‘It needed a lot of moxie. You could blow yourself out of there in a heartbeat’
The tunnel rats of the Vietnam War were small in number and stature but their courage, as they inched through pitch-black subterranean labyrinths, was immeasurable.
The National Museum of the United States Army dedicates a page to the rats on its website, concluding: “In a complicated war with a painful history in American culture, the courage, skill, and nerve of the tunnel rats shone as they invented a military skill in the midst of mortal danger.”
The tunnels, first discovered near Saigon in 1966, were usually so small only one soldier could enter at a time and, according to the National Museum, “most were short (most less than 5ft 5in) with a slight, wiry build. The job also required a special kind of mental toughness: crawling for hours in claustrophobic darkness expecting mortal danger could break down even the bravest men.
“The job also demanded lightning-quick reflexes and no hesitation: confrontations with venomous snakes or Viet Cong often occurred at hand-to-hand range.”
Thousands of underground tunnels and chambers criss-crossed Vietnam during the war, like those at Cu Chi beneath the then Saigon district and city (now Ho Chi Minh City) and at the Cambodian border as well as on the border between North and South Vietnam, known then as the DMZ (demilitarized zone) where Scots veteran John Keaveney operated. There were never more than 100 rats in Vietnam at one time with around 700 in total.
One US captain, Herbert Thornton, put together the volunteer teams trained to enter and clear the Viet Cong tunnels and said a tunnel rat “had to have an inquisitive mind, a lot of guts and a lot of real moxie... knowing what to touch and what not to touch to stay alive because you could blow yourself out of there in a heartbeat.”
Booby traps were common beneath ground and the rats could expect to face wired explosives, poisonous gas, stake pits, and tethered venomous snakes. Harold Roper, a tunnel rat in the early days of 1966, recalled: “I felt more fear than I’ve ever come close to feeling before or since.”
In their book, The Tunnels Of Cu Chi: A Remarkable Story Of War, authors Tom Mangold and John Penycate detail the subterranean war. Keaveney told The Sunday Post: “There were numerous tunnels around the DMZ in the mountains near Laos. If they were found then someone had to go in and inspect them.
“It couldn’t be some 6ft, 190lb soldier. It had to be some guy my height, short and on the slim side. This was a job that was done by volunteers. I believe there were 700 total volunteers from 1964 to 1973. Going into the tunnels you needed to be real careful, they were booby trapped. They were so big they had hospitals in them. For those ones we’d have to call airstrikes on them. My job was to go down and blow them up from within, just make them inoperable.”
In 1969, the tunnels were finally destroyed for good by B-52 carpet-bombing raids but not before they had already contributed significantly to the war.
Today some of these underground wartime warrens serve as tourist attractions for the many thousands of travellers who visit the country that was once South Vietnam.