowed them to reach quickly round tunnel corners and fire without themselves exposing more than a hand and an arm. It sounded like a cap gun when it went off (which was good)—but it did not always kill (which was not so good). In fact there were several times when it did not even incapacitate an enemy soldier after he was hit. The riot shotguns that some rats used always maimed, at least. There was also a dangerously high misfire rate with the ammunition.

According to the demonstrators, the differing tunnel rat techniques used by the 1st and the 25th also confused the tests. In the Big Red One, rats would often fire three rounds into the entrance of a tunnel, and around each sharp turn. A similar
sequence was used when they found trapdoors or false walls. The 25th, on the other hand, tended to hurl grenades, mines, and gas into tunnel entrances “to discourage the enemy from firing on exploration personnel.” The truth is that these rat techniques were not standard at all. By 1969 tunnel warfare had matured, and tunnel destruction was generally avoided until weapons, documents, and occasionally VC themselves could be brought out. In fact, the .44 magnum did not get much of a run from the rats, who were already impatient with all the false technological breakthroughs that LWL had shipped over. The Tunnel Weapon went the way of the Tunnel Exploration Kit, although there is a curious addendum to this story.

According to Richard Keogh, who was the 1st Division's ammunition officer, LWL did solve the ordnance problem and actually came up with some new, highly potent ammunition for the snubnosed .44. “It was a multiple bullet with four segments to increase the kill range,” he recalled. “It didn't make a nice hole; in fact it just tore holes inside you. It was very good at a short distance. The barrel of the .44 was shortened to three inches and a sling swivel added. They only manufactured about seventy-five of these guns; they were in use for six months, and then suddenly they were withdrawn.” It is likely that the new lethal and silent “segments” bullet that replaced the less effective 15-pellet bullet contravened the Geneva Convention on “allowable” weaponry.

The killing power of the hand weapons had become of great significance to the tunnel rats as they realized that nothing ever seemed to induce the VC to surrender in the tunnels. Major Ellis recalls that his squad were issued bullhorns to be used to talk VC out of the tunnel. “We figured that was a lot less risky than going in there. But in no instance were we ever able to talk anybody out of the tunnel. So eventually it became my concern that when we met a man in the tunnels, we would have to be absolutely sure that we killed him. Wounding a VC just didn't help. A couple of fellows showed up one day with this new .44 magnum. It had a stainless steel little shell, that kind of had little holes round the back of it. It was gas-propelled. It shot pellets and had a range of about twenty feet. They showed them to us and we fired at silhouettes above the ground, but it wasn't a killing gun.”

Over at the 25th, Master Sergeant Robert Baer, an experienced
tunnel rat, also found that the tunnel VC simply refused to surrender, even when obviously trapped away from any secret tunnel exit route. He devised one way of flushing them out into the open, by simply throwing smoke grenades or trip flares into the tunnels, which burned up all the available oxygen and sometimes led to reluctant surrender. But more often than not the VC preferred suicide to capture.

In May 1969, Baer was led to a shallow tunnel by a captured NVA nurse. There were two other NVA nurses and one Communist soldier in the hole. Baer's Kit Carson scout tried talking them out. Conversation was easy between the ground and such a small tunnel shelter. Baer's squad of eleven waited out of gunshot line near the hole. For nearly half an hour the Kit Carson scout tried and failed to get the three to surrender. Finally, Baer ordered an attack with fragmentation grenades. After the final warning had been given the three in the tunnel, Baer heard one single pistol shot. They threw grenades into the hole. When it was over and the bodies were taken out, they discovered that the two women had shot their own comrade in the back and used his body in a vain attempt to protect themselves from the grenades.

But it was the knife or bayonet rather than the pistol that became the tunnel rat's best friend. A weapon as old as war itself returned to fashion in the darkness, where feel, touch, and strong nerves determined whether you lived or died. The knife was used as a probe or as a silent killing instrument. Booby traps had to be felt for in the pitch darkness by delicately prodding the floor, sides, or roof of the tunnel in what became an instinctive search for tiny telltale wires, or for tree roots that somehow just didn't feel right. In blackness—only as loud as the mosquitoes—that sensitized the ears close to aural perfection, the tunnel rat usually moved with grotesque slowness, each new inch holding the threat of sudden detonation, that last and terrible flash before death. There was more than just an element of perverse satisfaction, even excitement, at meeting a challenge with such grim rules and such awful codes. The isolation in those endless black holes was often welcome. Many rats refused to take communications equipment; many who took it didn't use it. What was there to say and what was there worth hearing from the ground, when every faint rustle below needed instant interpretation and reaction?

Lieutenant Jack Flowers was typically contemptuous of all the attempts made to maintain tunnel-ground links. “Nothing ever worked,” he said. “We used verbal communication between us when necessary. When there was contact, the man involved would fire shots. More than three shots and we knew he was in trouble. If six were fired we knew it was real trouble because there'd be no time to reload.” Sergeant Arnold Gutierrez used his communications set, but not for speech. He developed a “click-talk” by which he switched his set on, once, twice, or more, in accordance with a prearranged code by which very basic information was transmitted to the ground. Sometimes he blew or gently whistled into his set, but he abhorred speech and allowed no two-way communication.

But the lack of communications did create a new hazard. Capless, covered in earth and sweat, usually shirtless, small, and sometimes Hispanic or Oriental-looking, the tunnel rat who suddenly popped out of an as-yet-unmapped tunnel hole could find himself quickly targeted by his own side! Sergeant Gilbert Lindsay was a classic example. “I kept telling the squad who waited up on the ground, ‘Look, when I come up my hair's gonna be all dirty, I'm gonna be looking like Charlie,' and they said, ‘Don't worry, Larry, we'll be up there waiting for you.' Well, once while I'm down there digging up stuff, the whole bit, it's chow time for them. So what did they do? They leave the fuckin' hole, sit down, and eat their C-rations. So along come brand new people from another unit. I start coming up and I shout ‘Okay, I'm coming up,' no big deal. Okay. All of a sudden I come up, and pop my head out, and I look around and I see nothing but M-16s pointing at my skull and a lot of unfriendly faces looking down the M-16s. And all of a sudden your heart's beating, and you have to smile and shout, ‘Hey, I'm like you, I'm American.' And they still ain't smiling, and I tell them who won the World Series in 1962 and who was the President of the USA, and all that shit. And then they start laughing, and I ain't laughing anymore.”

In the early days of tunnel exploration, attempts were made to map the system, but it would have been easier to chart sandhills in the Sahara. Staff Sergeant Bernard Justen took compasses down below, but even with those he still soon lost all sense of direction. Harold Roper worked a little more scientifically. He would leave two of his squad on top, one with
the walkie-talkie and one with a compass and pen. Roper himself had a walkie-talkie transmitter in the tunnel, and he kept the transmitter button permanently taped down so he could always talk into it. He had a compass and a pistol and simply maintained a running commentary on the compass bearings as he crawled through the tunnel. “It was like being in water, twisting and turning with your eyes closed. You completely lost your sense of direction.”

“We tried the compass/radio system; we didn't know what we were doing,” confessed Major Herb Thornton. “We always went in pairs; one did point and checked for mines and booby traps, the other talked into the radio, used his compass and tried to tell them above what the tunnel map was like. And they were up there, carefully trying to plot it all on a map board, and trying to tie it up with other holes found previously. We couldn't tell if we'd gone ten meters or ten miles after a while.”

Ultimately, the tunnel rat's best piece of equipment was a body tuned to near perfection, where every part was guaranteed. The successful rat had to volunteer to go down and stay down and take risks that were unmatched by anything he would ever meet above ground. Even if he was small by American standards, he had to negotiate bends in the communication tunnels that would only just let a slim Vietnamese through. He had to conquer an instinctive tendency to hyperventilate and he had to remember that victory could be achieved only if he came to terms with his own fear. His fingertips and ears became to him what a walking stick is to a blind man. After a while, he could “smell” the enemy ahead, not just through odor but by sensing him, like a bat, that other creature of darkness that employs primitive sonar to avoid or detect objects at night. Major Jack Pryor forbade his tunnel rats to smoke, chew gum, or eat candy because it not only made them detectable but also impaired their ability to sense the enemy.

But it was Arnold Gutierrez who best expressed what really happened to the professional rat in those tense and lonely tunnels. “I could smell the Viet Cong, really, I could smell Charlie. It wasn't just his body sweat or the urine. There were times when I could hear the breathing, real quiet; you could hear a person breathe, and I'd know he was in there, and I didn't go any farther. I just said to myself: In this dark corner of a tunnel
is where the animal belongs, a rodent belongs. I'm becoming like a rodent, but still I don't belong. Yes, I could smell Charlie. And he knew me. The type of cologne I used, the aftershave—that's when we stopped using it altogether. But there was more than that. There was the scent that told you there was somebody in the tunnels. We became so tuned up after a while that when the other person would flick an eyelid up or down, you really knew he was there, in the corner, not even hiding anymore. Just sitting and waiting. They were the ones you never killed. You just backed out and told them up above the tunnel was cold.”