The Tunnels of Cu Chi (35 page)

A foot above Flowers's glistening and grimy face, the trapdoor was quietly turned round and slotted back into its frame. Flowers froze; the gook was right there. Suddenly the door moved again. Something dropped into Flowers's lap, right in front of his eyes. He watched it fall, momentarily transfixed; then the danger to his life overwhelmed him as he screamed “Grenade!”

The American M-26 grenade has a steel casing over a coil of pressed steel. The coil is designed to burst into over seven hundred pieces, and the case into chunks of shrapnel. It is fatal at up to five meters. It is detonated when the pin is pulled that releases a handle igniting the fuse. The acid fuse burns for five to seven seconds before the detonator sets off the pound of high explosive.

In his nightmares for years afterward, Jack Flowers saw that grenade falling as a series of still frames in a slowed-up reel of film, dropping jerkily, hypnotically …

Flowers did not know how far he had crawled when the explosion ripped through the tunnel. There was a tremendous ringing in his ears and his legs were bleeding, but he was still crawling. Batman too was moving away when Flowers reached him. He shone his lamp on Flowers's torn and bloody fatigues. Flowers was suddenly preoccupied about having dropped his pistol. Batman advised him to forget it and keep moving. Another explosion rocked the tunnel. The NVA soldier was trying to make sure that the tunnel rats were dead, even pursuing them. Flowers blindly scrambled back through the different levels. When at last he saw daylight, and reached for the hands of the men above, he collapsed. When he came round, medics were taking shrapnel out of wounds in his legs. Colonel George Patton III was standing over him.

The exit to the tunnel was under one of Patton's tanks; the NVA had been trapped. But Flowers decided against further pursuit. Tiep, the Hoi Chanh, tried to talk the NVA soldiers out, without success. Charges were set at each tunnel entrance timed to go off simultaneously and cave in the whole structure. Batman, like Flowers, already had a ruptured eardrum from the earlier grenade explosions. As the dust-off helicopter took them off to hospital, the tunnel collapsed; the enemy was smothered
to death. Next day Colonel Patton ordered the bodies to be dug up for the body count.

Flowers recalled his thoughts in the hospital bed. “If it had been John Wayne, he would have picked up the grenade, lifted up the trapdoor, and thrown it back at the bastards. If it had been Audie Murphy, he would have thrown his body over the grenade to save Batman's life, and his mother would have received his posthumous Medal of Honor. But since it was Jack Flowers, I started crawling like hell.” In fact, both men received the Bronze Star (V) from the division's commanding general. For all his self-preservation instinct, Flowers had been blooded underground. At last he was Batman's equal.

Within a few weeks, early in April, Flowers and the tunnel rats were back in the Iron Triangle, this time training a platoon of ARVN engineers in the science of tunnel exploration and demolition; Vietnamization had begun. The ARVN used TNT to destroy tunnels; it was more bulky and less sophisticated than the C4 plastic explosive used by the Americans. On the second day out, an old but recently renovated tunnel was discovered and Flowers decided it would be an ideal training location for his South Vietnamese counterparts. The TNT charges were lowered into the access shaft and stacked at the tunnel opening. Batman was contemptuous of the ARVN: “These goddam little monkeys will never make tunnel rats.”

Flowers descended the access shaft to supervise the demolition; there were notches in the sides for knees and elbows. Tiep, the Kit Carson scout, was supervising the ARVN soldiers carrying the TNT from the stack into the tunnel. Flowers looked up at the circle of sky. An ARVN soldier was looking down, carrying a box of detonating caps that were needed for the charges. At that moment there was a tremendous explosion above ground, and the next thing Flowers saw was a shower of thin silver cylinders falling down on him. He covered his head. He was sitting on fifty pounds of TNT.

Detonating caps can easily explode, and careless soldiers over the years have lost fingers and eyesight from accidents with them. They are never carried in the same pack as explosives. A cap dropped onto concrete will explode, as will a cap squeezed in a vice. And a cap will set off any other explosive material nearby. Flowers was sitting on high explosive with a box of them scattered around him. “Batman!” he screamed.
Then he ordered the terrified Tiep and the ARVN soldiers to retreat down the tunnel and send for a tunnel rat called Morton who was up ahead. Batman appeared at the top. It seemed that the Viet Cong had fired a rocket into an ARVN APC, and there was a firefight going on above ground. But Flowers dared not move. Morton appeared from the tunnel and, wide-eyed, gingerly began to pick up the caps. Batman meanwhile had found the ARVN soldier who had dropped them. It had been a brand-new box of fifty; seven were still in the box. That left forty-three. Morton was carefully picking up as many caps as he could see. Thirty-two. Flowers had still not moved. Then Morton shifted the sticks of TNT that were free of Flowers's weight. He found three more caps; five were unaccounted for. Batman looked down and decided to string a rope round Flowers to pull him up. That way Morton could move the rest of the TNT. A rope was lowered. Slowly Flowers was hoisted clear of the explosive. A cap fell from his lap and Morton quickly picked it up. As Flowers reached a standing position, three more caps were revealed. That just left one. Batman continued pulling Flowers up to the surface. As he neared the top, Batman stopped: “Son of a bitch!” He reached down and Flowers felt his hand on his head. The last of the detonating caps was lodged in Flowers's bush hat.

Flowers was to lose Morton's services. Some weeks later, they were exploring a tunnel system in the “Catcher's Mitt,” a VC base area east of Lai Khe shaped like a baseball glove. Morton, going point, reached a trapdoor leading upward and went through it. Then he let out a piercing scream. Denny Morton was from Cleveland, Ohio. He was nineteen years old and had joined the army on his eighteenth birthday. He had volunteered for Vietnam, and for the tunnel rats. He was only five feet four, slender and wiry—the ideal size for a rat. He had already received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart; now he would receive another.

After the scream, the next thing Flowers heard was three shots, followed by Batman calling him. When Flowers reached the trapdoor, Batman was standing in it. Morton was rolling on the tunnel floor, his hands covering his face. Blood was flowing freely through his fingers. “The son-of-a-bitch knifed him,” said Batman. “I think he got it in the eye.” Batman was shooting as Flowers began working Morton back down the
tunnel. Morton moaned as they hauled him along, a few feet at a time. He was unconscious when they got him out. His face was covered with coagulated blood and dirt. There was a great gash starting at his hairline and running across the bridge of his nose, down through his left cheek. Flowers couldn't tell whether Morton still had his right eye when the dust-off helicopter ferried him away.

Fifteen May 1969 was Sergeant Robert Batten's DEROS—date of estimated return from overseas. He was not allowed to extend, or take another tour. He wanted to carry on killing gooks, but the decision was taken at division level to send him home. He had been wounded four times, and twice was the normal limit. Flowers sat drinking with Batman for some hours a few days before the sergeant left Vietnam. Batman delivered his verdict on the lieutenant. Flowers had been determined to emulate the sergeant's toughness and courage. Batman was not deceived; he made a scornful prediction. “You're not a killer, Six, and that's your problem. You're pretty good, the best Six I ever had, but you'll fuck up somewhere. Charlie hasn't killed a rat for quite a time. And you'll either let him get you, or what's worse, you'll get yourself.”

Flowers heard that Batman left the army when his final request to return to Vietnam was turned down; he returned to New Jersey to work on construction sites. The new sergeant was Peter Schultz. He was a good NCO and demolitions man, but solidly built and over six feet tall—the wrong physique for a rat. He was reliant on Flowers's tunnel knowledge. Without Batman, Flowers was exposed; it was as if he had lost his right arm, the ultimate source of tunnel wisdom and know-how. Increased work and responsibility weighed upon Flowers. He led mission after mission, but fatigue began to infect him, and with it, fear. In one tunnel the enemy set off a large mine that completely buried him. It took Sergeant Schultz five minutes to dig him out, unconscious.

The end came in late July 1969. Flowers and the rats were on a mission in the Iron Triangle that discovered a Viet Cong base camp in the course of construction, with woven baskets and long bamboo poles to hoist the earth from the tunnels. The rats explored a succession of holes into which Viet Cong or NVA had run to hide when the 1st/4th Cavalry had arrived in the area. All proved to be cold. At length only one hole remained.
And all the soldiers in the tunnel rat squad knew that at least one enemy had to be down there. Flowers realized that every member of the squad had been down a tunnel that day except him. Sergeant Schultz offered to take one of the Kit Carson scouts and explore the last hole. But Flowers knew that as the officer in charge, he had to take the most dangerous job himself. As usual, a grenade was dropped down the shaft first, but all the rats were aware that this was little more than a noisy warning gesture. The Viet Cong had years of experience ducking round corners in tunnels to avoid the very limited range of a grenade.

The hole was about fifteen feet deep and curved away to one side at the bottom. Flowers knew that it was not connected to any of the other holes, so if his theory was right, the Viet Cong had to be down there, waiting for him. He sent for a Swiss seat, a cradle of straps in which he could be lowered into a hole. The two strongest men would pay out the rope to lower Flowers to a point three feet from the bottom, then at a signal suddenly drop him, to surprise the waiting Viet Cong. It could take thirty seconds to get down. Flowers assessed the situation coolly: The only question to be answered was survival at the other end. It would be a confrontation that he had long anticipated. The rest of his squad looked at him grimly. As Flowers went over the side of the hole, the two Kit Carson scouts were almost tearful, the newer tunnel rats appalled by the ordeal. Schultz offered the lieutenant a second pistol. Flowers declined it, but ordered that it be ready loaded to drop down to him. If they heard anything other than his pistol firing, they were to pull him up.

Flowers began his suspended descent. Fear gripped him, the fear that knows no ranks and possesses every young man who faces the reality that his life might be stolen from him in a few, fleeting seconds. As Lieutenant Flowers thought back over his life, the image of Batman kept reappearing to him, saying, “You'll fuck up, you'll fuck up.” His feet and elbows rubbed against the sides of the shaft, dislodging clods of earth that would tell the Viet Cong below that he was coming down. Flowers pictured the enemy down there on his knees, leaning against the side of the tunnel with his AK-47 set on full automatic fire. In an aperture about four feet in diameter it would be hard to miss. Twenty rounds would cut through Flowers in
four seconds. So Flowers knew that the first shot from his pistol would have to kill the VC. He would aim straight at the VC's face; a shot to the body would not disable him enough to prevent him firing the AK-47. Flowers swung sideways, with his left arm over his chest and his right shoulder hunched to protect his temple, to minimize the wounds he was bound to take. He was three feet from the tunnel floor. He signaled to Schultz to release the rope. The moment had come.

Flowers hit the floor with his pistol firing; the first shot went through the VC's forehead, the second his cheek, the third his throat, the fourth, fifth and sixth pounded into his body. Blood racing to his brain, Flowers kept pulling the trigger, clicking on the empty chambers of his revolver. Schultz heard the firing and instantly hurled the loaded pistol down to his Rat Six. The gun clattered down the shaft.

Cordite smoke lingered in the dank tunnel air.

Flowers stared dumbly in front of him, disbelieving what his mind had created. There was no enemy soldier there, no adversary with a rifle, just a blank wall with six holes neatly grouped in the earth. Six. And the time-honored law of the tunnel rats said no more than three. Sergeant Schultz and the others peered down at their leader. The Rat Six had faced his enemy. Somewhere inside Flowers's head, Batman laughed.

Two days later at Lai Khe the battalion's executive officer relieved Flowers of his tunnel rat command, and told him to go home. “Don't make me tell you what you already know. You're finished. You've fought your war. Stay out of sight for three weeks, then forget all about Vietnam and the tunnel rats.”

After they had pulled Flowers out of the hole and had been told there was nobody down there, nothing was said—but they all knew. Flowers's own strict rules would have to be applied to him as ruthlessly as to any other tunnel rat. Sergeant Schultz had gone to the executive officer and told him what had happened: The men's confidence in their leader was shaken; he might be a danger to them. The tunnel rats were sent out on a mission and Flowers was not told about it till they had gone. For the sake of their morale he was quickly shipped out of Lai Khe to Di An, where he was drunk for a week; then to Bien Hoa and home. He had just vanished; there were no farewells, no handovers.

In 1984, in the penthouse restaurant of the Philadelphia
skyscraper where he worked as a stockbroker, Jack Flowers ruminated on the end of his war. “Rat Six was dead. He died in some tunnel in the Iron Triangle. Batman had been right. Charlie didn't get me; I'd gotten myself.”

   Vo Thi Mo—The Girl Guerrilla