The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold Read Free Book Online Page B

River, his soldiers had seen only two fleeting glimpses of the enemy running through the jungle.
    Haldane spent half the day by the river. Then, late in the afternoon, the communications net began to reveal that the 173rd Airborne, and the Australians to the north, had at last made contact with the Viet Cong—in tunnels. On Tuesday morning at first light, Haldane’s battalion began to retrace its steps. It was beginning to dawn on the commander what had happened. He had actually walked over the enemy. He began a detailed search for tunnel entrances. But nothing was obvious to the eye. A few GIs, very reluctantly, lowered themselves into a trench, explored it, and discovered an air-raid shelter large enough to house several men. But no tunnels. The men, now hot, tired, and nervous at their inability to fight the kind of infantry war they had been taught to fight, waited for further instructions. Platoon Sergeant Stewart Green, a slim, wiry 130-pound NCO, hunched down to relax. Suddenly he leaped up cursing. The country was full of scorpions, huge fire ants, and snakes, and he had just been bitten on his backside, or at least assumed he had. But as he searched the dead leaves on the ground with his rufle butt, ready to crush his tormentor, he discovered the bite had come from a nail. A further, gingerly conducted search disclosed a small wooden trapdoor, perforated with air holes and with beveled sides that prevented it from falling into the tunnel below. The first tunnel had been found.
    Haldane ran almost gratefully toward it, but as he stood at the entrance he realized that there were no training manuals to tell him precisely what to do next. When the battalion had trained for combat back at Fort Riley in Kansas, the programhad not included instruction in tunnel warfare. The lessons of the stunning Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu, if studied, had not been digested. Neither the Americans nor the Australians had any experience of dealing with what to them was a new phenomenon. But they were relatively unconcerned; the famous OJT principle (On-the-Job Training) would somehow see them through. But in January 1966, muddling through, adapting, applying combat empiricism, would not be enough to wipe out the Communist presence in the “liberated zones” of Cu Chi district.
    Stewart Green volunteered to explore the tunnel he had uncovered with his behind. He leaped in and, with Haldane’s encouragement, others joined the platoon sergeant to explore the black depths. The men penetrated a short distance and found hospital supplies, which were brought up and handed to the unit’s S-2 (intelligence officer), Captain Marvin Kennedy. As Kennedy was analyzing the packages in detail he suddenly heard shouts; he turned and was astonished to see the tunnel explorers shoot out of the tunnel hole in breathless haste. Stewart Green was last out, sweating and covered in dirt. He told Kennedy that they had found a side passage from the main tunnel and had suddenly stumbled on some thirty Viet Cong soldiers, whom he could see in the dim light of a candle one of them was holding, which the Communists had rapidly extinguished as the GIs blundered near to them. Captain Kennedy, delighted that he had some thirty enemy trapped under his very feet, called a Vietnamese interpreter and ordered him to return to the tunnel with the unfortunate Stewart Green and order the enemy to surrender. The two men reluctantly went back down. Their mission lasted all of a few minutes and they returned embarrassed and empty-handed. Green explained to Captain Kennedy that the interpreter had actually refused to talk to the enemy. The captain quizzed the interpreter, who balefully informed the American officer that he had to “hold his breath” in the tunnel because “there was no air” and he would have “died if he had started to talk.” From a military rather than a medical point of view, that last statement might have