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Tunnel Rats in Vietnam: Fight for Life in the Tunnels (Part-3)

In a three-level tunnel, secret doors led from one level to another. First you had to find the secret door. Then pushing or pulling the secret door was scary. But going up through a secret door was the hardest thing a man could do.

Tunnel Rat's Fight Against Fear in Vietnam

Chicago TriBune/Published June 28, 1985. British Broadcasting Co. (BBC) reporters Tom Mangold and John Penycate went to Vietnam in 1978 to investigate the war.

Mangold's first impressions of the region and the war were as follows: "The Viet Cong repeatedly launched hit-and-run raids and melted away. They disappeared because of elaborate networks of tunnels and caves connecting villages, districts and even provinces. These evolved as the response of an ill-equipped guerrilla army to massive modern warfare technology. The tunnels therefore had great symbolic significance for the Viet Cong. They convinced them that if they persevered and maintained an active presence, they could win the war."

During the 1954 French occupation, which ended with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese peasants, like an army of fleas, regularly used their hands and tin pots to break up their land, often digging up hidden soil in full public view: The enemy. But the true extent of this effort remained hidden until 1978, when Mangold and Penycate became the first BBC journalists to be granted visas by the newly victorious government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to visit Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

The tunnels and the unpublicized life and death struggles that took place there shocked Mangold. As a former war correspondent, he remembered the area well, a 70-square-mile natural fortress of jungle and scrub.

"Everyone in Saigon knew that Charlie [Charlie (a slang word for the enemy, taken from Victor Charlie, the Army's phonetic alphabet for the VC or Viet Cong)] was all over Cu Chi, but no journalist knew about the tunnels," Mangold says. "It was a free-fire zone, the most bombed, gassed, defoliated and devastated in the history of the war. We would routinely watch planes returning from hotels in Saigon drop unused bombs and napalm on Cu Chi."

(Here I would like to digress from the article and make a small reminder. Why does a fighter jet or a bomber have to drop the bomb load before landing that it cannot drop on the mission in the planned bombing mission? These were issues that needed to be considered in terms of weight, safety and especially airport security.

Safety: Bombs carry the risk of accidental explosion during landing. This explosion can pose a serious danger to the pilot and ground crew. It can also damage the aircraft itself during landing, depending on the strength of the bomb.

Weight: The bombs carried in the aircraft can be quite heavy depending on the nature of the bombing mission and the type and type of bomb. When the aircraft is landing, carrying extra weight may require more runway length, engine power and braking power. The weight can reduce the aircraft's maneuverability during landing. This increases the risk of an unsafe landing.

Airport Safety: In order not to risk the flight safety of the airport, which is constantly used for landing and take-off, it is not allowed to prevent the risk posed by bombs ready to explode on the aircraft approaching for landing during landing).

With that little reminder, let's pick up where we left off. However, as Mangold and Penycate detail in their remarkable new book, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (Random House), the complexes resisted all attempts by the communists to occupy and hold what they now honor as the "Land of Fire".

"American military commanders never really understood this," says Mangold. According to him, "They consistently underestimated the scope and importance of the tunnels. In 1966, they even built the Cu Chi base, a 1,500-acre complex housing 4,500 men, right on top of a thriving nest of Viet Cong tunnels. Charlie then spent a field day blowing up airplanes and equipment in the vicinity. Later, it turned out that even the barbers inside the US base (13 of them) were Viet Cong supporters."

A Viet Cong officer told Mangold that the secret Cu Chi tunnels were "like a thorn in the enemy's eye". The guerrillas lost 12,000 men there, but still managed to infiltrate Saigon with intelligence agents, party cadres and sabotage teams. In 1968, the Tet Offensive was planned and launched underground, with tunnels housing thousands of troops.

As a point of interest, journalists were shown a huge complex of tunnels dug into the protective clay of the Cu Chi region, just 20 miles north of Saigon. Reporters then conducted detailed interviews with several tunnel guerrillas who had survived the war. They, in turn, told reporters about the American Tunnel Rats.

A network of small access holes (2 feet wide and 3 feet deep) led through a series of cleverly concealed hatches to communication tunnels zigzagging up, sideways and down for up to 5 meters. These passageways led to a labyrinth of caves and caverns that snaked through 4 levels for 200 miles, all the way to the Cambodian border.

Air, sanitation, water and cooking facilities were sufficient to sustain a primitive but fairly safe existence. In the underground labyrinths (some more than 1.8 meters high), the Viet Cong built sleeping quarters, air raid shelters, toilets, hospitals, kitchens, political theater stages, conference centers and printing presses. They stored large quantities of rice, captured American artillery and artillery shells. They even buried an American tank. They moved an M-48 tank abandoned after a firefight to another location, covered it with earth and connected it to a tunnel. They made the M-48 tank an underground command and control center.

While bombs rained down and tanks rumbled overhead, guerrillas lived uncomfortably in damp and darkness, sometimes for years. They made booby traps and weapons in ammunition factories. They made anti-personnel mines in primitive forges. "Empty" for reuse They repaired American bullets and bombs.

The Viet Cong hid the bodies of Viet Cong fighters in the tunnels to prevent American soldiers from counting bodies. They also hid the bodies of the American soldiers they killed in the tunnels. Babies were born in the tunnels. War doctors worked with their bare hands in the dim light of small foot or hand generators, household drills for brain surgery, wooden saws for amputations, sterilizing instruments in pressure cookers. Anesthetics were rare, Mangold reported. Honey was the main antiseptic; as it dries it becomes acidic and kills bacteria.

These were the underground metropolises of the Viet Cong. No wonder that after the guerrillas staged a raid and retreated back into their world, the odds against their pursuers changed dramatically. The hunters became the hunted.

"The levels of the tunnels were twisted like snakes, making the line of fire incredibly short," says Mangold. "The entrances were camouflaged and invisible. Explosives often bounced off clay walls. The gas was cleverly contained in closed tunnel sections. The tunnels were full of booby traps. If you somehow managed to avoid them, who was waiting for you in the dark?"

Charlie with the AK-47.

To penetrate such fortresses, which were rare, the Americans needed a special kind of soldier. At first, attack dogs were sent into the holes. The dogs knew nothing about booby traps and, as a result of the inevitable slaughter, their handlers flatly refused to sacrifice any more animals. The dog fiasco led to the sudden creation of a special human unit in 1966.

American officers in Vietnam saw the short, slender combat engineers as SWAT teams to be called in whenever a suspicious hole was found in the ground. To other members of the military unit, these "Tunnel Rats" were a self-absorbed, arrogant bunch who mocked rank, scorned drugs and self-doubt, and boasted of deeds that no sane person would do.

The Viet Cong guerrillas revered the American Tunnel Rats as deadly hunters, armed only with knives, flashlights and pistols.

"The Tunnel Rats were Combat Engineers," says Mangold. "They had to be small and thin, volunteer, and highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat. The mission was to kill, capture or bury the Viet Cong with explosives. The weapon of choice was a small-caliber pistol. The Americans were forbidden to fire more than three consecutive shots. If you fired the sixth, the enemy would know you were out of ammunition.

"There were never more than 100 Tunnel Rats and most were killed in the tunnels. We spent three years looking for them in the U.S. and only found 12. I suspect there were 10 left. The attrition rate was horrendous. "These were strange men to begin with. They still suffer from the memories of what they went through. When they walked home, America, devastated by post-war trauma and recriminations, was not interested in their stories. So they told no one. They remain lonely, isolated, very heroic men. But they are heroes America never knew it had."

As weak and reclusive as the Viet Cong they hunted, the Tunnel Rats avoided anything that dulled their senses, including cologne or chewing gum. Knives or bayonets, weapons as old as war, determined whether they would live or die. In the pitch darkness, booby traps had to be sensed. Instincts, long dormant, were re-honed. Fingertips and ears became to the Tunnel Rats what canes are to the blind.

"The great fear, that was the key," Jack Flowers recalled in a recent telephone interview. Once a war resister and high-ranking Army officer, Flowers served as "Six Mice," the commander of the crack Tunnel Rat unit of the 1st Infantry Division in 1969. He landed in 97 pits after the Viet Cong, each time in terror.

"You had to control and direct the fear. You made every move with infinite care. Your senses have never been so sharp. In the tunnels, your adrenaline was pumping like a river. I swear I could hear my heart beating.

"We would enter the tunnel one at a time, a few meters apart, so that one grenade wouldn't catch us all. For booby traps, you grope your way through. They are there so you can feel them. It's the same in the Viet Cong. You could smell another person in the tunnel. You knew he was waiting for you in the dark. Many times I tried to convince the Viet Cong to surrender. They would never do it."

The Tunnel Rats never knew what they would find.

The Viet Cong would take a snake; we called them 'one-step' or 'two-step' snakes. They were bamboo vipers and once they bit you could only take one or two more steps before you died. Charlie would tie the viper to a piece of bamboo with a piece of string. If Tunnel Rat accidentally touched it as he passed by, the snake would come out and bite him on the neck or face. We learned how to check the ceilings with a flashlight to avoid this.

The Viet Cong also placed scorpion boxes with a trigger wire to open the box. One of the men was stung. He came out screaming and never went into another tunnel again. We also encountered wasps, centipedes, moving masses of big black spiders and bats. We met rats carrying bubonic plague."

Battling claustrophobia with every breath in the heat and stinking filth, the Tunnel Rats often had to crawl for hundreds of meters.

"In a three-level tunnel, secret hatches led from one level to the next," says Flowers. "First you had to find the secret door. Then pushing or pulling the secret door was scary. But going up through a secret door was the hardest thing a man could do. You had no idea what was above you."

A favorite Viet Cong trick was to slit a Tunnel Rat's throat or strangle him as he exited through a connected trap door. Guerrillas could spear the Tunnel Rat's throat or stick their spears into the Tunnel Rat's small opening. His friends could not convince him and sometimes he went into hysteria. The more they tried to crawl out of the tunnels, the more Viet Cong would be waiting for them.

Once, a grenade suddenly fell on Flowers' house through an opened trap door. He spun like lightning, scrambled and crawled far enough to survive the blast. Years later, that grenade, twisting and falling in slow motion, would permeate his dreams.

Flowers refuses to estimate how many enemies he killed. His last mission took place in a newly dug bunker complex near the Saigon River. The Americans discovered seven holes.

My men killed six of them. They were all cold; no Viet Cong. Everyone had returned except me. The last hole was supposed to be hot. When we looked down the 3-meter shaft, we could see the tunnel entrance. We knew Kong was there. I couldn't ask anyone else to go down that hole."

Flowers would soon leave Vietnam. He really didn't need to explore the tunnel. But he insisted. He remembers seeing tears in the eyes of his men as they lowered him down the shaft on a suspended seat. His elbows and boots rubbed against the sides of the shaft, dislodging dirt.

He imagined a Viet Cong waiting for him below, his AK-47 set on automatic. He could fire 20 rounds at Flowers in four seconds. Flowers knew he only had one chance.

"I had to shoot first. And I had to hit him in the head. All our training was based on this: Shoot at close range, shoot in the face."

When he was about a meter from the bottom, Flowers' men stopped taking him down. To make himself smaller, he swung to the side, crossing his left arm over his chest. He hunched his right shoulder to protect his temple. Then he nodded briefly. His men let him go.

His gun went off and he fell to the ground. The first shot pierced the Viet Cong's forehead. The second tore into his cheek. The third in his throat. Fourth, fifth and sixth, his body. Flowers kept pulling the trigger, tapping and tapping the empty chambers of his pistol.

When the smoke cleared, his shots grouped neatly on the wall. There was no Viet Cong. Only in Flowers' mind. Six shots had broken the Tunnel Rat code. He had broken something else.

"I'm done," he says. He was rushed out of command and sent home, and it took him years to recover. He wrote a book as therapy but didn't try to get it published. He painfully finished college, married, divorced, remarried, fathered two daughters, and made and lost a lot of money as a stockbroker in Philadelphia.

Now, when Mangold and Penycate find him 16 years later, Flowers suddenly finds himself a real commercial hero. He sold his story to MGM. He hopes to contribute to the movie. But he says his life is in shambles again. She is going through another divorce, has lost her job and has pinned her hopes on Hollywood.

"I'm glad our story is finally being told," she says. "Why did we do this? I wasn't a tough guy. No one who knows me would ever suspect me of doing what the Tunnel Rats did. I would never want a son of mine to have to do that.

"But I think men will stand up in any situation if called upon. There's something deep inside all of us, something we can use if we really have to." He knows something primal and very scary.

"We should thank God," he says, "that we usually don't have to go through such hardships in life that we have to show this side of ourselves."

In 1967, a "Tunnel Rat" was led out of a Viet Cong tunnel by his comrades and taken to a safer location. The men who chose to serve as "Tunnel Rats" braved unimaginable dangers. (Image by US Army)

_Conclusion

The result was that US forces were not completely successful in destroying the tunnels in Vietnam. The tunnels were a very effective fighting tool for the Viet Cong during the war, and the Viet Cong were very successful in resisting American efforts to destroy the tunnels. The Tunnel Rats tried to play their part in the Vietnam War. The American Army was able to penetrate and explore the Viet Cong's tunnels, making it very difficult for the Viet Cong to use them. In a way, they destroyed the Viet Cong in their own lair, in their own tunnels. However, even though many tunnel rats were killed or wounded in the tunnels, the US could not completely destroy them. The American soldiers who fought the Viet Cong in these tunnels were traumatized both during and after the war. Nevertheless, the US Army command always admired the Viet Cong Tunnel Rats for their determination to fight, for their unprecedented infrastructure of tunnel operations. They found it valuable to learn about 'tunnel operations and how to live in tunnels'. They have always respected the Tunnel Rats for this special competence.