‘No, and I don’t lose either,’ he said. Out beyond the ring of lights the officer nodded at the two MPs with him, and they moved in to make their arrest. Later the limping gunner got his promised twenty dollars.
Thirty days in the cooler was the penalty, the more so as he declined to name his opponent. He slept perfectly well on the unpadded slab in the cell and was still asleep when someone started running a metal spoon up and down the bars. It was dawn.
‘On your feet, soldier,’ said a voice. Dexter came awake, slid off the slab and stood to attention. The man had a lieutenant’s single silver bar on his collar. ‘Thirty days in here is really boring,’ said the officer.
‘I’ll survive, sir,’ said the ex-PFC, now busted back to private.
‘Or you could walk now.’
‘I think there has to be a catch to that, sir.’
‘Oh, there is. You leave behind the big, jerk-off toys and come and join my outfit. Then we find out if you’re as tough as you think you are.’
‘And your outfit, sir?’
‘They call me Rat Six. Shall we go?’
The officer signed the prisoner out and they adjourned for breakfast to the smallest and most exclusive mess hall in the whole 1st Division. No one was allowed in without permission and there were at that time only fourteen members. Dexter made fifteen, but the number would go down to thirteen in a week when two more were killed.
There was a weird emblem on the door of the ‘hootch’, as they called their tiny club. It showed an upright rodent with snarling face, phallic tongue, a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. Dexter had joined the Tunnel Rats.
For six years, in a constantly shifting sequence of men, the Tunnel Rats did the dirtiest, deadliest and by far the scariest job in the Vietnam War, yet so secret were their doings and so few their number that most people today, even Americans, have hardly or never heard of them.
There were probably not more than 350 over the period: a small unit among the engineers of the Big Red One, an equal unit drawn from the Tropic Lightning (25th) Division. A hundred never came home at all. About a further hundred were dragged, screaming, nerves gone, from their combat zone and consigned to trauma therapy, never to fight again. The rest went back to the States and, being by nature taciturn, laconic loners, seldom mentioned what they did.
Even the USA, not normally shy about its war heroes, cast no medal and raised no plaque. They came from nowhere, did what they did because it had to be done, and went back to oblivion. And their story all started because of a sergeant’s sore bottom.
The USA was not the first invader of Vietnam, just the last. Before the Americans were the French, who colonized the three provinces of Tonkin (north), Annam (centre) and Cochinchina (south) into their empire, along with Laos and Cambodia.
But the invading Japanese ousted the French in 1942 and after Japan’s defeat in 1945 the Vietnamese believed that at last they would be united and free of foreign domination. The French had other ideas, and came back. The leading independence fighter (there were others at first) was the Communist Ho Chi Minh. He formed the Vietminh resistance army and the Viets went back to the jungle to fight on. And on and on, for as long as it took.
A stronghold of resistance was the heavily forested farming zone northwest of Saigon, running up to the Cambodian border. The French accorded it their special attention (as would later the Americans) with punitive expedition after expedition. To seek sanctuary the local farmers did not flee; they dug.
They had no technology, just their ant-like capacity for hard work, their patience, their local knowledge and their cunning. They also had mattocks, shovels and palm-weave baskets. How many million tons of dirt they shifted will never be calculated. But dig and shift they did. By the time the French left after their 1954 defeat the whole of the Iron Triangle was a warren of shafts and tunnels. And no one knew about them.
The Americans came, propping up a regime the Viets regarded as puppets of yet another colonial power. They went back to the jungle and back to guerrilla war. And they resumed digging. By 1964 they had two hundred mile
s of tunnels, chambers, passages and hideouts, and all underground.
The complexity of the tunnel system, when the Americans finally began to comprehend what was down there, took the breath away. The down-shafts were so disguised as to be invisible at a few inches range at the level of the jungle floor. Down below were up to five levels of galleries, the lowest at fifty feet, linked by narrow, twisting passages that only a Vietnamese or a small wiry Caucasian could crawl through.
The levels were linked by trapdoors, some going up, others heading down. These too were camouflaged, to look like blank end-of-tunnel walls. There were stores, assembly caverns, dormitories, repair shops, eating halls and even hospitals. By 1966 a full combat brigade could hide down there, but until the Tet Offensive that number was never needed.
Penetration by an aggressor was discouraged. If a vertical shaft was discovered, there could well be a cunning booby trap at the bottom. Firing down the tunnels served no purpose; they changed direction every few yards so a bullet would go straight into the end-wall.
Dynamiting did not work; there were scores of alternate galleries within the pitch-black maze down there, but only a local would know them. Gas did not work; they fitted water seals, like the U-bend in a lavatory pipe.
The network ran under the jungle almost from the suburbs of Saigon nearly to the Cambodian border. There were various other networks elsewhere but nothing like the Tunnels of Cu Chi, named after the nearest town.
After the monsoon the laterite clay was pliable, easy to dig, scrape back and drag away in baskets. In the dry, it set like concrete.
After the passing of Kennedy, Americans arrived in really significant numbers and no longer as instructors, but for combat, starting spring 1964. They had the numbers, the weapons, the machines, the firepower – and they hit nothing. They hit nothing because they found nothing; just an occasional VC corpse if they got lucky. But they took casualties, and the body count began to mount.
At first it was convenient to presume the VC were peasants by day, lost among the black-pyjama-clad millions, switching to guerrillas at night. But why so many casualties by day, and no one to fire back at? In January 1966 the Big Red One decided to raze the Iron Triangle once and for all. It was Operation Crimp.
They started at one end, fanned out and moved forward. They had enough ammunition to wipe out Indochina. They reached the other end and had found no one. From behind the moving line sniper fire started and the GIs took five fatalities. Whoever was firing had only old, bolt-action Soviet carbines, but a bullet through the heart is still a bullet through the heart.
The GIs turned back, went over the same ground. Nothing, no enemy. They took more fatalities, always in the back. They discovered a few foxholes, a brace of air-raid shelters. Empty, offering no cover. More sniper fire but no running figures in black to fire back at.