C.W. Bowman, drafted in 1966, was a member of the 9th Infantry Regiment in Vietnam. He had his first encounter with a tunnel during a routine S&D (search and destroy) patrol. After finding a map showing the location of nearby tunnels and ammo dumps, he became one of the unit’s designated tunnel rats. Photography by Richard Van De Water
One evening in 1966, C.W. Bowman arrived home to find his mother crying on the front porch. His father grinned, greeted him with a mock salute, and handed him a brown envelope. “I said, ‘Well, I guess I got drafted.’”
In just a few months, C.W. — who now lives in Irmo — had finished infantry school and found himself in Vietnam as a member of the 9th Infantry Regiment. “None of the old-timers wanted anything to do with me because I was a FNG — Fairly New Guy,” C.W. says. “They were worried about new guys making mistakes and getting them killed.” His new sergeant told C.W. and the other new arrivals that it was not a matter of “if” the war made them go crazy; it was a matter of when.
Jim Knight, now of Aiken, secretly joined the Army when his parents were away on vacation in 1965. Army life came naturally to Jim; he won his expert infantryman’s badge and was promoted to sergeant while at his first duty station in Germany. In 1967, Jim was sent to join the 35th Infantry Regiment in Vietnam. His comrades did not know what to make of him due to his youthful appearance and his unusual hobby of collecting snakes. Ever since a childhood encounter with a garter snake, Jim had wanted to be a herpetologist, and he had plenty of opportunities to pursue that interest in the jungles of Vietnam. On patrol, his platoon leaders learned to call Jim whenever a snake was found so he could identify it. Decades later, one of his fellow veterans still calls him by his radio call sign, “Snake Hunter.”
As C.W. and Jim were adjusting to their new units, their commanders were adapting to a new kind of war. Senior officers had fought in large set-piece battles in World War II and Korea. But in Vietnam, the enemy rarely fought traditional battles, preferring instead guerilla, hit-and-run tactics. These tactics put soldiers like C.W. on edge. “Every day we had something going on — sniper, booby trap, small ambush. We did not have that many major battles, but every day somebody was getting wounded or killed in action. You were always wound up like a tight spring.”
For novice soldiers like C.W. and Jim, Vietnam was their first taste of war. But many of the Vietnamese rank-and-file were experienced fighters. “They had just finished kicking the French out of the country not long ago, so they all had battle experience,” C.W. says.
Sometimes Americans fought North Vietnamese army regular troops, or NVA. Jim says that the NVA’s experience fighting the Japanese and the French showed in their tactics. “I had profound respect for the North Vietnamese. They knew what they were doing,” says Jim. But the more common threat was from the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were part-time guerilla soldiers who spent the day tending to rice paddies and the night fighting Americans. They were poorly equipped and less well-trained than the NVA. Jim says you could tell the difference in a firefight because the NVA fired their rifles in short bursts, while the Viet Cong just emptied their magazines all at once.
C.W. says, “If the Viet Cong were farmers, they were damn good fighters too.” The Viet Cong were also the ones who had perfected tunnel warfare.
U.S. forces first became aware of the Viet Cong tunnel system during Operation Crimp in January 1966. The U.S. First Infantry Division advanced into an area called the Hố Bò Woods in search of a communist headquarters. It soon became clear that the headquarters they were seeking was located underground, part of a vast tunnel network covering more than 120 miles of territory. Operation Crimp saw the first attempts at tunnel exploration; the Americans soon found that not everyone was suited for the job. More and more, tunnel exploration became a special duty for volunteers — the so-called “tunnel rats.”
C.W.’s first encounter with a tunnel was during a routine S&D, search and destroy, patrol. After finding a village bunker, his sergeant handed him a crooked neck flashlight and ordered him to search it. “The bunker was pitch black. I walked slow and straight, didn’t look left or right. My heart was pounding — I was scared. I made it to the other side and got an adrenaline rush. You can become addicted to that.” Later, while exploring another tunnel with his friend Gary Heeter, he found a map showing the location of nearby tunnels and ammo dumps, which he brought to his platoon leader. Because of the map’s discovery, the battalion extended their time in the field two more weeks. “The guys told me, ‘If you find another map in the tunnel, you leave the damn thing there.’” Another result of the map’s discovery was that he and Gary became the unit’s designated tunnel rats.
Jim volunteered for tunnel duty shortly after arriving in Vietnam. He says his unit’s tunnel rat was in bad shape mentally after too much time spent exploring tunnels. Jim wanted to give him a break and set a good example as a platoon sergeant. But he never enjoyed tunnel work. “I don’t have the vocabulary to describe how much I hated it,” he says. Generally, the only equipment he carried into the tunnels was a Colt .45 pistol and a flashlight. The flashlight was only used when absolutely necessary. “If you shined the light, the enemy would see you coming and prepare an ambush for you,” Jim says. Most of the time, exploration was done entirely by feeling his way along the ground in pitch black darkness.
Some tunnels were relatively simple, more like trenches or single room bomb shelters. But others were elaborate, with multiple levels and open areas for use as field hospitals or weapons factories. They could be carefully designed. To counter American use of riot gas, for example, tunnels often featured “water traps,” where the only way to reach the next leg of the tunnel system was to dive into a pool of water and swim through an underwater tunnel to the other side.
Booby traps were perhaps the most dangerous feature of the tunnels. The most basic traps were sharpened sticks called punji stakes. They were often placed at the bottom of tunnel entrances to impale anyone who jumped down into a tunnel without checking it first. Jim says he learned to enter tunnel entrances carefully, usually being dropped down slowly by rope.
Other traps were more elaborate. Once as Jim slowly crawled through a tunnel 15 or 20 feet underground, his fingers touched something unfamiliar, and then he heard the telltale snap of a grenade’s firing pin. He had tripped a wire connected to a grenade hidden nearby. Jim had just seconds to make a choice, either try to back up and be buried alive by the collapsing tunnel or accept the quick death of the grenade’s blast. He chose to stay put. “I flipped my flashlight on and saw that ugly little grenade sitting in a hole in the wall. I probably stared at it for most of an hour,” Jim says. Eventually, he realized that grenade was a dud. He could not force himself into a tunnel for a month after that incident.
Jim recalls another trap that was straight out of a horror film. “I was feeling my way along and something crusty bumped into my forehead. I backed up a little bit and listened real closely to make sure there was no noise, no breathing or metallic sounds. Then I turned my flashlight on and looked.” What he found was a snake — a wire had been run through its body and tied to a nail on the roof of the tunnel. He identified it as the carcass of a venomous bamboo viper. “When this snake was alive,” he says, “if someone came crawling through the tunnel it was going to bite him in the face.” Equally nightmarish were the decomposing enemy bodies that often littered the tunnel system since the Viet Cong hid casualties in the tunnels to confuse American intelligence. “They had a certain odor that I think will never leave my nostrils,” Jim says with disgust.
C.W. only came across Viet Cong in the tunnels once, but once was enough. He stumbled into a large underground room where several men were resting on bamboo beds, their rifles stacked against the wall. “I popped in there, and they were looking at me and I was looking at them — it was like Keystone Cops — and I just started shooting. When the slide locked back on the pistol, I thought, ‘Time to leave.’” C.W. didn’t know if he had hit any of the Viet Cong rushing for their weapons. He crawled backward out of the tunnel system and called out for C-4 explosives, which he tossed back into the tunnel and detonated.
Extended time in the tunnels made C.W. increasingly reckless, especially after his friend Gary was grievously wounded by a Bouncing Betty mine. “I never had felt so alone in my life,” he says of the time after Gary was wounded. It was during this period that he had his worst scare in the tunnels.
“I came up on a trap door and was leaning on the frame, shining a flashlight down into the tunnel when the frame gave way and I fell headfirst into the tunnel below me. I thought I would just somersault when I hit to get my feet under me.” Instead, C.W. found himself wedged upside down in the dark tunnel, his body contorted so badly he could hardly move. Far away from any of his comrades, stuck fast upside down underground, C.W. says he started panicking. “I thought, ‘Those suckers are going to crawl up here and shoot me in the face.’” But fortunately for C.W., no Viet Cong ever appeared. After 30 or 40 minutes of wriggling, alone in the darkness, he righted himself and managed to exit the tunnel safely.
C.W. and Jim also saw plenty of combat aboveground before leaving Vietnam. C.W.’s helmet was shot off by a Viet Cong sniper, gaining him a Purple Heart “and a dent in my head,” as he puts it.
Jim fought in the 1968 Tet Offensive, one of the war’s most savage engagements; he compared the intense combat to a barfight. But he says the tunnels were as bad as anything he experienced then.
For both men, infantry training at Fort Jackson was their first time in South Carolina, but both returned to the state after the war. C.W. became a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson and eventually enjoyed a successful career in telecommunications. But the war stayed with him. One day in the 1980s a truck backfired while C.W. was walking along Gervais Street, and he instinctually dove for cover into some nearby bushes, three-piece suit and all. C.W. still has vivid nightmares about the tunnels, particularly his experience being trapped upside down. “That’s the one where I wake up in the middle of the night and I don’t go back to sleep because it scares me so badly.” He mostly keeps to himself but does stay in touch with Gary Heeter, who recovered from his wounds and now lives in Texas.
Jim’s snake-hunting did eventually lead him on to a successful career as a herpetologist. Ultimately, he became a curator at the South Carolina State Museum. But he too is haunted by war memories. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about those tunnels.” For years, Jim did not talk about Vietnam but recently decided to write his memoirs. “It was relatively easy to bang out 330 pages because I’ve relived it every day since it happened. It’s always there.”
He says telling his story is important. “Only a third of us Vietnam vets are left. If those of us who are left, old as we are, don’t tell the story, then nothing will be learned, and we’ll make the same mistakes over again in the future. If we haven’t already.”
Editor’s Note: The South Carolina Confederate Relic Room & Military Museum’s exhibit “A War with No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973” will remain on display through the end of May. It is located at 301 Gervais St., in the State Museum.
