The Tunnels of Cu Chi (38 page)

By 1969, as far as the Big Red One was concerned, tunnel rat strategy had been honed down to a sharp edge. The old days of on-the-job training and the vagaries of combat experience were giving way to organization and professionalism. There was real divisional enthusiasm and support for the tunnel rats of the engineer battalion that had taken over responsibility for the job from the original chemical detachment.

At the Cu Chi base of the 25th Infantry Division, tunnel rats were less organized. They were still drawn from the infantry platoons who could be expected to discover tunnels, or from the 65th Engineer Battalion, who had a broader responsibility for destroying the Viet Cong tunnels. Their approach included the use of Rome plows (used extensively during the Cedar Falls operation) to tear up the earth above tunnel complexes, a tactic that lacked the finesse of the small, mobile, and trained tunnel rat squad. The 25th Infantry's Operation Kole Kole, which ran from May until December of 1967, found 577 tunnels, but the copious after-action reports scarcely mention tunnel rats. Unlike the Big Red One, farther north across the Saigon River at Lai Khe, the 25th Infantry did not give priority to detecting and destroying the tunnels. General Fred
Weyand, who commanded the division when it first arrived, did not feel unduly concerned about their existence. “They were there, they'd always been used by these people to protect themselves and to move about, but I never viewed them as anything that was a major threat to the division.… there was no way that you could seal them all up. I suppose if you sealed them up, why, they could dig them out again.”

This relaxed view of the military importance of the tunnels was simply not shared by the 1st Infantry Division commanders. Consequently, they formalized the tunnel rat squads, officially christened them, allowed them their own flash and motto, and subtly encouraged the military elitism that went with tunnel-ratting.

Following Jack Flowers's enforced departure from the leadership of the squad, Lieutenant Randolph Ellis became the new Rat Six, and with him came a new team. He commanded Alpha squad, and Lieutenant Jerry Sinn, a fresh-faced, fair-haired arrival in-country, took charge of Bravo squad. The entire tunnel rat section comprised thirteen men, all volunteers, all men who had undergone considerable psychological and physical examination before their applications for the job were accepted. Ellis and Sinn were to develop differing techniques, but the broad management of the “Dirty Thirteen” was coordinated. (In the 25th Division, as a rule, officers did not go down tunnels.) Although individuality was encouraged, Ellis and Sinn ran tight units and each, using basic textbook disciplinary techniques, earned the admiration and respect of their men. The days of the Flowers-Batman “jock” confrontation were over. There were men just as mean as Batman on the squads—Cubanborn Sergeant Pete Rejo was one—but officer authority was never to be so blatantly challenged again.

In fact by 1969 a discernible rat breed had begun to emerge. Each man was wholly individual yet subsumed his individuality by recognizing and working with a team. Many of the qualities found in Britain's Special Air Service or the U.S. Special Forces were evident in the kind of man who volunteered to become a tunnel rat. Physically they were all slim. They were men who could live off the land, taking only enough to stay alive. They tended to reject most of the earthy pleasures available to men in war, especially the Vietnam War. They abhorred drugs, were not obsessed with sex, and did not gamble. Most spoke a
foreign language, read copiously, and sought solitude rather than the entertainments of the NCOs' or enlisted men's clubs. They were dangerous men: to the enemy, to barroom loudmouths, to battalion bullies who might be tempted to take advantage of their lack of height. In action they found their way to where it was most dangerous and complex. If there was battlefield indiscipline, it was because of their impatience with officers they considered stupid or uninvolved. This kind of maverick is not unusual in any fighting force—many of the dust-off helicopter pilots in Vietnam were similar—but he is not just the product of the environment of war. Men like that are born, and the shrewd recruiting officer knows how to spot and exploit them.

Lieutenant Randy Ellis knew precisely what kind of man he wanted in his squad. If there were recruiting errors, and there were, draconian use was made of Article 15: Any conviction under military law, no matter how minor the offense, meant instant dismissal from the squad. His tunnel rat procedure followed several basic and rigid rules. No fewer than three men ever entered a tunnel; a full tunnel exploration team was never less than five men, and was usually six. Two men always remained at a tunnel entrance, either to pass supplies forward or help pull a rat in trouble out as quickly as possible. The point man (it was usually Pete Rejo) was never less than five yards ahead of the next rat, so that if he was killed by a grenade, the second man would survive. If the rats came to a Y junction in the tunnel, one man stayed there to help monitor the progress of the others in case they started going round in circles, or in case a VC was luring them into a trap. To deal with the high death rate faced when going through trapdoors, where possible the door was dynamited. Grenades were used only in emergencies, because they destroyed so much oxygen in the tunnel. Even the tricky business of exiting a tunnel by a hitherto undiscovered ground-level trapdoor and risking being shot by one of your own men was solved. All tunnel rats were given red flashlights (in the certain knowledge the VC did not have them) and on emerging, rats would first raise the torch and signal before putting their heads out.

All the Dirty Thirteen maintained their strong contempt for the inventions of military science and stuck faithfully to the basic rat gear: pistol, common wire, bayonet or knife, and
flashlight. No gadgets or “miracle” machines were ever adopted.

Randy Ellis's standard operating procedure was to take his squad into each tunnel in a “softly, softly” operation designed to catch as many Viet Cong as might be there. It was a tactic that invited the most dangerous response from an angry, frightened, and desperate guerrilla, trapped by surprise in his own hole. That's precisely what happened on the day Ellis earned his Bronze Star (V).

On 2 February 1970, Alpha squad was ordered into what was undoubtedly a hot hole at the edge of the Michelin rubber plantation. Ellis was the number-three man, Private Virgil Franklin was point, and the NCO in charge, Sergeant Cox, was second. An infantry battalion from the 1st had been dropped in an air-mobile insertion; there had been a firefight in the area and Charlie had, as ever, vanished. Ellis was shown the most likely tunnel entrance. Silently, and according to all the agreed procedures, the three rats slipped into the shaft. Ellis's rules were that no one man in the chain should ever be out of sight of the other, even when crawling through the tightest communication tunnels or turning the sharpest bends. Franklin vanished for an instant as he turned to the right, and just as Ellis began worrying about it, the tunnel erupted with the cacophony of an AK-47, and a stream of green tracers burned, like grotesque fireflies, into the clay above and just ahead of Ellis's left shoulder. Ellis heard Franklin's pistol fire every round—he counted each one—and knew his point man was in serious trouble. Cox crawled the five yards to Franklin, who lay seriously wounded in the stomach, right arm, and shoulder. Ellis had instinctively already passed a fresh .38 magazine to Cox to give to Franklin, but the GI was too badly wounded to move.

Slowly and painfully Cox and Ellis pulled the wounded soldier back. They had less than a hundred feet to go before they were safely at the shaft. Ellis then broke the rules, and after Franklin had been medevaced out, returned alone into the tunnel, crawled to the pool of blood where Franklin had been hit, and lobbed two grenades into the darkness before returning to the tunnel entrance. It was perhaps a foolish and unnecessary action—a conventional ingredient of heroism, after all. But his attempt to drive out, singlehandedly, the guerrillas in the tunnels ended as light fell in the later afternoon. It was of course
the
golden rule that tunnel fighting had to stop with
darkness. It would have been impossible to guarantee the capture or death of an enemy flushed up after dark, or to emerge safely from the trapdoors oneself. As he left the tunnel entrance, Ellis sprinkled copious quantities of standard-issue foot powder at the mouth of the shaft and just inside at the bottom. On his return at first light the next day, he would need to know if the Viet Cong had been back to booby-trap the entrance for him. But although the carpet of powder had remained undisturbed, the next morning proved to be a final frustration. Clearly the VC guerrillas had escaped. For his coolness under fire, and his success in evacuating his wounded comrade, Ellis received the Bronze Star (V).

Lieutenant Jerry Sinn's Bravo rat squad had a man of different caliber as leader. More an engineer by temperament than an infantryman (he would command the 1st Engineer Battalion fifteen years later), Sinn believed that tunnel-ratting had tunnel-destruction as its sole aim. Not for him the stealthy entrance, the chance encounter with a cornered VC, the sudden grab of a cache of documents of arms. While following the same basic tunnel rat rules as his friend and comrade Randy Ellis, Jerry Sinn did not believe in stealthy reconnaissance. He believed in giving Charlie ample time to get out before the rats went in. “Any time I moved through a trapdoor or changed locations, I'd run that lantern up there, and stick my pistol up there and fire. And I kept thinking, my mission is to gather as much intelligence as possible and destroy the tunnel complex and to deny its use to the enemy. You're not talking to a hero.”

So under Sinn, Bravo squad had no tunnel firefights, took no casualties below ground. But the inquisitive young officer did study, very carefully, the effects of gas and explosives on the tunnels, and was largely responsible for refining the C-4 explosive charges to the point where they did the maximum (but still quite insufficient) damage to the tunnel walls and overburden.

Taken together, this was the most fertile period for the Big Red One's tunnel rats and it is doubtful if under the circumstances they could have done very much more to interdict the tunnels. Techniques, equipment, SOP, and personnel were about right. Under the strict but enthusiastic command of both officers, there emerged an extraordinarily brave and ruthless squad of rats. It was, for example, inevitable that Randy Ellis would
pick Staff Sergeant Pete Rejo as his NCO and senior point man. Rejo was a killer of Communists who worked with the kind of quiet and controlled vengeance that any tunnel rat officer longed to harness. Rejo had been around a year before Ellis joined, working as a sort of human mine detector in the Big Red One's area in War Zones C and D. A lanky five-foot-eleven Cuban, he had spent his early teens in Havana, taking pot shots at Castro's men and developing an active dislike for Communism. While most supporters of the dictator Batista were tactfully buying themselves a one-way passage to Florida, the young Rejo took his father's .38 and fired at the bearded revolutionaries. He was lucky to escape with his life then, even luckier when he had gone mine-detecting up Vietnam's Highway 13 in 1968. It was Rejo, his taut cadaverous face never moving a muscle, who first discovered the mines, discovered the grenade booby traps beneath them, and finally discovered the Viet Cong were making homemade jobs out of captured American ordnance.

On three separate occasions Pete Rejo heard the sound of certain death as he stepped on a mine, sprung it—and, incredibly, it did not go off. The handful who have heard the click of a booby-trapped device and lived to talk about it can rarely find words to describe the moment after the sharp metallic announcement of doom. On each occasion that it happened to Rejo, he examined the mine and found it in working order. His comrades used to call him the human probe, and after a time the gibe took on real form. He smelled mines. Even if his squad went over a suspected area time and time again and swore blind it was clean, if Pete Rejo smelled a mine, a mine there was, and he would personally dig it out.

Whatever impulses drove Rejo to mine-detecting soon drove him to become a tunnel rat. He was to spend three years in Vietnam, like many of the rats, three times as long as necessary. What kept him there, and in the tunnels, was that sense of obscene excitement that all men can find in the pit of their souls, but few care to examine. Unlike Ellis, his officer in charge, who wanted prisoners and documents and tunnels destroyed; and unlike Sinn, who wanted to get it all over with, Staff Sergeant Pete Rejo wanted to kill Communists in tunnels. He would try to rationalize it any way he liked. It was part of the eternal fight against Communism, it was for the flag, it was a blow for democracy in Vietnam, Asia, the free world.
It showed his buddies how American he really was, and how efficient the GI could be. The truth is, he needed the juices to flow. For at the climax of each operation, if he was lucky, he would find an enemy soldier, and one took no prisoners in the tunnels. There were then, and remain now, paradoxes in his psyche. “I loved it. The enemy hit us, and then they went down the holes, and I knew we were going to get them down there—what other place were they going to go—deeper? I would have gone deeper, too. I enjoyed it very much. I liked it a lot. In fact, when they told me they had a VC down there, I came unglued. I got over there about a hundred miles an hour. To me it was like going hunting. They told me, ‘Hey, we've got a VC down there,' and I got all ready. I wanted to be the first down there. I wanted to get down there right away, I didn't want to mess around no more, I wanted to go after him.”