Avenger (5 page)

The major studied his forms and looked up.

"When was this?"

"Last year, sir. Between leaving school and signing on."

"Your papers say you are just eighteen. That must have been when you were seventeen."

"Yes, sir."

"That's illegal."

"Lordy, sir, I'm sorry about that. I had no idea."

Beside him he could feel the ramrod-stiff corporal trying to keep a straight face. But the major's problem was solved.

"I guess it's engineering for you, soldier. Any objections?"

"No, sir."

Very few said goodbye at Fort Dix with tears in their eyes. Boot camp is not a vacation. But they did come out, most of them, with a straight back, square shoulders, a buzz cut head, the uniform of a private soldier, a kit bag and a travel pass to their next posting. In Dexter's case it was Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for Advanced Individual Training.

That was basic engineering; not just driving a bulldozer, but driving anything with wheels or tracks, engine repair and vehicle maintenance and, had there been time, fifty other courses besides. Another three months later, he achieved his Military Operational Skill certificate and was posted to Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Most of the world only knows Fort Knox as the US Federal Reserve's gold depository, fantasy Mecca of every daydreaming bank robber and subject of numerous books and films.

But it is also a huge army base and home of the Armour school. On any base that size there is always some building going on, or tank pits to be dug, or a ditch to be filled in. Cal Dexter spent six months as one of the Post Engineers at Fort Knox before being summoned to the Command office.

He had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday; he carried the rank of Private First Class. The commanding officer looked grim, as one about to impart bereavement. Cal thought something might have happened to his father.

"It's Vietnam," said the major.

"Great," said the PFC. The major, who would happily spend the rest of his career in his anonymous marital home on the base in Kentucky, blinked several times.

"Well, that's all right then," he said.

A fortnight later Cal Dexter packed his kit bag said goodbye to the mates he had made on the post and boarded the bus sent to pick up a dozen transferees. A week later he walked down the ramp of a C5 Galaxy and into the sweltering, sticky heat of Saigon Airport, military side.

Coming out of the airport, he was riding up front with the bus driver. "What do you do?" asked the corporal as he swung the troop bus between the hangars.

"Drive bulldozers," said Dexter.

"Well, I guess you'll be a REMF like the rest of us round here."

"REMF?" queried Dexter. He had never heard the word before.

"Rear Echelon Mother F****r," supplied the corporal.

Dexter was getting his first taste of the Vietnam status ladder. Nine-tenths of GIs who went to Vietnam never saw a Vietcong, never fired a shot in anger, and rarely even heard one fired. The 50,000 names of the dead on the Memorial Wall by the Reflecting Pool in Washington, with few exceptions, come from the other ten per cent. Even with a second army of Vietnamese cooks, launderers and bottle-washers, it still took nine GIs in the rear to keep one out in the jungle trying to win the war.

"Where's your posting?" asked the corporal.

"First Engineer Battalion, Big Red One."

The driver gave a squeak like a disturbed fruit bat.

"Sorreee," he said. "Spoke too soon. That's Lai Khe. Edge of the Iron Triangle. Rather you than me, buddy."

"It's bad?"

"Dante's vision of hell, pal."

Dexter had never heard of Dante and presumed he was in a different unit. He shrugged.

There was indeed a road from Saigon to Lai Khe; it was Highway 13 via Phu Cuong, up the eastern edge of the Triangle to Ben Cat and then on another fifteen miles. But it was unwise to take it unless there was an armoured escort, and even then never at night. This was all heavily forested country and teemed with Vietcong ambushes. When Cal Dexter arrived inside the huge defended perimeter that housed the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, it was by helicopter. Throwing his kit bag once again over his shoulder, he asked directions for the HQ of the 1st Engineer Battalion.

On the way he passed the vehicle park and saw something that took his breath away. Accosting a passing GI he asked:

"What the hell is that?"

"Hogjaw," said the soldier laconically. "For ground clearing."

Along with the 25th "Tropic Lightning' Infantry Division out of Hawaii, the Big Red One tried to cope with what purported to be the most dangerous area of the whole peninsula, the Iron Triangle. So thick was the vegetation, so impenetrable for the invader and such a protective labyrinth for the guerrilla, that the only way to try to level the playing field was to clear the jungle.

To do this, two awesome machines had been developed. One was the tank dozer an M-48 medium tank with a bulldozer blade fitted up front. With the blade down, the tank did the pushing while the armoured turret protected the crew inside. But much bigger was the Rome Plow or hog jaw

This was a terrible brute if you happened to be a shrub or a tree or a rock. A sixty-ton tracked vehicle, the D7E, it was fitted with a specially forged, curving blade whose protruding, hardened-steel lower edge could splinter a tree with a three-foot trunk.

The solitary driver operator sat in his cabin way up top, protected by a 'headache bar' above him to stop falling debris from crushing him dead, and with an armoured cab to fend off sniper bullets or guerrilla attack.

The "Rome' in the name had nothing to do with the capital of Italy, but with Rome, Georgia, where the brute was made. And the point of the Rome Plow was to make any piece of territory that had received its undivided attention unusable as a sanctuary for Vietcong ever again.

Dexter walked to the battalion office, threw up a salute and introduced himself. "Morning, sir. PFC Calvin Dexter reporting for duty, sir. I'm your new hog jaw operator. Sir."

The lieutenant behind the desk sighed wearily. He was nearing the end of his one-year tour. He had flatly refused to extend. He loathed the country, the invisible but lethal Vietcong, the heat, the damp, the mosquitoes and the fact that once again he had a prickly heat rash enveloping his private parts and rear end. The last thing he needed with the temperature nudging ninety was a joker.

But Cal Dexter was a tenacious young man. He badgered and pestered. Two weeks after arriving on post he had his Rome Plow. The first time he took it out, a more experienced driver tried to offer him some advice. He listened, climbed high into the cab, and drove it on a combined operation with infantry support all day. He handled the towering machine his way, differently, and better.

He was watched with increasing frequency by a lieutenant, also an engineer, but one who seemed to have no duties to detain him; a quiet young man who said little but observed much.

"He's tough," said the officer to himself a week later. "He's cocky, he's a loner and he's talented. Let's see if he chickens out easily."

There was no reason for the big machine-gunner to hassle the much smaller plow-driver, but he just did. The third time he messed with the PFC from New Jersey, it came to blows. But not out in the open. Against the rules. But there was a patch of open ground behind the mess hall. It was agreed they would sort out their differences, bare knuckles, after dark.

They met by the light of headlamps, with a hundred fellow soldiers in a circle, taking bets mostly against the smaller man. The general presumption was that they would witness a repeat of the slugging match between George Kennedy and Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. They were wrong.

No one mentioned Queensberry Rules so the smaller man walked straight up to the gunner, slipped beneath the first head-removing swing and kicked him hard under the kneecap. Circling his one-legged opponent, the 'dozer driver landed two kidney punches and a knee in the groin.

When the big man's head came down to his level he drove the middle knuckle of his right hand into the left temple, and for the gunner, the lights went out.

"You don't fight fair," said the stakeholder when Dexter held out his hand for his winnings.

"No, and I don't lose either," he said. Out beyond the ring of lights the officer nodded at the two MPs with him, and they moved in to make their arrest. Later the limping gunner got his promised twenty dollars.

Thirty days in the cooler was the penalty, the more so as he declined to name his opponent. He slept perfectly well on the unpadded slab in the cell and was still asleep when someone started running a metal spoon up and down the bars. It was dawn.

"On your feet, soldier," said a voice. Dexter came awake, slid off the slab and stood to attention. The man had a lieutenant's single silver bar on his collar. "Thirty days in here is really boring," said the officer.

"I'll survive, sir," said the ex-PFC, now busted back to private.

"Or you could walk now."

"I think there has to be a catch to that, sir."

"Oh, there is. You leave behind the big, jerk-off toys and come and join my outfit. Then we find out if you're as tough as you think you are."

"And your outfit, sir?"

"They call me Rat Six. Shall we go?"

The officer signed the prisoner out and they adjourned for breakfast to the smallest and most exclusive mess hall in the whole 1st Division. No one was allowed in without permission and there were at that time only fourteen members. Dexter made fifteen, but the number would go down to thirteen in a week when two more were killed.

There was a weird emblem on the door of the 'hootch', as they called their tiny club. It showed an upright rodent with snarling face, phallic tongue, a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. Dexter had joined the Tunnel Rats.

For six years, in a constantly shifting sequence of men, the Tunnel Rats did the dirtiest, deadliest and by far the scariest job in the Vietnam War, yet so secret were their doings and so few their number that most people today, even Americans, have hardly or never heard of them.

There were probably not more than 350 over the period: a small unit among the engineers of the Big Red One, an equal unit drawn from the Tropic Lightning (25th) Division. A hundred never came home at all. About a further hundred were dragged, screaming, nerves gone, from their combat zone and consigned to trauma therapy, never to fight again. The rest went back to the States and, being by nature taciturn, laconic loners, seldom mentioned what they did.

Even the USA, not normally shy about its war heroes, cast no medal and raised no plaque. They came from nowhere, did what they did because it had to be done, and went back to oblivion. And their story all started because of a sergeant's sore bottom.

The USA was not the first invader of Vietnam, just the last. Before the Americans were the French, who colonized the three provinces of Tonkin (north), Annam (centre) and Cochinchina (south) into their empire, along with Laos and Cambodia.

But the invading Japanese ousted the French in 1942 and after Japan's defeat in 1945 the Vietnamese believed that at last they would be united and free of foreign domination. The French had other ideas, and came back. The leading independence fighter (there were others at first) was the Communist Ho Chi Minh. He formed the Vietminh resistance army and the Viets went back to the jungle to fight on. And on and on, for as long as it took.

A stronghold of resistance was the heavily forested farming zone northwest of Saigon, running up to the Cambodian border. The French accorded it their special attention (as would later the Americans) with punitive expedition after expedition. To seek sanctuary the local farmers did not flee; they dug.

They had no technology, just their ant-like capacity for hard work, their patience, their local knowledge and their cunning. They also had mattocks, shovels and palm-weave baskets. How many million tons of dirt they shifted will never be calculated. But dig and shift they did. By the time the French left after their 1954 defeat the whole of the Iron Triangle was a warren of shafts and tunnels. And no one knew about them.

The Americans came, propping up a regime the Viets regarded as puppets of yet another colonial power. They went back to the jungle and back to guerrilla war. And they resumed digging. By 1964 they had two hundred miles of tunnels, chambers, passages and hideouts, and all underground.

The complexity of the tunnel system, when the Americans finally began to comprehend what was down there, took the breath away. The down-shafts were so disguised as to be invisible at a few inches range at the level of the jungle floor. Down below were up to five levels of galleries, the lowest at fifty feet, linked by narrow, twisting passages that only a Vietnamese or a small wiry Caucasian could crawl through.

The levels were linked by trap doors, some going up, others heading down. These too were camouflaged, to look like blank end-of-tunnel walls. There were stores, assembly caverns, dormitories, repair shops, eating halls and even hospitals. By 1966 a full combat brigade could hide down there, but until the Tet Offensive that number was never needed.

Penetration by an aggressor was discouraged. If a vertical shaft was discovered, there could well be a cunning booby trap at the bottom. Firing down the tunnels served no purpose; they changed direction every few yards so a bullet would go straight into the end-wall.