Avenger (7 page)

Through all this misery, discomfort and fear there occurred a moment now and again when the Tunnel Rats hit the mother lode. This would be a cavern, sometimes recently vacated in a hurry, which had clearly been an important sub-Headquarters. Then boxes of papers, evidence, clues, maps and other mementoes would be ferried back to the waiting intelligence experts from G2.

Twice the Badger and the Mole came across such Aladdin's caves. Senior brass, unsure how to cope with such strange young men, handed out medals and warm words. But the Public Affairs people, normally avid to tell the world how well the war was going, were warned off. No one mentioned a word. One facility trip was arranged but the 'guest' from PA got fifteen yards down a 'safe' tunnel and had hysterics. After that, silence reigned.

But there were long periods of no combat, for the Rats as for all the other GIs in Vietnam. Some slept the hours away, or wrote letters, longing for the end of tour and the journey home. Some drank the time away, or played cards or craps. Many smoked, and not always Marlboro. Some became addicts. Others read.

Cal Dexter was one of those. Talking with his officer-partner he realized how blighted was his formal education, and started again from square one. He found he was fascinated by history.

The base librarian was delighted and impressed, and prepared a long list of must-read books which he then obtained from Saigon.

Dexter worked his way through Attic Greece and Ancient Rome, learned of Alexander who had wept that, at thirty-one, he had defeated the known world and there were no more worlds to conquer.

He learned of Rome's decline and fall, of the Dark Ages and medieval Europe, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Age of Elegance and the Age of Reason. He was particularly fascinated by the early years of the birth of the American Colonies, the Revolution and why his own country had had a vicious civil war just ninety years before he was born.

He did one other thing in those long periods when monsoon or orders kept him confined to base. With the help of the elderly Vietnamese who swept and cleaned the hootch for them all, he learned workaday Vietnamese until he could speak enough to make himself understood and understand more than that.

Nine months into his first tour two things happened. He took his first combat wound and the Badger ended his twelvemonth stint.

The bullet came from a VC who had been hiding in one of the tunnels as Dexter came down the entrance shaft. To confuse such a waiting enemy, Dexter had developed a technique. He threw a grenade down the shaft, then went in fast, hand over fist. If the grenade did not blow away the false floor of the shaft, then there was no punji-stick trap down there. If it did, he had time to stop before he hit the spikes.

The same grenade ought to shred any VC waiting out of sight. On this occasion the VC was there, but standing well down the passage with a Kalashnikov AK47. He survived the blast, but injured, and fired one shot at the fast-falling Tunnel Rat. Dexter hit the deck with pistol out and fired back three times. The VC went down, crawled away, but was found later, dead. Dexter was nicked in the upper left arm, a flesh wound that healed well but kept him upstairs for a month. The Badger problem was more serious.

Soldiers will admit it, policemen will confirm it; there is no substitute for a partner you can utterly rely on. Since they formed their partnership in the early days, the Badger and the Mole did not really want to go into the tunnels with anyone else. In nine months, Dexter had seen four Rats killed down there. In one case, the surviving Tunnel Rat had come back to the surface screaming and crying. He would never go down a tunnel again, even after weeks with the psychiatrists.

But the body of the one who never made it was still down there. The Badger and the Mole went in with ropes to find the man and drag him out for repatriation and a Christian burial. His throat had been cut. No open casket for him.

Of the original thirteen, four more had quit at the end of their time. Eight down. Six recruits had joined. They were back to eleven in the whole unit.

"I don't want to go down there with anyone else," Dexter told his partner when the Badger came to visit him in the base clinic.

"Nor me if it were the other way round," said the Badger. They settled it by agreeing that if the Badger extended for a second one-year tour, the Mole would do the same in three months. So it was done. Both accepted a second tour and went back to the tunnels. The Division's Commanding General, embarrassed by his own gratitude, handed out two more medals.

There were certain rules down in those tunnels that were never broken. One was: never go down alone. Because of his remarkable hazard antennae the Mole was usually up at point with the Badger several yards behind. Another rule was: never fire off all six shots at once. It tells the VC you are now out of ammo, and a sitting duck. Two months into his second tour, in

May 1970, Cal Dexter nearly broke them both, and was lucky to survive.

The pair had entered a newly discovered shaft up in the Ho Bo woods. The Mole was up front and had crawled three hundred yards along a tunnel that changed direction four times. He had fingertip-felt two booby traps and disconnected them. He failed to notice that the

Badger had confronted his own personal pet hatred, two tomb bats that had fallen into his hair, and had stopped, unable to speak or go on.

The Mole was crawling alone, when he saw or thought he saw the dimmest of glows coming from round the next corner. It was so dim he thought his retina might be playing tricks. He slithered silently to the corner and stopped, pistol in right hand. The glow also stayed motionless, just round the corner. He waited like that for ten minutes, unaware his frozen partner was out of sight behind him. Then he decided to break the stand-off. He lunged his torso round the corner.

Ten feet away was a Vietcong, on hands and knees. Between them was the source of light, a shallow lamp of coconut oil with a tiny wick floating in it. The VC had evidently been pushing it along the floor to accomplish his mission, checking out the booby traps. For half a second the two enemies stared at each other, then both reacted.

With the back of his fingers the Vietnamese flicked the dish of hot nut-oil straight at the American's face. The light was snuffed out at once. Dexter raised his left hand to protect his eyes and felt the searing oil splash across the back of his knuckles. With his right hand he fired three times as he heard a frantic scuffling sound retreating down the tunnel. He was sorely tempted to use the other three rounds, but he did not know how many more were down there.

Had the Badger and the Mole but known it, they were crawling towards the headquarters complex of the Vietcong's entire Zone Command. Guarding it were fifty diehards.

Back in the States there was, all this while, a covert little unit called the Limited War Laboratory. Throughout the Vietnam War they dreamed up splendid ideas to help the Tunnel Rats, though none of the scientists ever went down a tunnel. They shipped their ideas over' to Vietnam where the Rats, who did go down tunnels, tried them out, found them gloriously impractical and shipped them back again.

In the summer of 1970 the Limited War Laboratory came up with a new kind of gun for close-quarter work in a confined space. And at last they had a winner. It was a .44 Magnum handgun modified down to a three-inch barrel so as not to get in the way, but with special ammunition.

The very heavy slug of this .44 was divided into four segments. They were held together as one by the cartridge, but on emerging from the barrel separated to make four slugs instead of one. The Tunnel Rats found it very good for close-quarter work and likely to be deadly in the tunnels because if fired twice it would fill the tunnel ahead with eight projectiles instead of two. A far greater chance of hitting the Vietcong.

Only seventy-five of these guns were ever made. The Tunnel Rats used them for six months, then they were withdrawn. Someone had discovered that they probably contravened the

Geneva Convention. So the seventy-four traceable Smith and Wesson revolvers were sent back to the States and never seen again.

The Tunnel Rats had a short and simple prayer. "If I have to take a bullet, so be it. If I have to take a knife, tough luck. But please, Lord, don't ever bury me alive down there."

It was in the summer of 1970 that the Badger was buried alive.

Either the GIs should not have been down there or the B-52 bombers out of Guam should not have been bombing from 30,000 feet. But someone had ordered the bombers and that someone forgot to tell the Tunnel Rats.

It happens. Not a lot, but no one who has ever been in the armed forces will fail to spot a FUBAR: fouled up beyond all recognition.

It was the new thinking: to destroy the tunnel complexes by caving them in with massive explosions dropped by B-52s. Partly this had been caused by the change in psychology.

Back in the States the tide of opinion was now comprehensively against the Vietnam War.

Parents were now joining their children in the anti-war demonstrations.

In the war zone, the Tet Offensive of thirty months earlier had not been forgotten. The morale was simply dribbling away into the jungle floor. It was still unspoken among the High Command, but the mood was spreading that this war could not be won. It would be three more years before the last GI would board the last plane out of there, but by the summer of 1970 the decision was made to destroy the tunnels in the 'free strike zones' with bombs. The Iron Triangle was a free strike zone.

Because the entire 25th Infantry Division was based there, the bombers had instructions that no bomb should fall less than three kilometers from the nearest US unit. But that day High Command forgot about the Badger and the Mole, who were in a different division.

They were in a complex outside Ben Sue, in the second level down, when they felt rather than heard the first 'crump' of bombs above them. Forgetting the VC, they crawled frantically towards the shaft going up to level one.

The Mole made it and was ten yards towards the final shaft up to daylight when the roof fall came. It was behind him. He yelled, "Badger." There was no reply. He knew there was a small alcove twenty yards ahead because they had passed it coming down. Drenched in sweat he dragged himself into it and used the extra width to turn around and head back.

He met the dirt pile with his fingertips. Then he felt a hand, then a second, but nothing beyond that except fallen earth. He began to dig, hurling the slag behind him but blocking his exit as he did so.

It took him five minutes to liberate his partner's head, five more to free the torso. The bombs had ceased, but up top the falling debris had blocked the air flues. They began to run out of oxygen.

"Get out of here, Cal," hissed the Badger in the darkness. "Come back with help later. I'll be OK."

Dexter continued scrabbling at the dirt with his fingertips. He had lost two nails entirely. It would take over an hour to get help. His partner would not survive half that time with the air flues blocked. He put on his flashlight and shoved the lamp in his partner's hand.

"Hold that. Direct the beam back over your shoulder."

By the yellow light he could see the mass covering the Badger's legs. It took another half hour. Then the crawl back to daylight, squeezing past the rubble he had cast behind him as he dug. His lungs were heaving, his head spinning; his partner was semi-conscious. He crawled round the last corner and felt the air.

In January 1971 the Badger reached the end of his second tour. Extension for a third year was forbidden, but he had had enough anyway. The night before he flew back to the States, the Mole secured permission to accompany his partner into Saigon to say farewell. They went into the capital with an armoured convoy. Dexter was confident he could hitch a lift back in a helicopter the next day.

The two young men had a slap-up meal then toured the bars. They avoided the hordes of prostitutes but concentrated on some serious drinking. At two in the morning they found themselves, feeling no pain, somewhere in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon across the river.

There was a tattoo parlour, still open and still available for business, especially in dollars. The Chinaman was wisely contemplating a future outside Vietnam.

Before they left him and took the ferry back across the river the young Americans had a tattoo created, one for each. On the left forearm. It showed a rat, not the aggressive rat on the door of the hootch at Lai Khe, but a saucy rat. Facing away from the viewer but looking back over his shoulder. A broad wink, trousers down, a mooning rat. They were still giggling until they sobered up. Then it was too late.

The Badger flew back to the States the next morning. The Mole followed ten weeks later, in mid-March. On 7 April 1971 the Tunnel Rats formally ceased to exist.

That was the day Cal Dexter, despite the urging of several senior officers, mustered out of the army and returned to civilian life.

Chapter SIX

The Tracker

THERE ARE VERY FEW MILITARY OUTFITS MORE SECRETIVE THAN the British Special Air Service regiment, but if there is one that makes the tight-lipped SAS look like the Jerry Springer show, it is the Det.

The 14th Independent Intelligence Company, also called the 14th Int, or the Detachment, or the Det, is an army unit drawing its recruits from right across the board, with (and unlike the all-male SAS) quite a proportion of women soldiers.