Avenger

"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 First 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 Tu

For six years, in a constantly shifting sequence of men, the Tu

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 Twenty-fifth 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 had done.

Even the United States, not normally shy about its war heroes, cast no medals and raised no plaques. 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 tired ass.

The United States was not the first invader of Vietnam, nor the last. Before the Americans were the French, who colonised the three provinces of Tonkin (north), A

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 Vietnamese 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, ru

They had no technology, just their antlike capacity for hard work, their patience, their local knowledge, and their cu

The Americans came, propping up a regime the Vietnamese regarded as puppets of yet another colonial power. They went back to the jungle and back to guerrilla warfare. And they resumed digging. By 1964, they had two hundred miles of tu

The complexity of the tu

The levels were linked by trap doors, some going up, others heading down. These, too, were camouflaged to look like blank end-of-tu

Penetration by an aggressor was discouraged. If a vertical shaft was discovered, there could well be a cu

Dynamiting did not work; there were scores of alternate galleries within the pitchblack maze down there, but only a local would know them. Gas did not work; they were fitted with water seals, like the U-bend in a lavatory pipe.

The network ran under the jungle from the suburbs of Saigon almost to the Cambodian border. There were various other networks elsewhere but nothing like the tu

After a monsoon, the laterite clay was pliable, easy to dig, scrape back, and drag away in baskets. Dry, it set like concrete.

After the passing of Ke

At first it was convenient to presume the VC were peasants by day, lost among the black pyjama-clad millions, switching to guerrillas at night. But why so many casualties by day and no one to fire back at? In January 1966, the Big Red One decided to raze the Iron Triangle once and for all. It was Operation Crimp.

They started at one end, fa

The GIs turned back and went over the same ground. Nothing. No enemy. They took more fatalities, always in the back. They discovered a few foxholes, a brace of air-raid shelters, empty, offering no cover. More sniper fire but no ru

On day four, Sgt. Stewart Green, massively fed up as were his comrades around him, had sat down for a rest. In two seconds he was up, clutching his butt. Fire ants, scorpions, snakes, Vietnam had them all. He was convinced he had been stung or bitten. But it was a nail head. The nail was part of a frame, and the frame was the hidden door to a shaft that went straight down into blackness. The U. S. Army had discovered where the snipers were going. They had been marching over their heads for two years.

There was no way of fighting the Vietcong living and hiding down there in the darkness by remote control. The society that in three years would send two men to walk on the moon had no technology for the tu

Someone had to strip down to thin cotton pants and with pistol, knife, and torch, go down into that pitchblack, stinking, airless, unknown, unmapped, booby-trapped, deadly, hideously claustrophobic labyrinth of narrow passages with no known exit and kill the waiting Vietcong in their own lair.

A few men were found, a special type of man. Big, burly men were of no use. The 95 percent who feel claustrophobic were no use. Loud mouths, exhibitionists, look-at-me's were no use. The ones who did it were quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing, self-contained personalities, often loners in their own units. They had to be very cool, even cold, possessed of icy nerves, and almost immune to panic, the real enemy below ground.

Army bureaucracy, never afraid to use ten words where two will do, called them "Tu