Avenger

By the time Cal Dexter reached Vietnam, they had been in existence for three years, the only unit whose Purple Heart ratio was 100 percent.

The commanding officer of the moment was known as Rat Six. Everyone else had a different number. Once joined, they kept to themselves and everyone regarded them with a kind of awe, as men will be awkward in the company of one sentenced to die.

Rat Six had been right in his gut guess. The tough little kid from the construction sites of New Jersey with his deadly fists and feet, Paul Newman eyes, and steel nerves, was a natural.

He took him down into the tu

To the rest of the Big Red One, the pair became a legend, spoken of in whispers. The officer was "the Badger" and the newly promoted sergeant was "the Mole."

5 The Tu

In the army, a mere six years in age difference between two young men can seem like a generation. The older man appears almost a father figure. Thus it was with the Badger and the Mole. At twenty-five, the officer was six years older. More, he came from a different social background with a far better education.

His parents were professional people. After high school he had spent a year touring Europe, seeing ancient Greece and Rome, historical Italy, Germany, France, and Britain.

He had spent four years in college getting his degree in civil and mechanical engineering before facing the draught. He, too, had opted for the three-year commission and gone straight to OCS at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Fort Belvoir was then churning out junior officers at a hundred a month. Nine months after entering, the Badger had emerged as a second lieutenant, rising to first when he shipped to Vietnam to join the First Engineer Battalion of the Big Red One. He, too, had been headhunted for the Tu

But within a month it was clear that once the two men went into the tu

Before either man had reached Vietnam, the U. S. High Command had realised that trying to blow the tu

Attempts had been made to drown the tu

This, it was believed, was down there somewhere, between the southern tip of the Iron Triangle at the junction of the Saigon and Thi Tinh Rivers and the Boi Loi Woods at the Cambodian end. To find that headquarters, to wipe out the senior cadres, to grab the huge harvest of intelligence that must be down there-that was the aim and, if it could be achieved, a prize beyond rubies.

In fact, the headquarters was under the Ho Bo Woods, upcountry by the bank of the Saigon River, and was never found. But every time the tankdozers or the Rome Ploughs uncovered another tu

The entrances were always vertical, and that created the first danger. To go down feet first was to expose the lower half of the body to any VC waiting in the side tu

To go down head first meant risking the spear, bayonet, or pointblank bullet through the base of the throat.

The safest way seemed to be to descend slowly until the last five feet, then drop fast and fire at the slightest movement inside the tu

Once inside the tu

Some horrors needed no Vietcong at all. The nectar bat and black-bearded tomb bat were both cave dwellers and roosted through the daylight in the tu

None of these were lethal; that honour went to the bamboo viper, whose bite meant death in thirty minutes. The trap was usually a yard of bamboo embedded in the roof, jutting downward at an angle and emerging by no more than an inch.

The snake was inside the tube, head downward, trapped and enraged, its escape blocked by a plug of kapok at the lower end. Threaded through this was a length of fishing line, heading through a hole in a peg in the wall on one side, thence to a peg across the tu

And there were the rats, real rats. In the tu

But a skim of clay will not stop a rat. They had their endless food source and grew to the size of cats. Yet the Vietcong lived down there for weeks or even months on end, challenging the Americans to come into their domain, find them, and fight them.

Those who did it and survived became accustomed to the stench as well as to the hideous life-forms. It was always hot, sticky, cramped, and pitch dark. And it stank. The VC had to perform their bodily functions in earthenware jars; when full, these were buried in the floors and capped with a plug of clay. But the rats scratched them open.

Coming from the most heavily armed country on earth, the GIs who became Tu

For a Tu