200896 minTVMAAction/Adventure, Military/WarFeature Film. Soldiers fight for their lives when the Viet Cong traps a squad in deadly underground tunnels.
Most of us who served as tunnel rats during the Vietnam War quickly realized that crawling through underground enemy bunkers would be the least of our worries. It’s the part of the job people want to hear about — they want to know what it was like to descend into the Vietcong’s subterranean pathways, storehouses, arsenals and barracks. But in fact, as dangerous as that work was, most of our casualties were aboveground, when we engaged in the other part of our job: finding and disarming mines and booby traps.For the most part, the job of tunnel rat was a catchall name for the work that we did as combat engineers. We were trained at the Australian Army’s School of Military Engineering, located 20 miles west of Sydney. The three-month course covered a lot of ground: mine detection, booby trap disarming, tunnel searching and demolitions. Somehow, I had convinced myself that my job as a combat engineer was going to be more “engineer” than “combat” — that the truly dangerous stuff would be handled by real experts.
I was wrong.I arrived in Vietnam on June 11, 1969, with the rank of sapper, the Engineer Corps equivalent of a private in infantry. Our base was at Nui Dat, 70 miles southeast of Saigon. I was paired with an experienced tunnel rat, Cpl. Geoff Handley.
We worked in pairs, with the more experienced “No. 1” — Geoff — passing on what he knew to me, his “No.
2.” After six months, we’d split up, and I’d become a No. 1 to an incoming No.
2.After just four days, Geoff told me we’d be heading out into the bush for four weeks of mine clearing as part of Operation Esso, led by the 5th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment. On June 15, we were picked up by a troop of Centurion tanks already loaded up with a platoon of infantry. By the time we got to our destination we’d heard that one of the battalion’s other platoons had been decimated already, on the first day of the operation. Many of the casualties were from mines; the area was full of them. Rod Lees of 12 Platoon had stood on an M16 mine, also called a “Jumping Jack” because, when triggered, it would toss up an explosive to about waist level and detonate. It killed three soldiers and wounded 24 others. Although seriously wounded himself, Sergeant Lees was a lucky man, one of perhaps only three Australians serving in Vietnam who kept both their lives and their legs after standing on a fully functioning M16 mine.
Clearly, we had our work cut out for us.Eight days later, just before midnight on June 23, a sentry detected movement just outside our perimeter. One of us opened fire, and we soon recei.