On Day Four, Sergeant Stewart Green, massively fed up, as were his mates around him, sat for a rest. In two seconds he was up, clutching his butt. Fire ants, scorpions, snakes, Vietnam had them all. He was convinced he had been stung or bitten. But it was a nail-head. The nail was part of a frame, and the frame was the hidden door to a shaft that went straight down into blackness. The US Army had discovered where the snipers went. They had been marching over their heads for two years.
There was no way of fighting the Vietcong living and hiding down there in the darkness by remote control. The society that in three years would send two men to walk on the moon had no technology for the Tunnels of Cu Chi. There was only one way to take the fight to the invisible enemy.
Someone had to strip down to thin cotton pants and, with pistol, knife and torch, go down into that pitch-black, stinking, airless, unknown, unmapped, booby-trapped, deadly, hideously claustrophobic labyrinth of narrow passages with no known exit and kill the waiting Vietcong in their own lair.
A few men were found, a special type of man. Big, burly men were of no use. The 95 per cent who feel claustrophobic were no use. Loud mouths, exhibitionists, look-at-mes were no use. The ones who did it were quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing, self-contained personalities, often loners in their own units. They had to be very cool, even cold, possessed of icy nerves and almost immune to panic, the real enemy below ground.
Army bureaucracy, never afraid to use ten words where two will do, called them ‘Tunnel Exploration Personnel’. They called themselves the Tunnel Rats.
By the time Cal Dexter reached Vietnam they had been in existence for three years, the only unit whose Purple Heart (wounded in action) ratio was 100 per cent.
The commanding officer of the moment was known as Rat Six. Everyone else had a different number. Once joined, they kept themselves to themselves and everyone regarded them with a kind of awe, as men will be awkward in the company of one sentenced to die.
Rat Six had been right in his gut guess. The tough little kid from the construction sites of New Jersey, with his deadly fists and feet, Paul Newman eyes and no nerves, was a natural.
He took him down into the Tunnels of Cu Chi and within an hour realized that the recruit was the better fighter. They became partners underground where there were no ranks and no ‘sirs’ and for nearly two tours they fought and killed down in the darkness until Henry Kissinger met Le Duc Tho and agreed America would quit Vietnam. After that there was no point.
To the rest of Big Red One the pair became a legend, spoken of in whispers. The officer was ‘The Badger’ and the newly promoted sergeant was ‘The Mole’.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Tunnel Rat
In the army, a mere six years in age difference between two young men can seem like a generation. The older man appears almost a father figure. Thus it was with the Badger and the Mole. At twenty-five, the officer was six years older. More, he came from a different social background with a far better education.
His parents were professional people. After high school he had spent a year touring Europe, seeing ancient Greece and Rome, historical Italy, Germany, France and Britain.
He had spent four years at college for his degree in civil and mechanical engineering, before facing the draft. He, too, had opted for the three-year commission and gone straight to officer school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Fort Belvoir was then churning out junior officers at a hundred a month. Nine months after entering, the Badger had emerged as a Second Lieutenant, rising to First when he shipped to Vietnam to join the 1st Engineer Battalion of Big Red One. He, too, had been headhunted for the Tunnel Rats, and in view of his rank quickly became Rat Six when his predecessor left for home. He had nine months of his required one-year Vietnam posting to complete, two months less than Dexter did.
But within a month it was clear that once the two men went into the tunnels, the roles were reversed. The Badger deferred to the Mole, accepting that the young man, with years on the streets and building sites of New Jersey, had a kind of sense for danger, the silent menace round the next corner, the smell of a booby trap, that no college degree could match, and which might keep them alive.
Before either man had reached Vietnam the US High Command had realized that trying to blow the tunnel system to smithereens was a waste of time. The dried laterite was too hard, the complex too extensive. The continuous switching of tunnel direction meant explosive forces could only reach so far, and not far enough.
Attempts had been made to flood the tunnels but the water just soaked away through the tunnel floors. Due to the water seals, gas failed as well. The decision was made that the only way to bring the enemy to battle was to go down there and try to find the headquarters network of the entire Vietcong War Zone C.
This, it was believed, was down there somewhere, between the southern tip of the Iron Triangle at the junction of the Saigon and Thi Tinh rivers and the Boi Loi woods at the Cambodian end. To find that HQ, to wipe out the senior cadres, to grab the huge harvest of intelligence that must be down there – that was the aim and, if it could be achieved, was a price beyond rubies.
In fact the HQ was under the Ho Bo woods, upcountry by the bank of the Saigon river, and was never found. But every time the tankdozers or the Rome Plows uncovered another tunnel entrance, the Rats went down into hell to keep looking.
The entrances were always vertical and that created the first danger. To go down feet first was to expose the lower half of the body to any VC waiting in the side tunnel. He would be happy to drive a needle-pointed bamboo spear deep into the groin or entrails of the dangling GI before scooting backwards into the darkness. By the time the dying American had been hauled back up, with the haft of the spear scraping the walls and the venom-poisoned tip ripping at the bowels, chances of survival were minimal.
To go down head first meant risking the spear, bayonet or point-blank bullet through the base of the throat.
The safest way seemed to be to descend slowly until the last five feet, then drop fast and fire at the slightest movement inside the tunnel. But the base of the shaft might be twigs and leaves, hiding a pit with punji sticks. These were embedded bamboo spears, also venom-tipped, that would drive straight through the sole of a combat boot, through the foot and out of the instep. Being fish-hook carved and barbed, they could hardly be withdrawn. Few survived them either.
Once inside the tunnel and crawling forward, the danger might be the VC waiting around the next corner, but more likely the booby traps. These were various, of great cunning and had to be disarmed before progress could be made.
Some horrors needed no Vietcong at all. The nectar bat and black-bearded tomb bat were both cave dwellers and roosted through the daylight in the tunnels until disturbed. So did the giant crab-spider, so dense on the walls that the wall itself appeared to be shimmering with movement. Even more numerous were the fire ants.
None of these was lethal; that honour went to the bamboo viper whose bite meant death in thirty minutes. The trap was usually a yard of bamboo embedded in the roof, jutting downwards at an angle and em
erging by no more than an inch.
The snake was inside the tube, head downwards, trapped and enraged, its escape blocked by a plug of kapok at the lower end. Threaded through this was a length of fishing line, heading through a hole in a peg in the wall on one side, thence to a peg across the tunnel. If the crawling GI touched the line, it would jerk the plug out of the bamboo above him and the viper would tumble onto the back of his neck.
And there were the rats, real rats. In the tunnels they had discovered their private heaven and bred furiously. Just as the GIs would never leave a wounded man or even a corpse in the tunnels, the Vietcong hated to leave one of their casualties up above for the Americans to find and add to the cherished ‘body count’. Dead VC were brought below and entombed in the walls in the foetus position, before being plastered over with wet clay.