The Tunnels of Cu Chi (19 page)

One benign explanation for the find may be that the guerrillas themselves, who often lived on rat meat, needed to know if they were eating plague-carrying rats. If, on the other hand, it had become widespread knowledge among the GIs that plague rats were being used by the Viet Cong in the tunnels, then tunnel-searching might well have become a considerably more laborious and slow process than it was already. Even though American and allied servicemen were all automatically injected against bubonic plague, a very careful watch was kept for its appearance, as the terrifying disease was prevalent throughout most of Vietnam.

Unfortunately, the recently declassified military correspondence relating to the strange story of the leashed rats is incomplete. There is evidence of considerable concern at the highest military levels in Saigon and Washington. Copies of the memoranda were sent directly to the officer commanding the U.S. Army Medical Research Command at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Inside the tunnels there were occasionally false walls, thinly plastered with clay, on the other side of which waited Viet Cong with bamboo spears. As a tunnel rat made his way slowly
forward, the VC would spy through a hole in the false wall and spear the victim. A similar fate awaited the unsuspecting GI who fell victim to a trap the Americans laconically christened “Sorry 'bout That.” This was a pit into which the victim fell. Next to it, and separated only by a thin clay-plaster wall, was another pit inside which a VC waited. The moment the GI fell, the VC would spear his hapless victim to death.

Booby traps and ambushes took a disproportionately high toll among infantrymen and remained a source of great anxiety to military tacticians in Vietnam. Throughout the war, booby traps were responsible for 11 percent of all American deaths, and 17 percent of all wounds. The mortality rate was kept down only by the superb American helicopter medical evacuation system.

Real damage was often caused by the high rate of wound infection. Major General Spurgeon Neel, former deputy surgeon-general to the U.S. Department of the Army, explained, “Massive contamination challenged the surgeon to choose between radical excision of potentially salvageable tissue and a more conservative approach which might leave a source of infection.” The vicious booby traps inside and just outside the tunnels generated sufficient fear among the ordinary grunts seriously to affect their military effectiveness. A high-tech infantry that usually fought only by day and was helicoptered out by night was not necessarily going to go out of its way to discover long tunnel complexes. Everyone knew about the booby traps … and what the grunt eye did not see on patrol, no officer's heart was going to grieve about.

In a revealing study conducted by Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, former commander of the II Field Force in Vietnam, it was shown that at least half the booby traps found by the 9th Division's GIs had been found by detonation—in other words, the men had set them off. Forty-six percent of the resultant casualties were multiple, caused by the bunching of the troops, who just did not know any better. In 1969, booby traps were the single most important casualty source in the 9th Division. When the 25th Infantry Division arrived at Cu Chi and discovered how serious a problem the tunnel booby-trap defenses were, they created a special school, called the Tunnels, Mines, and Booby-Traps School. It was run inside the perimeter using actual VC tunnels that had been dug under the division
HQ. At a more senior level, commanders of the 25th conducted elaborate booby-trap statistical analyses, a sort of sophisticated market research program; data was fed into their brand-new military computer, “thus giving them the capability to present and study the problem with minimum clerical effort,” noted the generals.

If the tunnels' outer defenses failed to deter, the next line of defense was the so-called spider hole. Spider holes were superbly camouflaged pits, dug to shoulder depth near each of the three tunnel entrances, and linked by short communications tunnels to the main tunnel. One, sometimes two, Viet Cong snipers stood, perfectly protected, and shot at intruders; when it became too dangerous to stay, they scuttled through the communication tunnel back into the main tunnel complex. No sophisticated detection or weapons system could easily or mechanically find, fix, and destroy the ubiquitous spider-hole sniper. He could be (and frequently was) mortared, shelled by artillery, napalmed, or besieged by tank. But the longer he fought, the more he fulfilled his primary function, which was to engage large numbers of the enemy and keep them busy, distracting them from the real prize, the tunnel complex over which he kept his lonely vigil.

The tunnels were not impregnable, but their strength, based on sound engineering principles, and their clever and exploitative defense systems gave them a military longevity far greater than they actually deserved. For a full five years they allowed the Communists to exercise effective control over the district of Cu Chi. The Americans and their ARVN colleagues held only a short lease above ground. The freehold belonged deep in the permanence of the earth.

   Animals

The animals and insects of the Vietnamese jungle quickly found the tunnels of Cu Chi to be a satisfactory environment. Many were already well adapted to the subterranean life; now the host, Man, left inviting traces upon which they could feed. Often they found themselves sharing the same space as the fighting men on both sides.

“The last tunnel I went into—I have this deathly fear of rats, and I crawled down, started going down the hole, and I could hear a noise and that alerted me to get the old adrenaline going. And the hole went down about six feet and then it turned to the left and opened into a room about four yards square, and I got to where I just saw the opening and I let the flashlight roll down ahead of me. So the flashlight is laying on the ground at the bottom of the hole, shining into the room, and at the opposite corner, I peeked round. In the corner was a rat up on its hind haunches, just baring its teeth. I swear this was the
biggest rat I've ever seen. Well, I just flipped out, I just completely flipped out. I was firing, yelling and screaming, and firing my .45, and people were pulling me out and I'm still firing and got up on the top, and like I say, I always have my explosive stuff right there at the top of the hole. I grabbed the ‘frag' and threw it down, and grabbed the concussion grenade and threw it down, and rolled away. I must have been a sight because I was petrified—I can't remember ever being that scared. That's when I gave it up. That was the last hole I ever went into. That damn rat, he made a believer out of me.”

“In the Cu Chi tunnels the VC used to take boxes of scorpions with a tripwire and that was a booby trap. You tripped the wire, the box would open, and the scorpions would come into the tunnel. One of my men got stung; he came out screaming and never went back in another tunnel. But scorpions don't kill you, plus we always had a medic on the surface.”

“In our area as in many others there is a specially fierce type of bee. They are more than twice as big as ordinary bees. They don't store honey, but their sting is terribly painful. We studied the habits of these bees very carefully, and trained them. They always have four sentries on duty and if these are disturbed or offended they call out the whole hive to attack whatever disturbs them. So we set up some of these hives in the trees alongside the road leading from an ARVN post to our village. We covered them over with sticky paper from which strings led to a bamboo trap we set on the road. The next time an enemy patrol came, they disturbed the trap and the paper was torn from the hive. The bees attacked immediately; the troops ran like mad buffalo and started falling into our spiked punji traps. They left carrying and dragging their wounded.

“From the post they must have radioed for help because the ARVN district chief sent a company by road from another post and more by helicopter. By that time we had set up quite a few hives. When the enemy came, they saw piles of dirt that looked like freshly dug traps so the officer ordered the troops to clear away the earth and uncover the traps. But the hives were hidden under the earth and there was a terrible commotion when the bees were disturbed in such a rough way. They attacked, hundreds of them, and in no time at all thirty enemy troops were out of action. They had to withdraw again. We were very encouraged by this and started to rear the bees specially for our defenses.”

“We used the hornets against the Americans for a while in 1966. Training them was a long process. When I asked one of my trainers about it, he told me it was possible to train the hornets because after a time they recognized the personal odor of the trainer and so they didn't attack him. The trainers used long poles to move the hornets' nests to the places where they foresaw the enemy troops would go through. The hornets were valuable. Western people not used to our climate got fever from their stings.”

“The thing that bothered me most was that damned centipede, but it was not a centipede. I don't know. I had to shoot it, whenever I saw it I used to shoot at it. It wasn't a snake, it had legs like a centipede. I used to shoot at them. It was over half a foot long. Kind of greeny color. I used to open up on those. I didn't want them close to me.”

“I got bitten by a centipede once. That sucker was probably a good eight inches long and I thought I was going to die—thought I was poisoned; my whole arm was numb. I crawled out of there and I was hollering for a medic. I thought, I'm going to die for sure.”

“They had this big hole and I had this weak flashlight, and I was checking to make sure there was no more booby traps or anything, and all of a sudden I felt like I was being watched. And I took my flashlight, it was very weak, and I turned to shine it on the wall and there were these two gigantic spiders. I think I was more scared of spiders down there than anything else. When you're face to face with them, this close to them, you know, close to the wall, they're pretty damn big. I remembered my bayonet, I took my bayonet and tried to stab them. I wasn't going to shoot them, you know. It was no good going bananas over two spiders, and then they went into the hole I was digging. And to hell with that. I just put the dirt back on the hole. I'd been digging because my detector showed there was metal down there, we'd already found some mortar shells. I didn't care what was in that hole after the spiders had gone in; whatever it was is still down there with the spiders.”

“… and one hole that seemed to be darker than any hole I'd ever been in and for a moment I thought I was losing my equilibrium because it seemed like the hole was moving in on me, and as I shined the light around more, I found out it was just a mass of spiders—just these spiders. The whole chamber, the walls and the top, were one great black moving mass of spiders. I'm sure they were there naturally. You know, they're
black spiders with a purplish or aqua blue spot on them, they're about as big as my thumbnail. They got on to me, too, and if they bit me I don't know, because I never got sick or anything.”

“Yeah, I remember when we went in a big tunnel, I went down in it and there weren't nothing down there. But the Vietnamese didn't bother me, I wasn't scared of them, cause I'd have shaped them [blown them up]. But the doggone snakes and spiders and stuff—went down this one and I bet you there was a million spiders in that thing, and they got all over my body, and I had to come out backwards, and I turned round and I was just covered with spiders, and they had to beat 'em off me. I'll never forget that, that's when I almost quit the tunnel rats. Spiders. And in a foreign country like that, I didn't know whether they were poisonous or not.”

“I seen some spiders down there you won't believe it. In fact I shot at them, the spiders as big as my hand. I just shot them. Bam.”

“We used insecticide in there, too, because of the huge fire ants. What we'd do if we encountered fire ants, they were on you before you'd know it, and we would simply pull out these little bottles of insecticide and stab it with our bayonet, just puncture it. They'd just blow up all over you, so you've got to get your mask on first, because it's a substance that would make you nauseous. Mind you, so did the fire ant. When we could get it, we'd use masking tape and we'd tape around our cuffs and close any entrance that we could, to keep these ants
from getting into our boots. Because when you're crawling along on your hands and knees, by the time you realize they are there, they're all over you, and they really bite flesh. The insecticide helped if you had it, but the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth were always vulnerable to fire ants.”