The US Army’s Tunnel Rats
When US ground troops arrived in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, they found a tunnel system stretching to around 250 kilometers. The Vietnamese had begun construction in anticipation of a Japanese invasion during the Second World War, and since then it had grown exponentially. It was an innovation that would force the US Army to adapt its style of warfare if it were to have any chance of taking on guerrilla forces in the Vietnamese jungles.
First, the US tried other tactics to target soldiers in these tunnels: sending in sniffer-dogs, carpet-bombing, flooding them with gas, and even flooding them with water in an attempt to either flush enemies out or entomb them within. As time went by, however, the US Army realized that in extreme circumstances more direct action was needed. So they called upon volunteers known as tunnel rats.
These men were tasked with entering these tunnels and pursuing that light at the end of it—normally a Viet Cong with a candle—hopefully leading to them locating and destroying the enemy’s resources and cutting off their supplies. Some of the things the tunnel rats came across were baffling. On one occasion they discovered an M-48 tank, buried six-feet underground and being used as a Viet Cong operations center.
The tunnel rats had to be brave, mad or a mixture of both. And small too, given the tunnels were designed by the shorter-on-average Vietnamese. They would often enter the tunnel in pairs so that if the man at the front triggered a mine or encountered an enemy the one behind would avoid the same fate. Or support him, depending on the lethality of the encounter.
Though rudimentary, the training tunnel rats received was designed to help them in these close quarters. This was especially the case with CEAIT—Combat Engineer Advanced Individual Training—which taught them how to use and detect explosives, identify booby traps (responsible for around 11 percent of US casualties during the Vietnam War) and orientate themselves around these terrifying labyrinths.
A communist wasn’t the worst thing you could encounter in the tunnels. From fire ants to venomous snakes to giant rats, there was no shortage of terrifying Vietnamese wildlife and the Viet Cong exploited this well, priming booby traps that released creepy crawlies. One tunnel rat triggered a trap that released dozens of scorpions, damaging his morale so badly he refused to enter another tunnel. Another was bitten and strangled by an enormous snake; his violet-colored corpse dragged out by his traumatized partner.