The TERRIFYING First Time Every Vietnam Tunnel Rat Went Underground HH

You are 19 years old lying in the red dirt of a Vietnamese jungle staring at a hole barely wider than your shoulders. A sergeant hands you a pistol and a flashlight and says, “Check it out.” You have never been inside a tunnel before. Almost nobody has. Below you waits total darkness. Air you can barely breathe.

>> [music] >> And maybe a man who has lived down there for years. The soldiers who went down were called tunnel rats. And many of them feared that first minute underground more than anything the enemy ever did to them above ground. To understand the fear you first have to understand the ground. Somewhere under the jungle northwest of Saigon ran one of the strangest battlefields of the entire war.

The historians Tom Mangold and John Pennecate who wrote the definitive account of this underground war described a hidden world the Americans barely knew existed. According to history the Viet Cong tunnel network around Cu Chi linked base to base across an estimated 250 km reaching from the edge of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.

That figure is an estimate and sources vary but even the low numbers describe something enormous. And these tunnels were far older than the men crawling into them. The first passages were not dug against the Americans at all. They were carved out years earlier in the war against the French and then widened and deepened as the new war grew.

These were not muddy foxholes. Dug by hand through sticky red clay some passages ran three levels deep. The lowest chambers as far as 10 m beneath the surface. Down there the Viet Cong built field hospitals, sleeping quarters, weapons workshops. Even rooms where they staged performances. They cooked underground on a clever stove named for the man who designed it that funneled the smoke sideways and let it leak out far away as a thin haze, so no plane above could spot a kitchen.

Whole villages had moved below ground to survive the bombing. And here was the problem for the American command. You cannot bomb what you cannot find, and you cannot win a tunnel you refuse to enter. Someone was going to have to go down there alone. At first, nobody knew how. Early in the war, commanders tried everything to avoid sending men underground.

They pumped in gas. They sent dogs down the shafts. They dropped explosives into the holes and hoped. None of it worked because the Viet Cong had built the tunnels to defeat exactly those tricks with sharp bends, water traps, and hidden trapdoors that sealed one section off from the next. So, the job fell to volunteers.

According to the National Museum of the United States Army, it was a chemical officer with the First Infantry Division, Captain Herbert Thornton, who in 1966 pulled together the first real teams trained to go in, clear, and search the tunnels. The men who did it were usually the smaller soldiers, wiry enough to fit through a shoulder-wide hole, and steady enough not to panic in the dark.

Many of them gave up cigarettes and gum because a sharp sense of smell could warn them of an enemy they could not see. And there were never many of them. At any one time, only around 100 or so were working the tunnels across the whole country, a tiny brotherhood for such an enormous war. They gave themselves a grim motto, dog Latin >> [music] >> that translates roughly to not worth a rat’s ass.

As the story is usually told, the name itself was almost an accident. An Australian officer called his men tunnel ferrets. A reporter who had never seen a ferret wrote it down as tunnel rat, and the name stuck to all of them. One rat became a legend among them, a sergeant named Robert Batten, known simply as Batman, who the enemy reportedly wanted dead so badly they put him on a most wanted list.

He taught the others two rules that kept men alive. Underground, there was no rank. Only who went first. And never fire more than three shots before reloading. Because a patient enemy in the dark would count your rounds and rush you on the fourth. So, what did a man actually take with him into a hole in the ground? Less than you would think.

The standard sidearm was the heavy .45 caliber pistol, but a lot of rats came to hate it underground. Fire a .45 in a clay tube barely wider than your body, and the blast can leave you deaf and blind for the seconds that decide whether you live. The weapons historian Kevin Dockery, writing in Small Arms Review, described how many rats switched to quieter options.

Period reporting from Time magazine in 1967 noted that one team carried small .22 caliber pistols for exactly that reason. Because a full-sized round would shatter their eardrums at close range. The army did try to help. It issued a special kit built around a .38 revolver fitted with an aiming light and a silencer.

The rats mostly hated that, too. Because a glowing light in a pitch-black tunnel simply told the enemy where to aim. So, they improvised. They swapped to red-lensed flashlights, since the Viet Cong used white light and candles, and a red glow was harder to mistake for one of their own. And when a rat finally crawled back toward daylight, he learned to whistle in an agreed tune before he surfaced, so his own side would not mistake him for the enemy and shoot him as he came up.

The one tool nobody argued about was a knife. It never jammed. It never flashed. And it could probe for a tripwire or quietly cut one. Radios were close to useless once a man was below the surface. So his only link to the world above was often a length of wire or simple string held by a friend at the entrance who tried to map his path by feel.

A pistol, a flashlight, a knife, a piece of string, and the dark. That was the whole war for a tunnel rat. Now imagine going down there for the very first time. Here is what that first descent actually felt like. The moment your boots dropped below the surface, the light died behind you. And the heat closed in like a wet blanket.

Ahead of you, the passage twisted and dropped deliberately >> [music] >> into blind bends and low spots built to flood. So you never knew what was 2 ft in front of your face. American soldiers had a name for that feeling. History records that they called it the black echo. That dark, airless, crushing quiet where the loudest thing in the world becomes the sound of your own breathing.

Harold Roper, one of the early tunnel rats, put it plainly. In an account preserved by the National Museum of the United States Army, he said he felt more fear in those tunnels than he had ever come close to feeling before or since. Mike Stubbs, who served with the same division and told his story to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, remembered his flashlight dying somewhere deep inside a tunnel, 30 or 40 yards past the entrance, in a blackness so complete he could not see anything in front of his face.

After that, he never went down without a spare light. And for almost every one of them, it was the first time. Because nobody had ever done this before. Listen to one of the men describe that exact moment in his own words. >> We were going in there. We found a hole, so this sergeant throwed a .45 at me and a flashlight, and he said, “Check it out.

” I’ve never been in a hole before. Nobody does. I crawled probably 300 yards, came out into a ville. Never seen anything. Never got any ordinance or anything. And then, later on, he gets to thinking, “Well, you know, it’s cool down there. >> [music] >> Snakes, spiders, everything over there that crawls, [music] bites, is poisonous.

But I’ve I can honestly say I never seen anybody get bit by anything.” >> That was the whole of it. A hole, a stranger’s order, and a man crawling into the earth with no idea what waited below. Nobody had trained him for this. And there was no script, no dress rehearsal, no second try. The tunnel rats fought a secret war beneath the ground, but they were not the only ones.

While they crawled under Cu Chi, a small classified unit was running missions across borders that officially did not exist. A group called Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, better known as MACV-SOG. If that hidden war pulls you in, there is a full documentary ebook on SOG waiting in the description over at truevietnamdocs.com.

And if you would rather have the real history than the recycled myth, consider subscribing because that is the whole reason this channel exists. Now, back into the dark. Because the dark was only the beginning. Even an empty tunnel was rarely a safe one. The Viet Cong seeded their tunnels with traps and the rats [music] found them the hard way.

Grenades wired to trip lines, sharpened bamboo stakes set to catch a crawling man. In some accounts, even boxes of scorpions rigged to spill open when a soldier brushed the wrong wire. And then, there were the snakes, which is where the legend needs correcting. Yes, the Viet Cong did sometimes tie venomous snakes in the tunnels as living traps.

But you may have heard of the so-called two-step snake. The one whose bite supposedly kills you before you take two steps. That part is a myth. The nickname was real, born out of fear, but no snake in Vietnam drops a man that fast. The truth down there was frightening enough without the exaggeration. The greatest killer of all in those tunnels was not even a weapon.

Mangold and Pennycate record that disease bred in the damp [music] and the dark, and malaria alone claimed enormous numbers. The worst danger a rat could meet was another human being. Somewhere in that blackness, there might be a Viet Cong fighter who had lived underground for years, who knew every bend by touch, and who was simply waiting.

Fighting, when it came, happened at the length of an arm in the pitch dark with a knife or a pistol pressed almost against the other man. Jack Flowers, who led the tunnel rats of the Big Red One and went by the call sign Rat Six, told the Chicago Tribune what those moments did to a body. He said his adrenaline pumped like a river and that he could swear he heard his own heart beating in the dark.

Other rats said they could smell the enemy before they could see him and knew in that instant that they were not alone. It was not only the Americans who paid the price down there. During Operation Crimp in early 1966, the first time Allied troops tried to clear the tunnels at real scale, an Australian soldier named Corporal Bob Botel crawled into a dead end and could not get back out.

According to the Australian Army, he suffocated underground trapped in air that had simply run out. It did not help that both sides pumped tear gas and smoke into these holes with backpack blowers, poisoning the little air there was. The tunnels did not always need a weapon to kill you. So, how deadly was this job really? Here the numbers matter and they deserve honesty.

You will see claims online that a tunnel rat survived only 7 seconds or that just three in a hundred ever came home. Those numbers are inventions. They carry no source and they fall apart the moment you go looking for one. The real figures are grim enough. Writing in the New York Times, the tunnel rat Jim Merritt laid it out.

Around 700 men did this work between 1965 and 1972. [music] 36 of them were killed. Roughly 200 were wounded. That is a casualty rate close to one in three, [music] and those figures trace back to the United States Department of Defense, not to a rumor. One >> [music] >> in three. High, even by the brutal standard of that war.

And remember, the men in the dark were not the only ones down there. On the other side of the flashlight were guerrillas who had made the tunnels home. Among them a young woman the histories remember as Vo Thi Mo, who fought from hidden spider holes, and surgeons who performed operations by lamplight with almost nothing to dull the pain.

As many as 16,000 people could shelter in the Cu Chi network at once. To the rats crawling toward them, >> [music] >> they were only a smell, a sound, a shape in the black. During Operation Cedar Falls in 1967, the American Battle Monuments Commission [music] records that United States forces destroyed hundreds of tunnels and bunkers [music] and hauled out nearly half a million enemy documents.

Yet the network around Cu Chi outlasted the war, >> [music] >> and it stands today as a monument walked through now by tourists [music] where men once crawled with a pistol and a light. At a memorial temple built near the old tunnels, more than 40,000 names of the Vietnamese dead are carved into stone, according to the memorial’s own keepers.

A reminder that the war underground cost the other side far more than it ever cost the men who came down after [music] them. The men who went first left us the clearest picture there [music] is of courage without a spotlight. There were no cameras down there and no one cheering. Just a hole in the ground, a borrowed pistol, and the choice to go down anyway.

[music] As David Sumner remembered it, everybody was scared. And anybody who tells you they were not, you should stay well away from them. If you want the real story of this war instead of the myth, subscribe and stay with us. Next time, we cross to the other side of the tunnel wall, to the guerrillas who lived in that darkness for years, and the war they fought [music] back.

Until then, watch your step.