10 Facts About Tunnel Rat Soldiers During the Vietnam War

Scarlett Mansfield - December 19, 2017

Booby Traps

Despite the superior firepower of the American military, the determination of the Viet Cong was on another level entirely. In the 1940s Ho Chi Minh, one of the founders of the Viet Cong, stated “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. Even at those odds, you will lose and I will win”. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, perfectly summarised the problem in 1969: “The conventional army loses if it does not win, the guerrilla wins if he does not lose”. The Viet Cong were simply experts at utilizing their surroundings to their advantage. Historians, for example, estimate that booby traps caused around 11 percent of US causalities in the Vietnam War.

Punji stake traps found in the tunnels highlight one of the most disgusting and feared examples of Vietnamese booby traps. Several Viet Cong members knew the American soldiers had boots with plated soles to help prevent injury to their feet. Because of this, they often targeted their legs instead. These soldiers made punji stakes out of heated and sharpened wood or bamboo. Sometimes, they would smear the tip of the stakes with urine, feces, poison, or other contaminants to infect the wound when it penetrated the skin.

Next, the Viet Cong would dig a pit and jam the punji stakes upright in it. If they were feeling particularly cruel they may point the sticks downwards at an angle. The soldiers then camouflaged the pit using natural undergrowth, mud, or crops. The stakes would then spear any soldier that fell into the pit. If the stakes pointed downwards, soldiers became unable to remove their limbs without causing severe damage. In particularly horrendous circumstances, enemy soldiers would dig another pit directly beside it. That way, when a soldier fell into a pit and became trapped, he would call for a colleague who would rush to his aid and collapse into the trap next to it. In 1980, recognizing the cruelty of such devices, the Geneva Convention banned them as weaponry.

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Booby traps #2

The Viet Cong also made use of explosive booby traps and pressure detonated mines. Stories reveal that one American soldier raised his head through a tunnel entrance only to have a piece of metal automatically speared through his neck. Tiger traps were also particularly violent. When triggering a tripwire, a plank weighted with barbed metal spikes and bricks would fall rapidly from the earth squashing the soldier below. The idea, of course, was to scare the men so much that they did not continue to search the rest of the tunnel.

Grenade traps were another form of booby trap placed along the base of tunnels. Communist soldiers would attach one side of the string to a stake in the floor, and the other to the safety pin in the grenade. When an American soldier tripped the wire, the grenade would detonate inside the tunnel. If possible they also used gas to disorient, scare, and suffocate tunnel rat soldiers.

Another particularly horrific tactic became known as the spike ball or the mace. The enemy would litter a concrete ball with barbed spikes. When the soldier tripped the wire, the ball would swing down the tunnel and strike into the face of anyone in the way. Similarly, the bamboo whip was a very traumatic trap. When the soldier triggered the tripwire, foot-long spikes placed all over a long bamboo pole catapulted into the soldier’s face and chest at a rapid speed.

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Animal’s attack

Already well-adapted to subterranean life, many insects and animals of the Vietnamese jungle found the underground tunnels to be a worthy living environment. Huge bees, gigantic rats, centipedes, spiders, snakes, bats, and fire ants (to name a few) plagued these tunnels. One tunnel rat claimed that the booby traps and Viet Cong did not frighten them as much as encountering the local ants. I quote “the half-inch ants have such a powerful bite that to pull them off means losing a bit of skin”.

The Viet Cong used this to their advantage to scare, and even kill, American soldiers. Talking of booby traps, Lt. Jack Flowers recalls how the Viet Cong used tripwires to release boxes of scorpions into the tiny confines of the tunnels. One of his men got stung and came out screaming, refusing to ever go into a tunnel again. Similarly, one soldier recalls how an encounter with the biggest rat he had ever seen led him to continually fire his gun. A colleague dragged him out before he grabbed a ‘frag’ and threw it into the hole too. After this, he refused to ever go into a tunnel again. American soldiers were often prepared for traps that may be on the ground, but they had not prepared for those coming from above.

Snakes were also commonly used traps inside these tunnels. Again, tripwires would trigger the release of snakes hidden somehow inside bamboo sticks, known to soldiers as ‘bamboo vipers’. Sometimes these snakes were even poisonous and so became known as ‘three-step snakes’ because a soldier was only granted three more steps before the venom killed him. Imagine being stuck in a tiny space, panicking, screaming, and trying to escape as a snake slowly wound itself around you.

Archives held in Texas revealed this happened to one unfortunate soldier. Reports state the soldier in question “had no time to scream or to unsheathe his knife, the snake had already knotted tighter around his neck and badly bit his face”. A colleague he worked with recovered his body by dragging his “violet-colored corpse” out of the tunnel. It was a horrendous ordeal to face and brought even the toughest of men to tears.

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Psychological repercussions

These tunnels hugely impacted American morale as it was difficult to comprehend that the enemy could be hiding just feet away yet were undetectable and unreachable. Frank Gutierrez, for example, served with the US Army in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970 as a rifleman, field wireman, and an ordinance specialist at Chu Chi and Long Binh. When interviewed he stated: “We often wondered how things happened in the night and we never saw what was going on, guys getting their throat cut. Nobody ever knew where these guys were coming from… they pointed out in jungle school that there was a tunnel system… we had numerous tunnel rats, but we never knew exactly where or how extensive or where the entrance was. We just didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

One of the huge psychological issues for tunnel rats was the closeness of combat. Even if they could deal with the claustrophobic conditions, air and artillery support had not prepared them for the type of old-fashioned combat that relied on savage behavior, individual strength, guts, and cunningness. The Viet Cong, with their lack of funding, was more skilled in this area given the necessity of their style of warfare. One Viet Cong technique was to slit a man’s throat or garrotte him as he came up through a connecting trap door; this often did not phase the men.

When it came to Americans, however, some found it difficult to kill when they were face-to-face with the enemy in such tight confines. Naturally, there were only first chances, never second, so some simply killed as they had to. On occasion, they ended up having severe nervous breakdowns and their colleagues dragged them out of tunnels crying and screaming. Sergeant Arnold Gutierrez of the 25th Division stated that after a while they became so tuned to what was happening “that when the other person would flick an eyelid up or down, you really knew he was there, in the corner, not even hiding anymore. Just sitting and waiting. [But] They were the ones you never killed. You just backed out and told them up above the tunnel was cold.”

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How successful were they?

The United States conducted two major campaigns to search and destroy the tunnel system: Operation Crimp (1966) and Operation Cedar Falls (1967). Operation Crimp hoped to target a key Viet Cong headquarter location believed to be unground. Significant causalities ensued on both sides, but the combined Australian and American forces were unable to fully uncover the extensive tunnel network. Similarly, Operation Ceder Falls attempts to uncover and destroy the tunnel system. This attempt enjoyed more success than Crimp but was short-lived as the tunnels were in working order again within weeks.

Overall, the Vietnamese were very quick to restore damages and continue as if nothing happened. This restoration was pivotal as it enabled some of the key successes enjoyed by the Viet Cong. Mai Chi Tho, brother of Le Duc Tho (a prominent Hanoi Politburo member) highlights how they used the tunnels to infiltrate Saigon. Tho claims the Viet Cong prepared both the necessary troops and assembled the supplies needed in these tunnels to conduct the Tet Offensive of 1968. This offensive is commonly seen by historians as a turning point for American involvement in the Vietnam war.

In hindsight, listening to the Viet Cong talk about their experiences in these tunnels, it appears more training certainly would have benefitted the American cause. One Viet Cong soldier highlighted their lack of discreteness. Tunnel rat soldiers often used flashlights to guide the way and thus warned the enemy of their presence. In fact, volunteers boasted of their ability to change flashlights in pitch black without realizing the damaging consequences of this. Similarly, one American soldier highlighted how they liked to ‘soften things up’ by throwing in one or more hand grenades before sending in tunnel rats. However, as the Viet Cong soldier highlighted, by throwing grenades into the void ahead, or shooting pistols, the noise was deafening and alerted them to their presence.

Needless to say, sadly many of those Americans who did enter the tunnels ended up dying. The exact figure, however, remains unknown as there were no extensive records kept on this exact type of engagement with the enemy. According to archives held by the US government, there were 58,220 US military deaths overall as a result of the Vietnam War. The War also claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 allied soldiers in Vietnam, nearly one million North Vietnamese/ Communist allied deaths, and an incomprehensible number of civilians.

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