Read Online The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold - Free Book Online Page B

twenty-four-hour ration packs with little tins in them. You never EVER left your tin around so it could be found, you never left anything the enemy could use. Your spoon, they would even use that for making weapons. We left nothing, absolutely nothing.” This was a discipline the GIs could well have emulated more enthusiastically. As the war became harder on the Viet Cong, they used the waste so generously left around by the Americans more and more, and in some areas, they became dependent on it.
    Tensions between the specialist engineers and the infantry began to show early in Operation Crimp. In an official Australian after-action report, the following laconic comments were recorded:
    In some cases, having secured tunnel entrances, infantry moved on to search other locations, leaving sappers underground with no immediate close-in protection. This does not foster confidence. One instance occurred where sappers were searching a tunnel under a house and the infantry commenced to burn the house. Sappers lose confidence under these circumstances.
    There was some discord between the lanky Australians and their American comrades, too. Sapper (now Major) Denis Ayoub said quite bluntly: “The Americans taught us nothing about tunnel fighting in an hour that we hadn’t already tried ourselves. Our determination to clear tunnels seemed to them to be little short of madness. They were quite surprised when our captainsuggested that we were going to send guys down with a torch and pistol and a length of string.”
    While the Australians began to develop the earliest techniques for exploring and destroying some short tunnel systems, they had no real plan for dealing with the heart-stopping business of actually running into a Viet Cong guerrilla inside a tunnel. Denis Ayoub recalled the first time it happened to him, when he was behind another sapper who was leading in the exploration of a narrow communication tunnel: “One minute we were crawling through the tunnel, the next minute my mate, without a word, started to back up rather rapidly. No one could turn around in the tunnels we found on Crimp; you had to back out of the bloody things. So he started to back up, and I had to back up. No one said anything. When we got to the bottom of the shaft, he somehow managed to get past me and was first up and out. So I came up second, hoping to Christ that my legs weren’t going to be left behind. When we got out, and my mate cooled down a bit, he told me he’d seen a man down there.”
    Fighting Charlie in his own tunnels was still a thing of the future. As American helicopters began to arrive to collect some of the thousands of Communist documents that had been found in the tunnels, Captain Alex MacGregor was ordering photographs taken of tunnel trapdoors and entrances, and of the booby traps found inside, and was busy making full notes of tunnel dimensions. Of all the tunnels intelligence assessments made during Crimp, the Royal Australian Engineers’ was probably the most accurate and the most prescient. Unfortunately, despite their success, the Aussies were never again to be so involved in the tunnels of Cu Chi.
    Alex MacGregor was to win the Military Cross for his courage and leadership of his engineer troop during Crimp. When the operation ended on 14 January, Australian deaths in Vietnam had doubled from eight to sixteen. The tunnels they had discovered turned out to be the huge complex that was part of the Viet Cong’s Military Region IV headquarters.
    The Americans were learning about tunnels, too. Three days before the operation ended, they brought in a huge mechanized flame-thrower to support an infantry task force attack to the north of Ho Bo woods. The flame-thrower was driven by Sergeant First Class Bernard Justen, then operations sergeant withthe Chemical Section of the 1st Infantry Division. His flame-thrower, mounted on an APC, fired liquid napalm out of the nozzle, using compressed air. The