The Tunnels of Cu Chi (39 page)

So he killed many men deep down in the holes, where he was on his own even if the squad
was
behind him, this long, thin, lightweight Cuban who stepped on mines and lived, who begged to go point more times than the rules allowed, and who became tense and restless only when he could
not
go down a hot hole. Of course, Ellis was a strict officer. “He had rules, he was very strict, I can't say different. But when you're down there, one on one, there were no rules at all.”

His Army Commendation Medal (V) citation is a glowing testament to a man without nerves. It tells of the bravery of a tunnel rat who, despite all the odds, despite the fact that the tunnel might have contained the Viet Cong who had already wounded two of his squad colleagues, instantly volunteered to go in and look for documents and destroy the tunnel. The citation recalls that Rejo entered the hot hole, even though it had already been contaminated by his own men with CS gas; that he refused to wear a gas mask, and with scant regard for his own safety, inched his way through the complex and arranged its destruction with explosive charges. What the citation does not relate, because Rejo's officer Randy Ellis did not know, was that the point man had found an NVA soldier in the tunnel. Driven by the smell of the enemy, just as he had been by the smell of their mines, Rejo had defied the choking, burning CS gas and literally carved his way through a communication tunnel that became so narrow he had to open it up with his knife just to get through. Randy Ellis was well behind,
but trying to stay close enough to cover Rejo. They wanted prisoners at the top. The policy on prisoners was to take them only when one could reasonably expect to make the hazardous journey back to the entrance while somehow, in those two-foot-wide holes, maintaining control over a captive. It could be done. But not by Pete Rejo.

He was still widening the tunnel with his knife when he came face to face with the Communist soldier—not a Viet Cong guerrilla, but a northerner, dressed in the distinctive dull-green uniform. He was carrying an AK-47. No one will ever know why the Communist did not fire at the tunnel rat. Why Rejo didn't follow his instinct and kill the soldier may be partially explained by his orders to take prisoners, and by the relative proximity of his disciplinarian officer, Randy Ellis. Rejo, who boasted that there wasn't a tunnel dug that he could not turn around in, did so, crawled toward Ellis, risking a bullet in the back of the head from the NVA soldier, and said, “Elly, order me a shape charge.” He told his officer that he could go no farther and that it was time to blow the tunnel. He neglected to mention the NVA soldier crouching in a corner of a small chamber only a few feet away. Why didn't Rejo tell Ellis? “Well, because he knew I was wild. If I would have told him, he would have interfered with what I wanted to do. Randy was a professional. I was a killer. You see what I'm saying?”

Eventually they brought Rejo the 40-pound cratering charge, and he returned to set it. He crawled all the way back to see if he could find his NVA soldier, but he didn't see him. But then, he didn't need to see him. He could still smell him—the sweat and the body odor were unmistakable. As he set the charge, he wondered how many he would kill when the tunnel caved in. He wondered why they didn't open up on him; he was a sitting target. It was like those mines not going off. After the explosion he wanted to go back down, just to confirm that he had killed the NVA soldier. But Ellis stopped him. There was another call for the rat squad.

They gave him ten days off to go to Guam to become an American citizen—his greatest dream ever since leaving Cuba. He would have stayed in the tunnels forever if the American involvement had not been coming to an end. Even then he begged to stay on. As the tunnel squads came to the end of their work, and as the Americans began to withdraw, Rejo
implored his superiors to let him join the First Cavalry gunship unit out at Le Quon Loi. They used to fly very low, skimming the jungle, shooting at people on the ground with high-speed machine guns that fired 6,000 rounds a minute. That was for Rejo. But they told him he'd been long enough in Vietnam and needed to come back home.

Even with his hard-won medals and his U.S. citizenship, Rejo has not found peace. He has been married and divorced three times. He never speaks about the days in the tunnels to his friends, nor does he attend the noisy veterans' reunions. But he did buy a shotgun, and a .22, and a big .300, and a .243, and some knives, and began hunting the deer and the elk and the coyote in the hills of Colorado. He hunts alone.

Rick Swofford fought with Ellis's squad, too. Unlike Rejo he was not tortured by the dark and contradictory forces that drive a man. Swofford was a twenty-year-old who somehow drifted into the army and fetched up in Vietnam, filling sandbags with the Engineers. By 1969 the fame of the tunnel rats was such that they had already become a legend to him. Ellis felt he could use the tough, glory-seeking soldier and took him on. Swofford was a demolitions expert, and his precision skill with explosives was just what Alpha squad needed. Too much could be dangerous, too little had no effect, inept handling could threaten everyone down in the hole, and Swofford got it right. Pete Rejo did not like the cocky youngster and needled and pulled rank on him until Swofford began to get angry. The tunnel rats did not use rank in this way, nor did they impose the kind of bullshit pecking order that existed outside their numbers. Swofford challenged Rejo and they fistfought each other to a standstill. After that they became firm friends. Swofford loved the glamour of the squad. Their distinctive flash roused envy every time they walked into the NCOs' club. They talked missions a lot. Anyone outside the squad who was allowed in on the rapping was strictly a guest.

It was Rick Swofford who blew the tunnel after Franklin had been shot in the action in which Ellis won his Bronze Star (V). It had been a tense and difficult time for the whole of Alpha squad. Swofford just went down there with Ellis and twenty-five cases of C-4 explosive, making some 300 pounds in all. They had to haul the stuff, crate by crate, through the long tunnel complex and set them scientifically at the same
time. Each case was a foot and a half square, and they were soon physically exhausted. Then they discovered they had not brought enough fuse wire, only a foot and a half, which would be extremely dangerous to use on that amount of explosive. Ellis asked him, “Swofford, is that enough fuse?” and Swofford, who had seen too many Westerns, lit the fuse with a cigarette, and answered, “No, you'd better start running now, Elly.” One could not, of course, run down a tunnel, but professionals did perfect an astonishingly fast if undignified crawl, which stripped the skin from the elbows and knees. As the two men shot out of the shaft like a couple of corks, the 300 pounds blew. Swofford was knocked down by the blast. The tunnels exploded as if in slow motion. Hundreds of tons of earth and stone hung suspended in the air. It was an unusual luxury to use 300 pounds of explosives, but it
was
the tunnel in which Virgil Franklin had been hit.

After the earth had settled, they discovered Swofford had set the charges so perfectly that the entire lid of the tunnels maze had been lifted like a scalp from a skull. They saw tunnels they had never even found during the early searches. Ellis forgave Swofford the theatrical gesture. Swofford loved every minute of it.

While the 1st Division tunnel rats were refining their unique military skills, challenging and often winning individual tunnel encounters, the 25th Division down at Cu Chi across the Saigon River was implementing a more laborious approach to the business. Long after the Big Red One tunnel rats had been officially created, the 25th Infantry maintained its policy of engineer involvement, but without the specialization and continuity of their colleagues farther north in the defense ring around Saigon. In May 1968 an operational report analyzing the lessons of Operation Atlanta showed 25th Division infantrymen were still using the Rome plows to expose the subtle intricacies of the Cu Chi tunnels. It was like shaving with a broken bottle. The equipment was massive and expensive, the process was time-consuming, the results lacked precision. It was a loud and crude way of dealing with tunnels.

It is debatable whether full-time tunnel rat squads would have been able to discover and seal the tunnel belt around Cu Chi base. There were frequent American sorties into the holes, but to the embarrassment of the 25th Infantry, they were never
fully located and destroyed. This meant that as late as February 1969 the Communists were able to mount their stunningly successful raid on the base, using the old tunnels and some new ones, too. VC prisoners told their interrogators that they had hidden in the tunnel belts around the base camp for three to four days before the attack. In other words, a full three years after arrival, the 25th Infantry headquarters at Cu Chi was still not in control of the land outside its own wire. Not only that, but the base had become a bulky fortress, forced to spend more and more time, energy, and money feeding itself and defending itself. A determined command approach to tunnel destruction might have allowed the division the luxury of more offensive missions. However, where part-time tunnel rat squads did evolve, their training and tactics reflected not the scientific approach of the engineers, but the old gung ho tradition of the infantry.

“The Rock,” “Chicago,” Jackson, Funchez Wright, and Manifold was such a squad. The Rock was Floro Rivera; he was the sergeant in charge. Neither he nor any of the squad were volunteers. They were all from the elite Wolfhounds, the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry, part of the 25th Division. The Wolfhounds had been created in 1901 in Fort McPherson, Georgia. The canine soubriquet was added late in World War I, when the White Russians compared the unit's ferocity to that of the giant dog.

Flo Rivera would have become a legendary tunnel rat had he been an engineer with the Big Red One. He was, like Thornton or Ellis or Rejo, born to the job. As it was, his ad hoc tunnel rat squad was to lack the fame and recognition earned by his colleagues at Lai Khe. Unlike them, he had no squad officer in charge. His platoon leader did not even go down the holes. So as it became evident that the Wolfhounds needed somebody to cope with the tunnels of Cu Chi on something more than an impoverished basis, they told Rivera he had the job.

He was born in Hawaii of Filippino parents. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father, a humble plantation worker, was left to bring up three sons. Both his elder brothers served in World War II and then got out. He had a stern and hard upbringing. His father taught him never to back off if he believed he was right. He was taught to use his fists and soon became a talented flyweight boxer. If Flo did anything wrong,
his father beat the hell out of him. One day when he was still only nine years old, his father gave him a large knife and told him it was his turn to kill a pig. “Don't make a mistake. You seen how I do it,” warned his father. “Kill it with one stroke, the first. You get this wrong, I'm gonna whack hell out of you. If you ever use a knife, then be good with it.” The pig died instantly, and Flo Rivera grew to use a knife like Davy Crockett.

He greatly loved and feared his father. At twenty, he joined the army for a career. Not backing off and refusing to take orders from dummies soon landed him in the stockade. He was a firm believer in discipline, but he never said please. There were bad NCOs who wanted to break him, but they failed. He had respect only for efficiency and discipline. “A PRC told me to jump, I would jump. A corporal told me to roll over and die—I would.” Anyone could have predicted that Rivera would become one of those legendary first-class sergeants destined to lead their men with honor. But for a while his stubbornness placed his career in the balance. During a tour in Germany, his boxing prowess became known to his colonel, who asked him to fight for the unit. Rivera had just promised his new bride he would give up boxing, so he declined with thanks. The colonel gently pointed out that the invitation had just become an order. Rivera did not say please. He saluted and left the office. The colonel arranged for Rivera to be given every dirty job that could be found on base, together with a string of all-night guard duties. Rivera still did not say please, and it was reaching an ugly moment in his military service, when a crafty master sergeant took him to one side and advised him to compromise. “Don't box, become the team coach,” he said. Rivera agreed, and the war with his CO ended.

He was a natural for tunnel duty—small, lithe, very strong, and quite fearless. OJT presented no problems to him, but turning his squad into tunnel rats did. Some, like Jackson, a big, slow-moving black, were physically unsuitable. Others had as much desire to go into the holes as they did to hack at their own throats with rusty razor blades. Unlike Ellis, Rivera could not handpick his team, so they simply had to be beaten into shape, an expression the little sergeant did not use as a metaphor. He reached an early agreement with his platoon commander, Captain Gavin, an amiable young officer who left the whole dirty tunnel rat business to Rivera, to handle the men
the way he thought fit. NCOs like Rivera were as rare as roses in the desert, and if they blossomed, you left them alone. Rivera was given full platoon authority.

He gathered the squad together inside the Cu Chi base and informed them that with great pride and honor he had accepted their requests to become tunnel rats as and when the occasion arose. There was a brief silence—no one knew at first what he was talking about. Then hands went up. The squad knew all about the tunnels. They had been under fire from VC who had popped up from tunnels, even inside the base. They were Wolfhounds, not terriers. Rivera gave them one further chance to think again. He told them that on every operation he guaranteed he would be down there himself; there was nothing to worry about—he would be there alongside them. A leery silence followed. He could not say please, nor could he trade on his rank any further. He waited for the first refusal and when it came, he simply challenged the man to a fight. It was illegal and immoral. He offered the trembling private the choice of a knife or pistol with one round in it. You did not fight Rivera with a knife unless you wanted overnight repatriation in a body-bag. A one-shot duel with pistols was equally unattractive.