The Tunnels of Cu Chi (8 page)

Later, A Company found another tunnel complex. One of its own soldiers was killed by a Viet Cong soldier who suddenly appeared out of a huge anthill. When the GIs rushed the hill, they discovered a tunnel entrance at the rear.

On Tuesday the 11th, in a tunnel somewhere in the Ho Bo woods, a Viet Cong called Tran Bang was making his diary entry. It described a situation far removed from Lieutenant Linh's optimism about the effective failure of Crimp. Tran Bang wrote:

The entry is dated 1445 hours, 11 January 1966. The following day, the diary became one of nearly 8,000 items captured by the Americans.

On the same day that Tran Bang wrote down his bittersweet thoughts, the tunnels claimed one of their first victims, Corporal Bob Bowtell of the 3rd Field Troop of the Royal Australian Engineers. The troop was part of the 1st Battalion Group of the Royal Australian Regiment, brought in to act as a blocking force on the northern perimeter of the Crimp operation, an area covered with light scrub, rubber plantations, and secondary growth. The Aussies, with their traditional bush hats and British military background, made a distinct and colorful contrast to the GIs. They were all volunteers, and most were keen to find the action. Third Field Troop was led by a large, beefy, popular officer, Captain Alex MacGregor. He was known in the Australian military jargon as a hands-on type, an officer who truly led his men, and would ask from them nothing that he had not done or would not do himself. He was a front row rugby forward, built like an ox, and had already spent two years with an engineer construction squadron in Papua New Guinea, a
place not generally regarded as being particularly homely or comfortable for a white man. In Vietnam he was one soldier who dealt with the prevalent foot-rot problem in a robust way: He discarded his socks and suffered the agonies of blisters for several days, but then, as calluses formed, his feet slowly developed a covering that was actually tougher than the jungle boots he wore. With him the captain had a small and enthusiastic team, including Sapper Denis Ayoub, his radio man, and Sappers Les Colmer and Barry Harford. Colmer was MacGregor's batman, but unlike the “butler” batmen of the British system, he followed his boss, often into fire. Sapper Harford was Colmer's friend; both had joined the army from Broken Hill, the large mining town in New South Wales. Although neither had been a miner, the mining background in their lives was to prove invaluable. Corporal Bowtell had been a friend of theirs.

On the first day of Crimp the troop found action without difficulty. Homemade grenades were spotted rigged as antipersonnel mines, with tripwires strung from the trees from ankle height to head height. On the second day they even ran across two mortar bombs activated by a grenade connected to an ankle-high tripwire. Later that day they found an area laced with punji stakes (razor-sharp bamboo spikes) set in concrete in the ground. A sapper of B Company demolition team stepped on one and it went straight through his foot.

By day three, the Australian infantrymen were beginning to take serious casualties. Captain MacGregor recalled that not only were the scouts of one leading infantry company killed, but when the stretcher-bearers were called for medical evacuation of the wounded, they were killed, too. In one action alone, four Aussies died. MacGregor and his engineer troop were called in when it became obvious that although the hot area had been surrounded, no Viet Cong had been sighted or killed. There was only one conclusion. They had, in the captain's words, “gone down.” As the Australian ring of steel closed on the area, they found the tunnels.

Over the next four days, working with the Americans, the Australians slowly uncovered at least three-quarters of a mile of communication tunnels, bunkers, and underground chambers. MacGregor's men had been in the country for four months. This was already their fifth operation, and they were neither
baffled by nor unduly apprehensive about the tunnels. They went down and explored. But there were mistakes.

They used a specially adapted commercial air blower called the “mighty mite” to blow smoke down the tunnels, and then watched carefully to see where the smoke came out of the ground so that they could begin a rough plot of where the tunnels spread. But the smoke stayed underground, and when the first Australian tunnel ferrets (as they were called) went below, they quickly became unconscious through lack of oxygen. This is how Corporal Bowtell died, in a tunnel war that was about to break out in earnest.

While exploring underground, Bowtell, a typically tall, lean Australian, unwisely tried to wriggle through a tiny trapdoor connecting one tunnel level with another. It measured sixteen inches by eleven inches, dimensions that would hardly have allowed a lithe Viet Cong guerrilla through, let alone a larger-framed Westerner. Bowtell got stuck and within seconds realized that lingering smoke from the “mighty mite” had expelled most of the oxygen in the tunnel. He shouted for help. Sapper Jim Daly volunteered to rescue his comrade, but by the time he got to the trapdoor, Bowtell was already unconscious. Futile attempts began above ground to sink an airshaft to the sapper. Daly was himself almost asphyxiated by the lingering fumes, but he had to try to cut Bowtell free with his knife by enlarging the tiny trapdoor frame in which the corporal's limp body was jammed. Four times he tried, but he failed to drag the corporal out, and finally, on the verge of collapse himself, he was ordered to stop. After Bowtell's death, MacGregor made sure no similar accidental deaths were ever to afflict the Australians. Jim Daly received a “mention in despatches” for “his sense of purpose, coolness in action and disregard for his own safety, which was an inspiration to all who fought with him.”

Meanwhile, searching and destroying these incredible underground tunnels had to continue. Les Colmer and Barry Harford, the men from Broken Hill, volunteered to work with demolition explosives in the tunnels. Using his communications skills, Denis Ayoub rigged up a proficient underground telephone system. He found ammunition caches stored in small chambers, small booby-trapped Parker 57 pens, and even underground flag-making workshops, complete with sewing machines. Large rice caches were also found, every one of
them booby-trapped—not just
around
the cache, but even
inside
the rice bags themselves. MacGregor made copious notes of what his men found. Only his bulk prevented him from leading the troop through the never-ending network of tunnels. It was MacGregor who realized the value to the Viet Cong of American combat detritus, after Denis Ayoub found a small tunnel workshop in which hand grenades had been made. The inner casing was made from a small discarded tomato juice tin, and the outer casing from an old beer can. The fragmentation pieces were blue metal road gravel, and the firing mechanism was from old French or American grenades. “Because of what we found in the tunnels,” recalled MacGregor, “we ordered this policy of burn-bash-bury. We had twenty-four-hour ration packs with little tins in them. You never EVER left your tin around so it could be found, you never left anything the enemy could use. Your spoon, they would even use that for making weapons. We left nothing, absolutely nothing.” This was a discipline the GIs could well have emulated more enthusiastically. As the war became harder on the Viet Cong, they used the waste so generously left around by the Americans more and more, and in some areas, they became dependent on it.

Tensions between the specialist engineers and the infantry began to show early in Operation Crimp. In an official Australian after-action report, the following laconic comments were recorded:

There was some discord between the lanky Australians and their American comrades, too. Sapper (now Major) Denis Ayoub said quite bluntly: “The Americans taught us nothing about tunnel fighting in an hour that we hadn't already tried ourselves. Our determination to clear tunnels seemed to them to be little short of madness. They were quite surprised when our captain
suggested that we were going to send guys down with a torch and pistol and a length of string.”

While the Australians began to develop the earliest techniques for exploring and destroying some short tunnel systems, they had no real plan for dealing with the heart-stopping business of actually running into a Viet Cong guerrilla inside a tunnel. Denis Ayoub recalled the first time it happened to him, when he was behind another sapper who was leading in the exploration of a narrow communication tunnel: “One minute we were crawling through the tunnel, the next minute my mate, without a word, started to back up rather rapidly. No one could turn around in the tunnels we found on Crimp; you had to back out of the bloody things. So he started to back up, and I had to back up. No one said anything. When we got to the bottom of the shaft, he somehow managed to get past me and was first up and out. So I came up second, hoping to Christ that my legs weren't going to be left behind. When we got out, and my mate cooled down a bit, he told me he'd seen a man down there.”

Fighting Charlie in his own tunnels was still a thing of the future. As American helicopters began to arrive to collect some of the thousands of Communist documents that had been found in the tunnels, Captain Alex MacGregor was ordering photographs taken of tunnel trapdoors and entrances, and of the booby traps found inside, and was busy making full notes of tunnel dimensions. Of all the tunnels intelligence assessments made during Crimp, the Royal Australian Engineers' was probably the most accurate and the most prescient. Unfortunately, despite their success, the Aussies were never again to be so involved in the tunnels of Cu Chi.

Alex MacGregor was to win the Military Cross for his courage and leadership of his engineer troop during Crimp. When the operation ended on 14 January, Australian deaths in Vietnam had doubled from eight to sixteen. The tunnels they had discovered turned out to be the huge complex that was part of the Viet Cong's Military Region IV headquarters.

The Americans were learning about tunnels, too. Three days before the operation ended, they brought in a huge mechanized flame-thrower to support an infantry task force attack to the north of Ho Bo woods. The flame-thrower was driven by Sergeant First Class Bernard Justen, then operations sergeant with
the Chemical Section of the 1st Infantry Division. His flame-thrower, mounted on an APC, fired liquid napalm out of the nozzle, using compressed air. The droplets were ignited by gasoline. This system was known as saturation firing: “You didn't waste any as it shot to the target that way,” said Justen. The diminutive Texan was eventually to specialize in tunnel warfare, but he admits that during Crimp he didn't quite know what was happening. “We knew nothing about the tunnels, and we had the wrong equipment. Everything that was learned was learned the hard way.”

Justen used his flame-thrower to burn away jungle and growth near trenches. If this expensive technique exposed a tunnel entrance—some had trapdoors and some did not—then he would explore.

“We started going down checking tunnels out, and right in the middle of it, while we're going into one tunnel, they [the VC] would pop up somewhere else and the shooting'd be going on up above you. You could hear them up above ground shooting and you never knew if you popped up out of one of these holes whether somebody from our side might take a shot at you. So you used to tell the guy—in them days we didn't lay wire or nothing because we were working blind—we used to tell them to hold off if they saw us coming out from a different hole to the one we went in. Hell, you didn't know where you were going to come out. I went down there, I got real close to Charlie—warm food, papers lying around, even found a calendar with the day's date on, that's pretty damn close. But truth is, I'd rather run them out than meet them down there.”

Justen was later to instruct others in tunnel warfare. He made drawings of what he found, including the tunnel water traps. The water traps, it turned out, were not to deal with drainage. They were rather like U-bends in the tunnel system, and they prevented tear gas or CS riot-control gas from blowing all the way into a tunnel complex. The early tunnel explorers had to navigate the water traps the hard way. Most just waded in, held their breath, and swam up the other side, always assuming they could do it on one lungful of air. “That really was the worst part of me,” explained Justen. “You never knew what was waiting the other side, you never knew if in that black hole you'd get to the other side, and when you did, you came
out soaking wet and stinking rotten. It was the worst part of it.”