The 7 Things Tunnel Rats Found Underground That Weren’t Supposed to Exist 

The 7 Things Tunnel Rats Found Underground That Weren’t Supposed to Exist 

At a depth of 8 meters underground, in the middle of the war, there was a kitchen where breakfast was prepared .  And the kitchen was the least of it.  A functioning hospital, a printing press, a munitions factory that repurposed American bombs, a buried tank converted into a command post, an underground theater of operations, and a drainage system that repelled all attempts by the United States Army to flood them.

Seven things beneath the surface of Kwaton-Nam Province that had no place to exist under the feet of 30,000 American soldiers who searched for them and couldn’t find them. You are one of those Americans, one of the hundred men in the country at any given time , whose job is to go underground and find out what’s there.

You were called a tunnel rat.  Your flashlight is kept away from your body.  Week one. First lesson.  A flashlight pressed to your chest makes you a target.  The beam moves forward through 3 feet of absolute darkness. Then you smell something.  Not earth, not mold. Culinary.  This is where the seven things begin.

  The Kuchi tunnel network stretched for about 250 km at its peak.  Pennate described a 200-mile-long labyrinth that runs through three levels at its deepest point, 8 to 12 meters underground.  At the height of the war, it housed approximately 5,000 to 7,000 fighters. Tunnel rats did not send more than 100 people into the country at a time .

  In total, there were 700 of them throughout the war. Of these 700, 36 were killed and 200 wounded, one in three.  They went inside with a flashlight, a .45 caliber pistol and a knife. The flashlight was held away from the body. The pistol was used instead of the rifle because the rifle could not be turned in the available space. The knife made no sound.

These were three aspects of the job, and those who understood all three before going in were the ones who came out. Captain Herbert Thornton, the first officer in the infantry division who formed the first tunnel teams, described what the job entailed.  An inquisitive mind, great courage, and true determination to know what to touch and what not to touch in order to stay alive.

  Harold Roer, who died in 1966, said it more clearly.  I felt more afraid than I had ever felt before or since.  The first thing they discovered was this .  Someone solved the simplest problem of underground survival so completely that the Americans never found a solution until the war was over. The problem was the smoke.    A fire underground generates smoke.

  And the smoke rises— American intelligence could have detected a cooking fire in the jungle, like a lighthouse noticing fog. The Viet Cong needed hot food. Hot food meant fire.  Fire meant discovery. This chain was to be unbreakable.  A cook from Division 300A named Hang Cham tore it apart.  His invention, developed between 1951 and 1952 and previously named in October of that year, was a buried stove system that directed smoke through a long underground duct before releasing it from a dispersal point hundreds of yards from the kitchen

.  Scattered beneath the leaves and undergrowth until it became indistinguishable from the morning mist.    The Vietnamese army motto related to this is to walk without traces, cook without smoke, speak without sound.  This was proven at the Dinh Bien Phu test site in 1954, where French reconnaissance planes flew over fires that were not there.

  By the time American aircraft were doing the same job, the Hangen cam furnace had been in production for over a decade. Khan Chadam died in 1996.  His stove is still standard equipment of the Vietnamese People’s Army. General Vo Nuen Job wrote about the furnace in his memoirs.  It would be remiss if I did not mention here an initiative that has improved the lives and health of our soldiers on the battlefield.

  This is a general who describes the kitchen stove as a significant contribution to military victory. He was right. The Americans spent a fortune on aerial reconnaissance and infrared detection.  The chef of the 3008th Division has already neutralized both .  The stove solved the smell problem upstairs.  The water problem was coming from below.

Water is coming.  It doesn’t seep in slowly.  A wall of water pumped from hoses, delivered by a tanker truck on the surface.  The Americans have found the entrance to the tunnel and are now directing the river after you.  The passage narrows around you.  You hear her approaching.  She stops. Drainage holes cut every 20-30 m along the bottom of the tunnel have already drained the water.

Mangeld and Penny Cake document the system on page 76. Every 20 or 30 m, the tunnelers dug a drainage hole for water to prevent flooding .  The deepest level of the drain led to the Saigon River itself.  One of the first things American commanders tried was flooding.  If you can’t bomb them, you can’t vaporize them with gas and smoke them out, you pump water.

The tunnels ran underground below the water table in some areas through a landscape cut by rivers and monsoon season floods .  The logic was sound.  What the commanders did not know was that the tunnel network had a drainage architecture designed to prevent this very strategy. Mangold and Penny Keith documented this specifically.

  Every 20 or 30 meters, the tunnelers dug a drainage hole for water to prevent flooding.    The deepest level of the tunnels drained into the Saigon River.  During the rainy season, when the surface flooded, the tunnels dried up. The wells led to underground aquifers, providing drinking water regardless of surface contamination.

The Americans tried to pump water mixed with chemical tracers.  The drainage system dispersed the tracers before they could be traced. The Americans tried CS Tar gas. Ventilation shafts drained water before it reached the living quarters. The system was not complex in any single element. She was thorough. Every strategy that was supposed to work had a well-thought-out solution already built into the tunnel.

  The floods stopped not because the Americans surrendered, but because the water flowed through the drainage holes into the river before reaching the living quarters.  An army that lived underground had to understand water better than an army that tried to drown it.  The engineering of the drainage system outpaced the engineering of the attack.

  They were alive and dry. Armament was another problem. A problem that the Americans themselves have already solved for them.  You find the projectile by sound before you find it visually.  A dull thud when your knee hits something that isn’t the ground. You hold up a flashlight.  155 mm artillery shell.  Faulty, half stuck in the tunnel floor.

  Someone scratched the mark on the cartridge case.  The check mark means it has already been cataloged.  Up to 30% of American munitions dropped on Vietnam failed to detonate.  The figure is consistent across several analyses, including a review by Alazero, which indicated the figure is about one- third of the seven and a half million tons dumped.

  This figure is impressive in itself.  What the Viet Cong did to him was stranger .  Workshops working by lamplight deep in the tunnels cut up defective American shells by hand, drained unexploded gunpowder, and repurposed both the explosive and the casing.  155mm shells became anti-personnel mines.  The bombs became traps.

  Weapons that didn’t kill America were repurposed to kill Americans instead.    The National Museum of the U.S. Army has field notes.  Collect unexploded bombs, cut them up by hand, drain the explosive powder, and reuse it in your own traps.    The gorillas who died from American firepower were, in a real and documented sense, killed by their own sides due to manufacturing defects.

  The tunnel rats who found these workshops brought back shells as evidence.  American commanders received impact reports documenting the reprocessing of munitions.  The raw material supplies never ran out, because as long as American planes were bombing, a certain percentage of those bombs were defective, and the workshops below would pick them up the next morning.

Workshops made weapons. Other rooms underground produced things that weapons could not reach.  You find a room by what you hear before you see it.    Not a single voice. Mechanical regularity in silence.    The ghost of something that worked recently but doesn’t now.  Your flashlight finds iron.  A fully assembled printing press, wedged in a 2-meter-high clay chamber with trays of movable type stacked on shelves carved directly into the ground.

Scattered on the floor. Paper cut into sheets the size of a postcard.  The ink is still a little wet on the printing press platform.  Someone left in a hurry.    The National Museum of the United States Army records the discovery in 1967 of a single 2,000-square-meter complex that contained cameras, film, printing presses, and fonts.

What did he produce? propaganda leaflets, fake American passes, unit communications, and training materials.    The Viet Cong’s information warfare operated on iron and ink from cameras that the Americans could not photograph from the air and could not reach from the surface. What he produced: propaganda leaflets, fake American passes, unit communications equipment, training materials.

Fake passes are the detail that distinguishes a propaganda shop from a military intelligence operation.    A Vietnamese gorilla with a fake American passport was able to move through checkpoints with documents that looked exactly like those printed by the Americans.  The difference between surviving and not surviving a checkpoint could be whether the people running the underground printing press did a good job that week.

  It was the infrastructure behind the message. The infrastructure behind the strategy was in the next room.  On January 18, 1967, tunnel rats from the First Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, operating during Operation Cedar Falls, entered what appeared to be a standard tunnel intersection in the Kucha area.

  They found the Viet Cong district headquarters, a complex of rooms containing half a million documents.    The National Museum of the U.S. Army records the find as plans for a failed assassination attempt on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. They found a room where the war was taking place.  Somewhere deeper in the tunnel network that year, another rat found something else.

    The National Museum of the U.S. Army records this in its collection of tunnel rats.    A missing American M48 tank , hidden underground, reprogrammed with batteries, lighting, and a radio. Still in working condition .  The Viet Cong used a stolen American tank as a command post. 491,553 pages of documents from Cedar Falls were analyzed by intelligence agencies.

  Some of the materials dated back years .  The M48 tank eventually ended up in a museum.  The generals planning on both sides had already advanced deeper into the network before the infantry arrived.  The room was empty.  Work—no. The generals planned below.  The fighters needed to believe that the plan was worth following.

  Christmas 1966.  At the Kuchi base, Bob Hope performed on the surface .  Lighting, sound equipment, stage, tens of thousands of American soldiers.  The show they will play on Christmas.  It was one of the most attended USO performances of the war.  At a depth of 8 meters underground, in a lantern-lit chamber, a Viet Cong artist named Pham Sang was holding his own show.

Mangled and Penke devote an entire chapter to it.  Chapter 13 is about the Kuchi Tunnels. His job was comedy.  His audience was fighters who lived underground.  Men who had n’t seen daylight for weeks, whose nerves were tuned to the frequency of a B-52 strike, and whose morale was the only resource the Americans couldn’t destroy from the air.

Two ledges, one directly above the other. Bob Hope had film crews, a sound system, and a plane to fly him home.  Pham Sang had a lantern. Mangold and Penke described his show as a comedy where the artist kept people alive in the dark by making them laugh. The Americans upstairs were entertained to keep up morale before the battle.

  The Viet Cong below was having fun to keep up morale after months of living underground.  Same function, different darkness .  Pham Sang worked without a stage, without lighting except for a flashlight, without an amplifier.  He maintained their readiness for battle. Dr. Whoang Lelei’s job was to keep them alive so they could fight again.

  January 9, 1967.  Kuchi district.  The 128th Infantry Regiment is 2 km away and approaching. Dr. Vhang Lei has seven employees.  There are approximately 60 wounded in the tunnels around him .  He has what he has: an 8-foot-tall camera, a single bare light bulb powered by a Honda motorcycle engine, tools made from the metal of downed helicopters, and whatever he’s been able to keep sterile in a space that never completely dries out.

  He performs amputations without anesthesia. Mangold and Penny document brain surgery completed using a mechanical drill.  Blood is collected during surgery and returned directly to the patient through a long electric tube, the only transfusion method available underground. The infantry reaches a distance of 2 km.  She can’t find the hospital.

During the day, Dr. Ley’s team evacuated 54 of the 60 wounded through tunnel passages that the Americans were unaware of.  Six seriously injured remain when they have to stop.  One ton of medicine is being taken out with the evacuees. Dr. Ley would continue to work underground until the end of the war.  He became Colonel Vo Hoang Ley, deputy director of Military Hospital 7A in Ho Chi Minh City.

  He died on May 13, 2018.  Alan Hawk, writing in Vietnam magazine in 2002, quotes him as saying: “We managed to do a blood transfusion by returning his own blood to the patient, and then our school was all over the tunnels at the patient’s bedside. He trained new surgeons in the tunnel on patients who were already on the table.

Operation Cedar Falls destroyed 400 tunnels, 1,100 bunkers, and 500 structures.    The US Army captured 3,700 tons of rice and 491,550 tons of .  Three pages of documents, including, as we have already said, plans to assassinate the Cabinet Secretary. Within a year, each tunnel was rebuilt.    The Kuchi Tunnel Complex is today a memorial park.

You can explore its reconstructed areas.  The entrances are enlarged so that tourists can pass through them.  They were not expanded for tunnel rats.  If your father, uncle, or brother was a tunnel rat, or if he ever talked about what he found there, leave his name and unit in the comments.  Men who have gone into darkness deserve to be…” remembered